This article Across the Middle East, the BDS movement is thriving was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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In the bustling streets of Cairo, a bold banner hangs outside the Writers’ Syndicate, confronting passersby with a piercing statement: “Every pound you spend on their products returns as a bullet in your brother’s back.” This message critiques the economic and political ties between the listed multinational products and Israel. The visual captures the spirit of a region-wide movement, where ordinary people are transforming everyday choices into acts of defiance against forces that fuel war and perpetuate conflict.

Across the Red Sea, in the lively streets of Amman, Jordan, another symbol of resistance stands in silence: the empty aisles of Carrefour supermarkets. Once bubbling with life, these shuttered stores are the result of an unwavering boycott campaign — and a testament to how solidarity and conscious consumer choices can challenge and disrupt dominant systems of power.

Across the world, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, has gained momentum, encouraging individuals to use their purchasing power as an effective tool for change. By reimagining the global economy as a means to exert pressure on Israel, BDS has transformed boycotts into one of the most effective forms of nonviolent resistance in a capitalist world, creating ripple effects that resonate far beyond the checkout counter. Nowhere is this impact more evident than in the Middle East, where shared regional solidarity and strategic economic pressure have turned the movement into a powerful force reshaping political and economic dynamics.

Transforming consumption into a weapon of resistance

Effective boycotts have long served as tools to challenge power, disrupting profits, tarnishing reputations and compelling institutions to change. In the Middle East, however, they hold a deeper resonance, intertwined with decades of struggle against colonialism and occupation.

“Boycotting isn’t new. It’s a legacy embedded in our struggle,” said Hossam Mahmoud of BDS Egypt. “It goes back to the days of British colonization and the partition of Palestine in 1947.” From student protests to global campaigns, the region has long relied on nonviolent resistance to challenge injustice.

This long history of economic resistance was reignited by Israel’s war in Gaza in October 2023, as social media quickly became the movement’s amplifier, with hashtags like #Don’tPayForTheirBullets rallying younger generations. In this renewed fight, global giants, such as McDonald’s and Starbucks, were targeted for their financial complicity or implicit support to Israeli military actions.

For many, these boycotts are more than economic — they are moral imperatives, a rejection of profiteering from violence. Their power lies not just in financial disruption but in reshaping consumer consciousness, forcing individuals to ask: Does buying this make me complicit in what it supports?

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Behind the boycott: strategies that drive success

Behind every successful boycott is a story of innovative tactics that turn awareness into action.

Social media became the core of the movement, transforming local efforts into worldwide campaigns. Platforms like X, Instagram and TikTok amplified voices, mobilized communities and sparked viral campaigns that forced corporations to pay attention. Hashtags like #BoycottOccupationGoods and #DidYouFundGenocideToday? became rallying cries, uniting millions and turning online outrage into tangible action.

But the fight for justice extended far beyond likes and shares. Tools like the No Thanks app bridged the gap between digital awareness and real-world action. By scanning a product’s barcode, consumers gained immediate access to details about a brand’s affiliations, giving them the power to make informed choices and determine whether their purchase supported the boycott.

Sustaining momentum required more than technology; activists leaned into grassroots efforts, fostering lasting connections through direct engagement. Workshops, public lectures and in-person action turned online trends into enduring campaigns for change.

University campuses have emerged as vital hubs for this movement, blending education with activism. At the American University in Cairo, the Political Science Students Association, or PSSA, is leading by example. Under Haya Kandeel’s leadership, the association has turned student engagement into a force for meaningful change. “This wasn’t just about boycotts,” Kandeel explained. “We tackled misinformation head-on, hosting talks with BDS representatives and professors to connect global injustices to local realities. We even launched a dedicated newsletter to spotlight Palestine and promote ethical consumer choices.” These initiatives fostered a culture of critical thinking and educated actions, leading to long-term commitment to change.

“Online activism is indispensable,” said BDS Egypt’s Hossam Mahmoud. “But grassroots, on-the-ground efforts remain the heart of lasting change.” He recalls how, in an older campaign, BDS took its fight directly to Zamalek Sporting Club, one of Egypt’s most prominent and historic football clubs. The group engaged members and decision-makers face-to-face to expose Puma’s ties with Israel, ultimately leading to a successful termination of their partnership. This victory underscores a vital truth: while social media can spread awareness, real impact often requires stepping out of the digital sphere and building direct human connections. From the halls of universities to the streets of Cairo, the boycott movement is proving that change begins with community — and the courage to confront power where it lives.

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For many, boycotting is more than an economic gesture — it’s a deeply personal declaration of values and solidarity. “Boycotting in itself is an act of raising awareness,” Mahmoud said. “It’s not just about applying economic pressure; it’s about educating people, sparking critical conversations and building a collective understanding of the daily injustices Palestinians face.” Mahmoud emphasized the accessibility of boycotting, calling it “a tangible form of solidarity — low-risk, yet profoundly impactful over time.”

However, not everyone shares this sense of empowerment. While waiting in line at a McDonald’s checkout counter, I asked a customer why he chose not to boycott. He hesitated before responding with quiet resignation: “To be honest, I don’t think it makes a difference. Whether I buy from here or not, a pack of fries isn’t going to free Palestine.” His words echo doubts harbored by many — questions about whether individual actions can truly dent entrenched systems of oppression.

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WNV’s guide to building lasting peace in Israel-Palestine

For others, however, boycotting is a way to reclaim agency. Safiya Aboushady, a university student in Cairo, recalls feeling helpless as she watched the destruction in Gaza. “Joining the boycott gave me something tangible to do,” she said. “It’s not just about avoiding a product, it’s about standing for a principle.” For Aboushady, the act of boycotting bridges the gap between despair and action, a sentiment shared by many who find strength in aligning their values with collective resistance.

Jana, a 22-year-old activist who requested her last name be omitted, sees boycotting as a vital tool in societies where public protest is restricted. “In many Middle Eastern countries, you can’t take to the streets without fear of being silenced or arrested,” she said. “Boycotting is one of the few ways we can express our resistance without directly confronting the authorities.” For her, it’s about more than just economic impact. “This isn’t just about hitting companies financially, it’s about making our voices heard.”

The wide reach of boycott movements

All these efforts yielded tangible results, as boycotts transformed from local acts of resistance into a regional movement, demonstrating that collective action can transcend borders and reshape the global discourse.

In Jordan, economic resistance has become a daily act of defiance, deeply rooted in solidarity with Palestine. According to one poll, over 93 percent of Jordanians have supported boycott efforts against companies associated with the occupation since October 2023. Community groups, schools and unions have incorporated boycotts into their initiatives, fostering a culture of disassociation from complicity in oppression.

Beyond Egypt and Jordan, the ripple effects of these campaigns are being felt across Lebanon, Kuwait and Tunisia. Lebanese activists have targeted cultural events and corporations like G4S, a private security firm, that are accused of enabling Israeli policies by providing equipment and services to Israeli checkpoints. Kuwait has institutionalized bans on companies linked to Israel, while in Tunisia, grassroots campaigns continue to build on the momentum of regional efforts. This interconnected resistance underscores the power of collective action, where local struggles merge with international movements, proving that economic resistance can ignite global conversations about justice.

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The boycott of companies like Coke and Pepsi has even transcended national boundaries, resonating across various countries. In Pakistan, local soda brands such as Cola Next and Pakola have seen a surge in popularity as consumers reject Western beverage giants, linking them symbolically to U.S. support for Israel. In Egypt, V7 Cola has gained popularity as a local alternative. Similarly Gaza Cola, introduced in the U.K., sold out its initial production run within weeks, pledging profits to rebuild hospitals in Gaza and embodying the spirit of resistance. Meanwhile, brands like Salaam Cola in the U.K. and Palestine Drinks in Sweden are channeling their revenues into humanitarian projects in Gaza and the West Bank, reinforcing their mission to support Palestinian causes. These brands not only offer ethical choices but also underscore the growing intersection of consumer behavior and political advocacy, transforming everyday purchases into acts of solidarity.

Mahmoud captured the essence of the movement, saying, “Our success isn’t measured by immediate victories but by building a sustained, unified movement that transcends borders.” His words highlight the interconnected nature of the global BDS effort, where campaigns, though rooted in local contexts, contribute to a broader, coordinated push that amplifies their collective impact. “Guided by the BDS National Committee in Ramallah, campaigns around the world coordinate efforts to maximize their influence, while preserving their grassroots foundations,” he said. “From Paris to Cairo, campaigns share strategies, messages and goals, creating a unified front that strengthens the movement’s reach.”

This cooperation ensures that each action contributes to a global momentum, demonstrating that solidarity knows no borders. These modern efforts evoke the global solidarity reminiscent of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, where international boycotts were instrumental in dismantling injustice.

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Donate The power (and paradox) of economic resistance

The surge of boycotts across the Middle East has forced multinational corporations to confront their vulnerabilities. Companies like McDonald’s Egypt have scrambled to mitigate damage, distancing themselves from their international counterparts and pledging millions of Egyptian pounds to Gaza relief efforts. Yet these gestures have done little to reverse declining sales or placate public criticism.

The economic repercussions have been undeniable on those corporations. Coke and Pepsi suffered a 7 percent sales decline in the first half of 2024 across the region. McDonald’s Egypt sales dropped by 70 percent amid the ongoing boycott over the company’s support to Israel. Starbucks Middle Eat laid off at least 2,000 employees amid declining sales after boycott efforts. The slower sales led Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan to tell analysts that “We saw a negative impact to our business in the Middle East,” and that “Events in the Middle East also had an impact in the U.S., driven by misperceptions about our position.” In an attempt to repair the reputational damage in April 2024, Starbucks’ charitable arm announced a $3 million donation to World Central Kitchen to provide food aid to Gaza.

In Jordan, Carrefour’s abrupt closure of all its branches further underscores the growing influence of BDS. The retailer announced on Facebook: “As of Nov. 4, 2024, Carrefour will cease all its operations in Jordan and will not continue to operate within the Kingdom.” This decision followed months of boycott campaigns accusing Carrefour of complicity in Israeli policies, including allegations of support for Israeli soldiers amid attacks on Gaza. The Jordanian BDS movement celebrated the closure as a victory for collective action and a testament to the power of ethical consumerism to challenge entrenched systems.

The BDS campaign has also caused global impact. In April 2024, McDonald’s announced plans to buy back its Israeli franchise from Omri Padan, who had offered free meals to Israeli Defense troops during the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Despite its power, economic resistance faces notable challenges. Critics argue that boycotts often lose momentum once initial enthusiasm fades, limiting their longterm impact. Multinational corporations, with their diverse revenue streams, can easily offset regional losses by capitalizing on gains in other markets, weakening the broader effect of localized efforts. “Boycotting must be more than a fleeting trend, it must become a lasting commitment to justice,” said Mahmoud, stressing the importance of sustained action to bring about real change. This reality means that even high-profile successes, like the closure of Carrefour outlets, may remain more symbolic than transformative on a global scale.

Nevertheless, boycotts remain a powerful tool for holding corporations accountable. As Mahmoud emphasized, they do more than disrupt profits, “they mobilize communities and shed light on systemic complicity in oppression.”

By redefining resistance and replacing violence with solidarity — as well as turning despair into action — these campaigns show that real change often starts with small, consistent acts of defiance. They turn everyday consumer choices into acts of protest and show that solidarity, when multiplied, can challenge violence and inspire a shared vision for justice. Ultimately, they prove that, even in the face of injustice, ordinary people can drive extraordinary change.

This article Across the Middle East, the BDS movement is thriving was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Our top stories of 2024 was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

As a new and ominous year approaches, you may be wondering how you’re going to handle the endless stream of crises emanating from the highest levels of government. News fatigue, if it hasn’t already set in, is going to be an issue. 

At Waging Nonviolence, we believe the best way to cut through that is by focusing not just on the problems facing our world, but the solutions — specifically the ones put forth by ordinary people and the movements they build to push for change. 

Our most-read stories of 2024 (see below) are the perfect encapsulation of this approach. Each one hits on a seemingly intractable problem — from threats to democracy to the increasing militarization of police to the atrocities in Gaza. But instead of only bringing you more stifling bad news, these stories show what is being done (or can be done) to achieve peace and justice.

It was particularly thrilling to see acclaimed author Rebecca Solnit underscore this very aspect of our work. In a recent post listing us among her “go-to news sources,” she described Waging Nonviolence as a publication that “provides really thoughtful and often soulful takes on political problems and solutions.” Wow, what an honor!

Also thrilling: This was our biggest year ever in terms of readership, with over 1.5 million people coming to read our stories. That, more than anything, shows the appeal of news that empowers.

We hope that as you read through our top stories from the past year, you’ll remember that it’s only through your support that we’re able to do this work. And if you haven’t already this year, please consider making a tax-deductible donation today to support our work in 2025.

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Donate today! WNV’s most-read stories of 2024

10. How to make sure your disruptive protest helps your cause
By Mark Engler and Paul Engler
Five key factors determine whether controversial protests are more likely to spark backlash or create positive outcomes.

9. Why protests work, even when not everybody likes them
By Mark Engler and Paul Engler
Organizers must learn to embrace the polarizing nature of protest in order to use it effectively.

8. Inside the fight to save Philly’s Chinatown from a new NBA arena
By Justin A. Davis
Mohan Seshadri of the Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance explains how protests, elections and culture intersect in the campaign against a proposed new home for the 76ers.

7. This activist group chat is blocking a weapons shipment to Israel
By Madison Bannon
A South African WhatsApp group working with BDS has sparked a movement to block a ship carrying military explosives bound for Israel.

6. The quiet rollout of Cop Cities across the US meets a growing resistance
By Victoria Valenzuela
As Cop Cities spread to nearly every state, grassroots activists are pushing back by forming coalitions that press for investment in communities over militarized policing.

5. Political violence is surging, but there’s a playbook to counter it
By George Lakey
Hardy Merriman helped prepare Americans for a Trump coup attempt in 2020. In this conversation, he offers insights into overcoming threats to this year’s election.

4. Overcoming despair and apathy to win democracy
By George Lakey
Lessons on movement building from one of the founders of the Serbian student movement that brought down dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

3. A new wave of movements against Trumpism is coming
By Mark Engler and Paul Engler
Our job is to translate outrage over his agenda into action toward a truly transformational vision.

2. How we can meet the challenges of authoritarianism
By Maria Stephan
This is not our first rodeo with authoritarianism. Americans have collectively risen to seemingly impossible challenges in the past, and we can do so again.

1. 10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won
By Daniel Hunter
The key to taking effective action in a Trump world is to avoid perpetuating the autocrat’s goals of fear, isolation, exhaustion and disorientation.

Additional favorites from the editors

Now is the time to send unarmed peacekeepers to Palestine
By Mel Duncan
Hundreds of unarmed civilian protectors could be quickly deployed to support Palestinians in securing a more sustainable peace than armed forces ever could.

Indigenous leaders saved Guatemala’s fragile democracy
By Jeff Abbott
More than a hundred days of Indigenous-led protest played a key role in defending Guatemala’s democracy, but the struggle continues.

Student-led climate action is flourishing in DeSantis’s Florida
By Nick Engelfried
As Gov. Ron DeSantis tries to block the clean energy transition, University of Florida students are adopting Green New Deal measures and showing how public schools can lead on climate.

Smuggled protest videos offer a rare glimpse at resistance in occupied Tibet
By Alessandra Bergamin
Defying a media blackout and severe backlash, Tibetan monks, nuns and residents of a threatened mountain community are showing the world their resistance to a Chinese dam.

Repression backfires in Pakistan, as oppressed Baloch people hold historic mass protest
By Esha Mitra
When authorities cracked down on a one-day national gathering in Balochistan, they galvanized a movement fighting to end enforced disappearances and killings.

Diabetes patients are finally starting to beat Big Pharma’s price gouging
By Fran Quigley
After years of struggle, patients with diabetes have won a major reduction in the cost of insulin, but the fight is far from over.

This article Our top stories of 2024 was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Archiving as resistance to genocide denial in Gaza was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

After the war and genocide in southeastern Bosnia in 1993, two very important forces shaped the society that emerged. One was the denial of war criminals and genocidal actors, who smeared and discredited victims to evade accountability. The second was the uphill battle of the survivors to not only deal with the crimes committed against them but also make sure that the truth didn’t get buried by preserving the memory of the events as they happened. 

While investigators and other experts flooded Bosnia in the aftermath to collect evidence for the Yugoslavia Tribunal at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court , it was grassroots activists and genocide survivors — like the Mothers of Srebrenica — who made the biggest impact. Their efforts ensured that the evidence was not only collected to be presented in courts, but also preserved for future generations. They saw this as a guard against the actors who still – to this day –  spread disinformation and deny the genocide and war crimes that took place. 

Malicious disinformation campaigns continue wherever crimes against civilians are committed. In Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere, many grassroots efforts have been formed out of the necessity to collect and preserve evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Now, in Gaza, over a year after Israel’s invasion, Palestinians are in the same uncomfortable position, forced to face the enormous task of accounting for their dead and how they were killed, as well as making sure that the evidence leads to accountability – not to mention sets the record straight amid orchestrated attempts to discredit what has happened.

One of the leading forces behind this effort is the grassroots movement and human rights organization Law for Palestine, which is composed of volunteer experts, scholars and researchers. I spoke to two of its members, legal advocate Kathryn Ravey and Palestinian researcher Layla (not their real name), to learn about the work of archiving evidence of genocidal intent in Gaza. Since the early days of October last year, the Law for Palestine team has been tirelessly compiling a database containing evidence of genocide incitement by Israeli leading figures. To this day, they have logged more than 500 instances, which they continue to update. We discussed their motives for doing this work, the challenges they face and lessons learned along the way.

Tell me about Law for Palestine and the work you do? 

Kathryn: We’re a global network of legal professionals. We answer legal questions, organize legal training and conduct legal advocacy for Palestinians, including submitting communications to UN entities. We are working as a grassroots movement, and we are network-building across the world.

Layla: We started working on the database on Oct. 8 last year. The purpose of the database is to showcase the intent [of Israel’s violence] versus the actual action. We collected any type of statement or material that contained incitement or intent to harm and genocide within the Israeli media, political scene and society. We aim to compile it into one place that can serve not only as evidence but also serve anyone who wants to research the ongoing acts of violence by the state of Israel in the future.

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What results and conclusions have you reached through your research? 

Kathryn: The legal categorization of genocide is a very difficult one to prove in international law. It’s a case that no one ever wants to bring in international courts because there’s a very high threshold to meet it.

What makes it difficult is that, in addition to showing the act of genocide has occurred, you have to show that this act was done with the intention to destroy the whole or part of a population. We’ve seen that the actions Israel has committed over the last year have constituted genocide,  through starvation, forced displacement, killings, targeting of civilian infrastructure, torture, dehumanization and imprisonment. We’ve attempted to show that these ongoing acts have been inextricably linked to the intent.

We’ve seen from Oct. 7 until today, statements by officials as well as people within Israeli society calling for the destruction of the Palestinian people, which includes calling for the withholding of humanitarian aid, eradication and forced displacement. This discourse has significant implications for international law and — with the case of genocide South Africa has brought to the ICJ — this database is an indispensable tool showcasing that all of these calls are materialized in Israel’s actions and wider policy. 

Why choose archiving as a form of activism? And why is it important to the wider Palestinian movement? 

Layla: Archiving is important not only for legal but also research purposes. As a Palestinian, I have not seen it done very widely, but archiving is pivotal for the events that happened to be remembered, for holding the people responsible accountable, and for future generations to have an opportunity to learn the key patterns that led to these events. Our archives must be accessible to people, because not only can such information become harder and harder to find but also these actions follow a pattern and are not isolated instances. 

Kathryn: We live in times where digital activism is new. Most past genocides have been reported only through text, video and photos that are usually retrieved quite a while after the events have occurred.

This is the first time that a genocide has been live-streamed, tweeted, and put on TikTok and Instagram. We’re witnessing genocide in a new way. We have been trying to work with various forms of media and try to capture all of this evidence, especially in the digital era where things can be deleted or removed quickly.

One big challenge has been how to capture and share this elusive information. We have made a significant effort to permalink everything, but a lot of times it’s not possible – or it’s very difficult to maintain a video that’s been deleted. It’s a new form of activism to try to hold people accountable for things that can easily disappear online.

What’s unique about your perspective as a grassroots movement that practices archiving and trying to preserve all this evidence in a non-institutionalized way?

Kathryn: This practice came out of necessity. This was not something that Law for Palestine had done before, but after Oct. 7, all of us in civil society circles  – along with the Palestinian colleagues we were speaking with – agreed it was an important thing to do.

A year ago, after Oct. 7, it was just chaos. There were so many things to respond to and people and resources were pulled. A lot of this work came out from the fact that no one else was doing it, and we responded to a role that needed to be filled. 

As time went on we figured out and experimented with how to maintain and present the database, find safe ways to do the research, secure digital evidence, deal with ownership, prevent information from getting leaked or traced back to a person, and protect our researchers from being doxxed or tracked. We also found ways to preserve evidence that might not meet the legal threshold of genocide but are still important to highlight. It’s been an enormous learning process along the way to figure out what’s useful and impactful as an exclusively grassroots effort. 

Layla: It’s important to mention that everything in the database is just public information.  Palestinians who live within Israel and Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza are exposed to these statements by Israeli news, zionist activists and members of the Knesset.

We hear these types of statements on national news all the time. We need to start tracking who’s been saying what and logging this information instead of accepting it as the status quo because the people whose statements have been logged in the database were pretty vocal about these things way before Oct. 7. So the idea of archiving and exposing these types of statements and making them public to people who are not exposed to Israeli media is very crucial because of the way that the genocide has escalated. 

By November, we have already collected 150 statements, and I’m sure we’ve missed some. It is important to start as early as possible to capture as many of these sentiments and make them available to people who are unfamiliar with the Israeli media landscape.

What difficulties did you encounter along the way?

Kathryn: We had countless difficulties. We had to find the sources and translate them – and then ensure we fact-checked our sources that the statement was valid and that the link to the source could be captured. The same story can appear on multiple links so we have to go through large quantities of material. 

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WNV’s guide to building lasting peace in Israel-Palestine

We were getting so many statements, more than we could categorize or deal with. By that time the ICC and the ICJ were happening. A lot of people were raising the question of genocide and the question of intent. We had all this evidence but very few resources. Most of us do this voluntarily on top of other commitments. This is a lot of work but thankfully over the last few months, we have been working with Visualizing Palestine, which helped us to organize the database and present it in the best way possible. 

There are plenty of sources that we’re still trying to permalink, sources that we had to remove, but it’s hard to capture a societal narrative. That being said, the reception of our work has been amazing. A lot of people have been using our database, and we’ve gotten some of the data back on what people are searching for. The amount of people visiting the database demonstrates that it has been a useful tool for anyone looking to advocate or learn more about the situation.

Layla: There’s a very difficult psychological aspect that comes with compiling copious amounts of material of extremely infuriating content and having to sift through things that are fitting the purpose of the database. For example, watching a two-hour-long right-wing TV show where panelists are calling for the extermination of Palestinians can easily take a toll on someone who spends hours being exposed to such materials. 

There are also challenges with translations. Many times it is hard to capture the essence of a sentence that does not have a direct way to be translated in English and people who speak the language can understand the nuances but will have a hard time explaining to English speakers. 

Kathryn: In addition to the translations, we also had to provide context because – for a lot of the statements we collected – readers might not know the locations, persons, or events they are referring to if they are unfamiliar with Israeli discourses. 

I would also like to reiterate that the secondhand trauma through reading all of this is a real thing. Also, when asking about people’s perceptions when shown the database, we quickly realized that many people weren’t ready to be confronted with the gravity of what was being said. 

This is an invaluable lesson. After all, you are immediately hit with how much has been said because not everyone is a daily witness to those narratives like the Palestinians are and don’t understand how common they are to mainstream Israeli discourse. When we are talking about genocide most people assume this is coming only from more extremist wings of society, but in reality it’s really widespread and our database accurately captures that. I think a lot of people react quite strongly because they’re sort of being questioned on their own perception of this. 

Have you been on the receiving end of smear campaigns due to the content of your work?

Layla: I am not doing this work openly as it could complicate things for me given my citizenship. There was an article in an Israeli website that ran a story about our database and how “a group of Palestinians” are trying to implicate Israel in acts it is not doing. Also, in the Law for Palestine Twitter account you can see a lot of bots and pro-Israel accounts trying to discredit us and calling people who are working on the database “antisemites” and questioning our intentions and identities. Other than that, all I’ve seen is just support. People are finding the database useful which is our main goal. 

Kathryn: Luckily we haven’t gone through personal attacks, but Israel has attempted to shut down all and everyone in the Palestinian civil society. There is always anticipation for smear campaigns, but I think what is guarding us from them is the fact that the evidence we provided speaks for itself and comes directly from Israeli sources, which is very difficult to dispute. 

What have you learned so far and what kind of wisdom would you like to pass to others who have to do this work where genocide and war crimes are also happening?

Layla: If you were to start this type of project, it is very important to have a supportive team, with everyone on the same page, because this is not a one-person project. It is very time-consuming and mentally tiring. 

I would also say: Start as early as possible because these types of situations get bad quickly, and if we had waited until the end of October to start archiving we would have missed a lot of crucial information, and we would be drowning in the sheer amount of material that is out there to cover. If you can start early you’ll be able to capture much more in a way that is more efficient and organized.

Kathryn: Because digital evidence in such cases is an emerging field it means that it’s a great opportunity to reshape the human rights and international law landscape. I think we should encourage creativity as there is a ton of new types of evidence we are going to be able to use in the court of law. For example, there is a group looking specifically at TikToks of Israeli soldiers committing war crimes and posting them on the platform. That would have been unheard of even a few years ago. 

It’s all a matter of staying creative and flexible. Oftentimes solidarity movements can get rigid or difficult to organize and that’s how they lose momentum. We never intended to make this what it is today. It was something that we started because it was important, and had no idea where it would go. With Visualizing Palestine we worked on an interactive visualization, which is a creative and artistic way to present this database. We never even knew it would get there, so staying responsive, creative, and flexible to the changing tides of international law and human rights is very important. 

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Anything you’d like to add?

Kathryn: Everything in the database is efficiently categorized. It is still very shocking content to go through. Everything you can imagine is there: starvation, torture, forced displacement and more.

Normally, if you’re presenting a case in front of an international law court, you have to read through hundreds of pages and it’s boring. You never get evidence presented in this way,  this is such a unique tool that I hope to see more in future cases.

Layla: Not only is this a great and creative source for legal procedures, but it’s also a great source to educate people who are not familiar with legal settings. Many find it hard to read through long articles and stories, so the interactive database offers people a push to dive into this topic and makes it easier for them to digest. 

Most people might not be very comfortable to research and read through large quantities of atrocious stories about families being wiped out or starved. But when seeing these types of things, people still want to find out what is being said, or the context, and understand what the connection is between the statement and the real-life actions.

Our database is a good tool for people to start learning about the situation in Palestine and then draw parallel lines with other causes that are going through similar struggles. I feel like that can help create a more emotionally-invested generation, one that can empathize beyond the news. So it’s a tool that can provide a lot to people from different backgrounds with an insight into our situation, and I hope that people get to utilize this opportunity to its fullest. 

This article Archiving as resistance to genocide denial in Gaza was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article A history of success drives the ongoing struggle to clean up Cancer Alley was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Two days after the election, I left on a research trip to Mississippi and Louisiana. I joined four others from my church in Yarmouth, Maine. Our purpose was to witness and learn about the struggle for civil and  environmental rights in a region known as “Cancer Alley.” 

This 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi — between Baton Rouge and New Orleans — is home to 150  petrochemical plants, all along the river. It is also home to many working-class people, a majority of  them Black.  

The first thing you notice are the huge refineries. Tall smokestacks spew toxic chemicals and methane  flares light up the sky. The scale of industrialization is hard to imagine — there are miles and miles of  factories and chemical plants.  

Sandwiched between them are small communities, many settled after the Civil War. In many places the  only thing separating industrial complexes from homes, schools and churches is a seven-foot chain link  fence. Residents face a cancer risk 50 times higher than the average American — hence the name “Cancer Alley.” 

Our trip wasn’t to focus on environmental racism, or indifferent corporations (although these are driving the pollution). We were there to support the grassroots organizers, who are on the frontlines of the struggle to address environmental racism and make their communities safe from toxic chemicals.

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The power of organizing  

Back in 2018 a small group of friends in the tiny town of Welcome, Louisiana gathered in a garage.  Sharon Lavigne, a retired special ed teacher, called the meeting. They came together to discuss toxic  emissions in their neighborhood and what they might do about it.  

No one in the group had organizing experience. Nor did they have graduate degrees, connections with  authorities or funding for a campaign. What they did have was faith in themselves and a strong  conviction that they deserved clean air, clean water and good health.  

The group also knew that industrial giant Formosa Plastics had a permit to build four new plastics plants  in a sugar cane field adjacent to their homes. While everyone in the group had connected the foul  smelling air with the high cancer rate in their community, it was the Formosa permit that propelled them  to action.  

The group organized protests. A handful of people marched and held signs at the Formosa site. The  media picked up the story. Pretty soon Lavigne and her friends launched a new nonprofit called RISE St.  James.  

On behalf of RISE, Earthjustice launched a court case against the state of Louisiana for issuing the  Formosa permits. Bloomberg’s Beyond Petrochemicals, the Years Project and several other organizations provided funding and media visibility.  

Within a few years, RISE St. James was on it’s feet with a mission, a website and a small staff. 

There is a powerful lesson here: When people in frontline communities step forward and speak from the  heart, doors open. 

Sharon Lavigne (second from left) with other RISE St. James members. A history of success  

The Louisiana Bucket Brigade is a nonprofit that’s been working to clean up Cancer Alley and prevent new plants from being built there since 2002. Their expertise in advocacy, direct action and organizing  have led to many successes over the years.  

A key to their success has been partnerships with local grassroots groups. They provide training, strategic  planning and technical assistance. They open doors to funders and support local leaders as they get their  groups organized. By partnering with local groups, the Bucket Brigade has greatly leveraged its impact.  

The Bucket Brigade and its partners have engaged in many successful campaigns. These include stopping Formosa Plastics, Wanhua Plastics, and South Louisiana Methanol from building new plants in Cancer  Alley. In early December, the federal government announced a halt in construction of the Venture Global  gas terminal and pipeline — another success for the Bucket Brigade .  

In 2019, the Bucket Brigade connected RISE St. James with Earthjustice, an organization that brings  lawsuits on behalf of groups suffering from pollution and government discrimination. As a result of  Earthjustice’s legal action, a Louisiana circuit judge demanded that the Formosa air permits be withdrawn.  

The Bucket Brigade continued to support the anti-Formosa campaign by building a coalition of  fishermen, parish council members and local restaurants that resulted in resolutions against Formosa in  the cities of New Orleans and Westwego. They also collected 40,000 written public comments  demanding that the Army Corps rescind its Formosa permit.  

Around the same time, EPA Secretary Michael Regan took a keen interest in Cancer Alley. After visiting  the area, Regan directed EPA staff to investigate a Cancer Alley complaint. The complaint claimed the  state of Louisiana violated the Civil Rights Act when it issued permits for two petrochemical plants in  Black communities.  

The investigation was based on a principle of civil rights law called “disparate impact.” This means that federal agencies must protect minority communities from being harmed more than others, whether  intentionally or not.  

By the beginning of 2024, things were looking up for the residents of Cancer Alley. Grassroots groups  were organized. They had funding, staff and media presence. RISE founder Sharon Lavigne had been  recognized nationally with the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. Several industrial projects had  been successfully stopped, and others forced to clean up operations. The civil rights case looked  promising.  

Recent setbacks  

As is often the case, Formosa fought back, appealing and winning its permit case in a higher court. The  permit allows Formosa to release over 800 tons of toxic chemicals and 13.6 million tons of greenhouse  gases each year. Cancer Alley organizers are pushing for the Louisiana Supreme Court to review the case.  They are hopeful that the clock will run out on the project, as it winds through the legal system.  

Meanwhile, the civil rights case is dead. The state of Louisiana sued the EPA for its investigation of the  Cancer Alley civil rights complaint. Federal Judge James Cain of the Western District of Louisiana found 

that the EPA had overstepped its powers. He ruled that the Civil Rights Act only protects people from  intentional harm, and that race cannot be considered in permitting chemical plants.  

As a result, the EPA backed off the case, and the residents of Cancer Alley lost. The people now have less  protection from environmental racism than before.  

What’s more, with a new Trump administration set to take over next month The attention and support of  the EPA in Cancer Alley will almost certainly end. It may also mean that more oil, gas and plastics  refineries and terminals will be permitted and built.  

During the first Trump administration, an EPA staff report citing toxic levels of ethylene oxide emissions  in Cancer Alley was withdrawn and hidden from the public. We are likely to see more of this behavior in  his second term.  

Where do they go from here?  

In response to the election, Bucket Brigade Executive Director Anne Rolfes said, “Our resolve is stronger than ever.” They are not defeated.  

But I had to ask how Cancer Alley organizers would continue their effort going forward.  

Corporate irresponsibility and complicit local and state governments are the root of Cancer Alley’s problems. Historically, the best way to change corporate behavior is to do something that threatens their  bottom line. Boycotts, strikes and union organizing are effective tools.  

But local leaders told me union organizing and strikes aren’t viable in Cancer Alley. For one thing, most of the workers in the refineries and chemical plants aren’t local. They are engineers and chemists recruited commuting from outside the community. The locals who do work in the plants have lower paying jobs,  and can’t afford to miss a day of work.  

Boycotts aren’t viable either. Most of the plants make commodity products — plastics, fertilizers, neoprene, chemicals, oil and gas. These companies are mostly unknown to consumers, taking boycotts  and consumer protests off the table.  

Public health would seem like an obvious framing of the problem. High cancer and COVID death rates in  the area are well documented. The link between specific chemicals and specific cancers is proven.  

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In 2023, Johns Hopkins University scientists outfitted two vans with state-of-the-art air quality  monitoring equipment. They measured air quality in Cancer Alley neighborhoods, something that hadn’t been done before. They found carcinogen levels nine times higher than what Louisiana state data  showed — and a thousand times higher than what is considered safe.  

But despite this data, public health arguments have not gotten traction with decision makers. In fact, the  opposite has occurred. Immediately after the Johns Hopkins air quality study was released, the Louisiana  legislature passed a law disallowing private data in enforcement and regulatory actions.  

In response, the organizers have turned to other strategies. A burial ground for enslaved people was  discovered on the land owned by Formosa Plastics. Further research turned up the names of the  enslaved people who were buried there, without headstones or any known memorial services held.  

An action is now being planned to celebrate their lives with a proper ceremony and markers for their  graves. This will gain media attention and make it more difficult to site a plastics plant there. 

Another strategy is to challenge local zoning. The St. James Parish Council (similar to a county  government) changed zoning from “Residential” to “Residential/Future Industrial” without public input. This is how the state was able to issue the Formosa permits.  

Inclusive Louisiana and other local groups are suing the parish for making the zoning changes. They hope  to win and bring back residential zoning.  

Public education is an important part of the current strategy, too. When the plants and refineries moved  in, locals did not know that high levels of toxic emissions would be the result.  

The public is learning more about this everyday. RISE St. James has a section on their website called  “Chemical of the Month” where they provide accessible and understandable information on toxic  chemicals. Our group visited the Whitney Plantation, a local museum focused on the history of racism in  the area, from slavery to industrial pollution. Webinars and reports on the toxic pollution in Cancer Alley  are presented regularly.  

Rallies and demonstrations are ongoing too, letting the media and decision makers know that residents  understand and oppose policies that harm them. A recent rally in the state capitol of Baton Rouge drew  people from 15 river parishes and 17 grassroots groups.  

The phrase “environmental justice” was coined in the 1980s. It resulted from the first study to document environmental racism, showing that landfills across the country were almost always sited in Black  communities.  

The 2019 “Green New Deal” bill in Congress broadened public awareness of environmental racism. It’s now common knowledge that toxic pollution occurs primarily in low income and Black neighborhoods.  This understanding will continue to gain traction, despite the political winds.  

Lastly, it’s important to recognize that all of us are complicit in the damage caused by irresponsible capitalism and the governments that allow it. Each time we use a plastic bag, fill our gas tank, or spread  chemicals on our lawns, someone is breathing toxic emissions from manufacturing these products.  

Local organizers in Cancer Alley are bravely raising the flag for environmental justice. Their work will  create a healthier environment for all of us. They deserve our continuing support.  

This article A history of success drives the ongoing struggle to clean up Cancer Alley was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Reproductive justice organizers in the South are finding new ways to help incarcerated mothers was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Reproductive justice advocates in the South can rarely depend on laws on the book to safeguard incarcerated pregnant people. 

Instead, they’ve learned to create their own aid. 

Motherhood Beyond Bars, a reproductive justice group in Georgia, was originally centered on helping pregnant people inside prisons. After finding it increasingly difficult to work internally at the Georgia Department of Corrections, the group decided to devote its resources towards helping inmates from the outside. 

“The number of problems and fires we’re trying to put out has kind of exceeded even our expectations of what folks would need our help with,” said Amy Ard, executive director of Motherhood Beyond Bars, or MBB. “You start to notice that the vast majority of the women, the pregnant women that we work with, need treatment instead of incarceration.” 

Like those in Motherhood Beyond Bars, other reproductive justice advocates in states with a Republican supermajority, say they find it hard to work on legislative solutions to boost legal protections for incarcerated pregnant people. When the collaboration does work, loopholes often snag actual progress. Consequently, more advocates are seeking alternative ways to support incarcerated mothers and pregnant individuals beyond law-making. They’ve turned to establishing direct connections with prison authorities, funding bail, and offering alternatives such as community service, suspended sentences or restorative programs.

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In February, MBB began its first diversion program in Fulton County, which is close to where the organization is based. They offer reproductive health education to pregnant individuals in Fulton County Jail while also pinpointing potential diversion candidates.

In the first six cases where they were able to talk to the women who’ve been arrested, work with their public defender or attorneys, find a placement for them, and present this option to a judge and the prosecutors, Ard says MBB has had a 100 percent success rate in getting women diverted from the prison system.

The latest legal assaults on abortion access have brought an extra layer of scrutiny for activists trying to increase protections for a historically vulnerable population. The issue became even more dire after the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade — an unprecedented legal move that led to half of U.S. states restricting abortion access. 

Organizers like Rafa Kidvai, director of the Reproductive Legal Defense Fund, say the state became even more emboldened to criminalize pregnant people.

“The state will step in and use any of the tools that it has, any law it can throw at people, which we call ‘legal spaghetti,’ and see if anything sticks,” Kidvai said. “After Dobbs, we saw people be much more emboldened about that.” 

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How mothers (and others) are making prison abolition possible

Some groups have found success in building messaging that would sunset harmful laws. In 2016, SisterReach and other Tennessee-based partners — including ACLU Tennessee — successfully collaborated with national organizers — like SisterSong and National Advocates for Pregnant Women — to take down what was known as the “fetal assault” law, which allowed mothers to be prosecuted for the use of illegal narcotics while pregnant if their child was born exposed to or harmed by drugs. State legislators quickly proposed a new bill that would have eliminated the law’s termination date, but it failed in the House Criminal Justice Subcommittee. 

SisterReach founder Cherrise Scott spoke to the first woman arrested under the fetal assault law, and learned that the woman was turned away from detox facilities and unsuccessfully attempted to detox on her own. This fueled the organization’s efforts, particularly as it rallied media opposition, arguing that women who didn’t want to be arrested were often crossing state lines to access abortion care. According to Scott, this led to Republican Rep. Andrew Farmer voting no, saying he didn’t want women in his county crossing state lines to get an abortion. After a tie vote, lawmakers decided not to extend the law after the sunset date in July 2016. 

SisterReach concluded that “systematic documentation” of the experiences of those impacted by the law was necessary to help inform how state and medical institutions could implement patient-centered care. 

In 2017, SisterReach launched a qualitative study on the impact the fetal assault law had on marginalized communities. “Of the women arrested, the majority were low-income women, women in poorly-resourced areas, and women of color,” the group’s report found.

Using the reproductive justice framework, the study aimed to focus on and learn more about the women whose experiences were impacted by the law.

Women told SisterReach that they wished they’d had the opportunity to be in rehabilitation before being criminalized. 

“The impact of the [fetal assault] law only exacerbated drug usage,” Scott said. “It only exacerbated overdose deaths, and it also caused women to not go to the doctor because they were being profiled in the prenatal visit setting as well.” 

Now, SisterReach is focused on providing sex education, policy and advocacy, and harm reduction with the help of regional stakeholders like the Positive Experience — a local HIV education and advocacy organization — as well as Lake Research Partners, a national public opinion and political strategy research firm. 

The move away from legislative coalition building has given SisterReach more flexibility in how it organizes. 

“I’m able to do reproductive justice the way I’ve always wanted to do it, not where abortion care is the focal point, but where women’s lives and families are the focal point,” Scott said. “This whole project is to figure out the best ways that we can get moms and children together as quickly as possible.” 

Reproductive Legal Defense Fund has been funding legal defense for clients since 2021, in response to the criminalization of people who were prosecuted for alleged abortions at home with medication or in-clinic, miscarriage, stillbirth or other pregnancy outcomes. Criminalization usually happens when someone is under-resourced structurally, and pregnancy makes one uniquely subjected to and vulnerable to criminalization, Kidvai says. 

Previous Coverage

Inside the campaign to close California’s remaining women’s prisons

If mothers get convicted and no other family members can take care of them, there’s a chance they will lose their children to the state. Black and Indigenous children enter foster care at roughly double the rate of white children nationally.

“Here in Memphis, Black women are the majority [of] household runners,” Scott said. “So if Mama is in jail, not only is it a situation where now she’s lost her home or her apartment, she’s lost her kids. And now she kind of comes out of this situation homeless.”  

Since 2015, Scott and SisterReach have been working on a coalition program with Pregnancy Justice, Southwest Community College and other local stakeholders, for mothers and children impacted by the criminalization of substance use. In May, Scott signed the purchase agreement for a transitional housing facility, on a property of a little over 79,000 square feet. The facility, which will be known as the SisterReach Village, will provide housing for mothers who are in rehabilitation, along with mothers and children living with HIV or impacted by intimate partner violence. 

“This is what it looks like when Black women lead liberation centered work for our own people,” Scott said. “As mothers we are thinking about what it looks like just to have somewhere to be well in the interim, that keeps people out of the crosshairs of the criminal justice system.” 

Laws are intentionally vague and complicated, Kidvai said. Most people don’t know what resources are available to them, which creates a “stigma criminalization loop.” 

There are various steps involved before advocates can even think about crafting and drafting policy, says Kimberly Haven, a formerly incarcerated reproductive justice advocate in Maryland. When creating state legislation, advocates have to be able to address how the existing policy is causing harm.

Regardless of whether policies and practices are up to speed, incarceration is never a conducive environment for the stress-free pregnancy necessary for mothers, according to Dr. Carolyn Sufrin, director at the Center for Advocacy and Research for the Reproductive Wellness of Incarcerated People. 

Although mandatory standardization would help, stress is not something reformed policy and oversight can get rid of, Sufrin said. 

Sometimes, the prospect of certain legislation can actually bring unintended consequences for doulas and reproductive justice advocates like Justice Gatson, a social justice doula based in Kansas City and founder of reproductive justice organization the Reale Justice Network.

“If there’s not a law on the books, you’re creating one,” Haven said. “And so you need to make sure that when you’re doing that, you’re not also creating unintended consequences down the road.” According to Haven, the way to be proactive about implementation is to put a reporting requirement into the bill.

However, this approach brings its own challenges. Federal agencies often kill bills that include reporting requirements. State laws must outline the specifics of data collection and reporting, a task left to advocates and lawmakers due to the absence of a national standard. Varying data collection methods among states give advocates information that isn’t standardized, posing challenges in holding prisons and jails accountable.

In 2018, Gatson collaborated with ACLU Missouri on SB 180, an anti-shackling bill. Without the funding, implementation of the anti-shackling bill would be difficult, and Gatson discovered that both the state legislature and some white-led organizations, in their own ways, make it arduous for Black and brown grassroots organizers to establish community ties and raise necessary funds to properly introduce such bills.

When MBB was working with incarcerated women inside prisons, Ard explained that the Georgia Department of Corrections refused to renew her volunteer badge without any explanation.

This setback became an advantage. 

Ard and her colleagues at MBB in Georgia began to understand that planning treatment programs for pregnant women before they face a judge could keep them with their children, saving time, money and effort. 

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MBB connects pregnant inmates with treatment programs, gets scheduled interviews, and a conditional letter of acceptance. They then take all of that to a hearing, where a judge makes the decision and determines whether it’s a reasonable path forward for the person in question. 

According to Ard, the judges who see high rates of recidivism have a limited amount of options and are hungry for alternatives to jailing. 

“They’re not wanting to have someone go back out into the community without any guardrails or any accountability,” Ard said. “That’s not what their job is.”

However, in Kidvai’s experience, prosecutors across the nation are more responsive to the culture of criminalization. Reproductive Legal Defense Fund works on cases all over the U.S., and Kidvai has observed that many judges are typically aligned with prosecutors. 

Backlash against reform-oriented prosecutors has led to recalls, litigation and legislative attacks in California, Georgia, Florida and Pennsylvania.

“All the power in the room is on one side, it’s all within the state. It’s all with the CPS attorney, it’s all with the judge,” Kidvai said. 

A part of the reproductive justice framework and the driving force for Scott, Gatson, Ard and Kidvai is to keep families together, independent of government control. 

The majority of MBB’s caregivers are grandparents and, as Ard noted, the incarceration of a family member can cause a ripple effect over generations. A little bit of investment can actually stretch a long way for the people MBB works with. 

“We know [if] we take care of moms, we’ve taken care of everybody else because Mama’s gonna make sure everybody else is getting taken care of,” Gatson said. “So it is an advantage that we invest in whatever it is that we need to do for Black women, Black pregnant people, etc.”

This article was produced in partnership with Just Media, a national hub supporting young writers covering justice issues.

This article Reproductive justice organizers in the South are finding new ways to help incarcerated mothers was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article How a local housing campaign won pro-tenant reforms by recruiting homeowners was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

If organizers learn anything from election results this year — and potentially any year — it might be a reaffirmation of the need for groups to work together in advancing progressive priorities. A loose coalition of anti-MAGA voters kicked Donald Trump out of office four years ago, but around four million of those voters chose to simply sit it out this year. 

Those coalitions are just as important when the goal is to move a policy agenda, rather than win an election. A case in point is the unexpected success of a few housing organizers in Greensboro, North Carolina — known as “the Gate City,” in a nod to its once prominent role as a railroad transshipment point across the South. In fact, their recent victory might give us all a roadmap for how to win in 2025, including one particularly relevant detail: The journey grew out of a series of losses. 

A campaign that grew from failure

Terrell Dungee and Cecile Crawford are organizers with the American Friends Service Committee’s North Carolina office. From 2020 onward, they both participated in local activist mobilizations, gravitating towards supporting tenants with abusive landlords. 

Last summer they were contacted by tenants at three different apartment buildings in Greensboro reporting severe negligence, illegal rent hikes and other serious problems. As is often the case, tenants at all three buildings struggled to recruit a majority of their neighbors to participate in any effort to use their collective power to force changes. In each instance, at Crawford and Dungee’s suggestion, a handful of tenants canvassed their neighbors, urging them to attend organizing meetings onsite, visit the city’s Code Compliance office, show up at City Council meetings or to take part in a regional day of action targeting a corporate slumlord, alongside tenants in other cities. The result was always the same: The tenants who had been willing to organize “threw in the towel” and moved on after a few months, often after receiving targeted harassment and threats of eviction.

Crawford and Dungee felt discouraged by the losses. That feeling of failure had become familiar to Greensboro activists. Over the last decade, hundreds of residents participated in mobilizations focused on winning local policy votes, like reforms to policing practices or stopping handouts to private developers. Only a few times had grassroots organizers been part of wringing significant concessions from elected officials — and Crawford and Dungee participated in one of those rare organizing victories. In 2022, they successfully mobilized affordable housing supporters alongside local basebuilders Siembra NC, who helped a Latino mobile home park tenant association win a $10 million fund for tenant relocation assistance. Following that experience, they knew the current City Council could be persuaded to fund tenant protections if a large enough coalition — including pro-tenant homeowners — could be galvanized to turn out in active support roles. 

Still, the idea of organizing for pro-tenant policies, even with people who weren’t renters, wasn’t one they had often seen reflected in other cities. Crawford and Dungee had closely followed tenant victories around the country, seeing grassroots tenant groups win significant changes to the landlord-tenant balance of power in political geographies similar to their own. In Kansas City, Baltimore and Philadelphia, organizers were winning mandated, universal right to counsel in eviction court and a legally-enforceable tenant bill of rights. But most of the groups behind those victories were centered around building-based tenant organizing. Crawford — despite having been an unhoused single mother who received an eviction notice in 2007 — was now a homeowner, as was Dungee. And many of the volunteers they had recruited weren’t experiencing unstable housing. 

Nevertheless, with the national political winds blowing against the landlord-dominated status quo, Crawford and Dungee thought there might be a way to win pro-tenant reforms in Greensboro. The question was whether they could win without having first organized a strong tenant union. 

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Struggling to stay housed and build governing power in Greensboro

Greensboro is a city of about 300,000 people in Guilford County, which has over half a million residents. Both city and county have relatively similar municipal operating budgets of $802 million and $834 million respectively. Voters have exclusively elected Democrats to Greensboro City Council since 2018, and the Guilford County Commission has been dominated by Democrats for just as long. But local activists and organizers have struggled to galvanize support for ambitious progressive policies, even as Durham — 45 miles to the east and with nearly the same population size — has become a national leader in funding alternatives to policing. Durham is even spending far more on affordable housing than Greensboro, even though the latter has a 30 percent larger municipal budget. 

It’s no coincidence that Durham’s basebuilders have built more and deeper containers for grassroots power. Members of Durham Beyond Policing, the Durham People’s Assembly and the Durham Educators’ Association have teamed up over the years to elect their champions to the council, school board and county commission — and continue to collaborate on the difficult challenges of co-governance.

In recent years Greensboro has had among the largest average rent increases in the state — and among the most evictions per capita, with 16,000 filed in 2023 alone. Ninety percent of the tenants in the county’s eviction court don’t have legal representation, but 90 percent of landlords do. Affordable housing is in short supply, and over the last several years the issue of “homelessness” has often dominated City Council meetings. But it came to be framed almost exclusively around how to manage people who are currently unhoused. Meanwhile, media narratives positioned “disruptive” local homeless advocates — who often interrupt council meetings — against downtown business proponents “just trying to get by.” 

With the public conversation around the lack of affordable and safe housing having been reduced to this narrow polarization, Crawford and Dungee spotted an opening: What if the issue were reframed around the need to prevent homelessness, by keeping people in their homes? What if, instead of asking whether people who lose their homes should receive public support or be allowed in public spaces, the question was: “How can elected officials use their policies and municipal budgets to keep people housed?” Crawford and Dungee thought that might build more support for pro-tenant policies across the political spectrum. 

Scoping the problem and ‘cutting the issue’ 

Up until that point, Crawford and Dungee had been thinking about rebalancing the playing field in favor of tenants through the lens of tenants they knew. Landlords could often get away with providing unsafe housing, and state laws kept local penalties weak. But when tenants withheld rent to extract concessions, they could be taken to court and evicted in just a few weeks. Crawford and Dungee decided to explore housing court as a potential place to both give tenants a leg up and to spotlight the harms of the eviction process for the entire city — a process organizers call “cutting the issue.”

In Greensboro, eviction court convenes Monday through Friday, and many landlords are represented by a single law firm, Loebsack & Brownlee, whose attorneys are permanent fixtures on one side of the courtroom. If tenants get lucky, they’ll end up in court during one of the eight hours per week someone from the Tenant Education Advocacy and Mediation program, or TEAM, is available to advise on their case. But they might not even know to talk to the friendly faces unless a magistrate points out — after ordering them to surrender their home — that TEAM can help them file an appeal, which could easily give them another month to work out a payment plan or find a new place. Of course, neither the magistrates nor the sheriff’s deputies who deliver eviction court notices are required to notify tenants of the program’s existence, and so a majority of tenants don’t even attend court hearings. 

Although severely underfunded, TEAM is very effective. According to American Friends Service Committee research, the program is currently helping an estimated 15 percent of all tenants in court avoid eviction. After researching it further and spending time in court, Crawford and Dungee realized the program could be a way to keep more tenants in their homes — and help build towards a stronger mandate by local elected officials to provide legal representation to all tenants. 

They learned the city and county, combined, spend around $16 million annually on managing homelessness, with the county contributing $440,000 in federal COVID relief funds for a tenant mediation and support program — the only local contribution to preventing people from becoming homeless, beyond occasional rental assistance funding. Doubling the budget, and therefore doubling the number of tenants TEAM might help avoid eviction, would only cost less than a percent of Greensboro’s annual spending. 

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Donate Launching a campaign to ‘Keep Gate City Housed’

After six months of planning, it was time to launch. Crawford and Dungee had honed their call to action and invited people to join them in a campaign to “Keep Gate City Housed” — with the goal of convincing the City Council to kick in $440,000 to dramatically expand TEAM. If they were successful, it would be the first time in known memory the city had stepped up to fund an anti-eviction program, and the city was often averse to contributing to anything designated a “county services issue” like housing support. 

Starting in mid-December 2023, their small volunteer crew had dozens of one-on-one conversations canvassing apartment buildings, bus stops and other public spaces. Almost everyone they canvassed thought the lack of renter protections was a problem, and many knew tenants who had been taken to court or had experienced an eviction themselves. But those conversations rarely turned into new faces at the group’s biweekly organizing committee meetings. By the end of February 2024, when city staff began finalizing their budget requests for City Council, Crawford and Dungee were worried about whether they would generate the momentum they needed. 

Their fortunes started to change in March, when they set up a biweekly court watch program to find out how often tenants were being told about their rights during hearings. Sometimes volunteers chased after forlorn renters — after they had been told to vacate their homes — to let them know they could get help from TEAM staff on filing an appeal. An initial group of five volunteers began to recruit even more people to join them at the courthouse, and many of the group’s contacts, who had been reluctant to join organizing committee meetings, started turning out in droves to the public “budget workshops” city staff began holding all over town. At every one, “affordable housing” led the list of priorities identified by attendees. New recruits kept appearing, repeating the group’s talking points about how evictions destabilize schools and neighborhoods, as well as make us all less safe and lead to job loss and homelessness. 

New recruits like Anita Washington, who Dungee met at a bus stop while canvassing, joined the effort. She was a single mother and National Guard veteran fighting an eviction, and had already connected with Legal Aid of North Carolina, and was struggling to get the city’s Code Compliance department to hold her landlord accountable. After coming to the group’s first public action, she got involved in the court watch program and organizing committee meetings. (Later on, she helped lead a subcommittee through a six-week study group on “right to counsel” ordinances.)  

By April, the group’s quiet outreach to elected officials and staff enlisted a councilmember who promised to support adding TEAM funding to the budget proposal. But many other council members hadn’t acknowledged their requests to meet. Dungee and Crawford knew they would have to turn up the volume on their demands in order to secure the four other votes needed to win.  

As City Council hearings on the city budget kicked off, the group held a mock “People’s Eviction Court” on the steps of City Hall, using props dreamed up by artivists at Look Loud that dramatized how “Team Tenant” was often outmatched by “Team Landlord.” They invited supporters to phone-bank their friends and contacts, asking them to send emails, make calls and attend budget hearings. They continued canvassing and, through multiple public actions, finally recruited tenants who had experienced eviction into the organizing committee — some of whom just happened to encounter the group at City Hall. Over the course of May and June, dozens of Keep Gate City Housed supporters flooded council meetings, persistently waving signs in the shape of door keys that read “$440,000” and “Join Team Tenant!”

Keep Gate City Housed members and volunteers after the final council vote. (WNV/Terrell Dungee)

Finally, they found out they had probably won from a City of Greensboro Facebook post that prominently listed their budget demand among the city’s official top priorities. Nevertheless, the group turned out in droves with coalition partners from the county-wide grassroots organization Guilford for All, as the council unanimously approved their line item at the first of two budget votes. At the second vote two weeks later, the group took a kind of leadership development victory lap, inviting organizing committee members to stand on the steps of City Hall and tell each other what they were proud of having contributed to the organizing win. Then they got some surprising news: In meetings with council members and staff, the group had urged the city to also set aside money for rental assistance, $1.5 million of which landed in the final budget document. 

Members of the group were joyful, but they knew it was just the first step of many towards their “north star” vision. They want a Greensboro that ensures all residents have access to safe and stable housing, and with municipal and state policies that make life as good for renters as it had become in Kansas City. After an actual victory lap at a nearby restaurant, the group reconvened to debrief the campaign and plan their next phase.

As of Fall 2024, they’re mapping out the homeowners, renters and students they’ll need to recruit in order to win the next phase of their vision. As Dungee told some of the group’s members, “We’re not Baltimore or Kansas City yet, but we’re on our way.”

This article How a local housing campaign won pro-tenant reforms by recruiting homeowners was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article University of Toronto students score a win for the climate — and campus protests more broadly was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

When the University of Toronto’s School of the Environment announced in October that it will no longer accept donations from the fossil fuel industry, the news sent waves through the growing movement to get coal, oil and gas companies off campuses. Among other things, that means banning fossil fuel corporations from financing academic research.

“This victory shows students have the ability to enact institutional change,” said Erin Mackey, a leader of the group Climate Justice UofT, which pushed for the fossil fuel money ban. “That’s especially important when, at many universities, students who want to make change are having the door slammed in their faces.”

Climate Justice UofT grew out of the fossil fuel divestment movement that over the last decade has swept across universities around the world. In 2021, after years of student pressure, University of Toronto agreed to divest its $4 billion endowment by 2030. Soon after that, Climate Justice UofT joined the nascent fossil free research movement that was already taking root in the United States and United Kingdom, helping bring it to Canada.

Yet, even as students built a powerful movement to get fossil fuels off campus, universities on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border have cracked down on dissent. With the election of Donald Trump to another term of the presidency, this tendency to stifle student voices is only likely to grow worse. In this context, the win at University of Toronto is about much more than a single Canadian college.

Right after news broke of the victory, Mackey said, “I was flooded with dozens of messages, mostly from students in the U.S. who were eager to learn how we did it. That shows there’s still a real appetite for change.”

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Student dissent under fire

The fossil free research movement formally launched in 2022, when over 500 U.S. and U.K. academics released a letter calling on higher education to stop accepting money from coal, oil and gas companies. The goal is to reduce polluting industries’ presence on campuses, while preventing the companies who are most responsible for climate change from exerting undue influence over research that informs the world’s response to the crisis.

“No one claims researchers are cooking the books or making up findings,” said Lynne Archibald, a Princeton alum who is part of the campaign to get the Ivy League school to ban fossil fuel money. “But bias in research begins far before that point. It involves what questions you ask — you aren’t going to ask them if it’s going to make your funder angry.”

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The Fossil Free Research movement is taking universities by storm

Most fossil free research campaigns are at schools that have already pledged to divest their endowments from at least some coal, oil and gas companies. Now, students want universities to take the next step by further dissociating from the industry. However, the very success of divestment and other student-led movements has provoked a backlash from administrations.

An obvious example of this is universities cracking down on protests against Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Last spring, over 3,000 pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested on U.S. campuses, sometimes by police in riot gear. While not directly related to climate change, many pro-Palestine groups who are calling on universities to divest from Israel have found eager allies in the fossil fuel divestment movement.

Meanwhile, U.S. higher education is under fire from Republican politicians for teaching critical race theory and other social justice concepts. In some red states, Republican leaders have appointed conservative presidents to lead state universities in ways that align with party values. All this has contributed to an apparent unwillingness on the part of higher education institutions to tolerate student dissent.

“Last spring’s upheavals over Palestine left a lot of administrations on edge,” said Archibald. “They’ve gotten to where they just don’t want to deal with any kind of controversy.”

Princeton is unusual in that the climate movement on its campus has pursued fossil fuel divestment and dissociation concurrently. Largely, this was in response to a university policy dating from the ‘80s, which states the two actions must go together.

“The administration decided to link divestment and dissociation during the movement against South African apartheid, arguably to make divestment seem more difficult,” Archibald said. “Of course, there’s a certain intellectual coherence to saying if an industry’s so terrible you won’t invest in it, then you shouldn’t be partnering or accepting money from it, either. Yet until recently, no one envisioned there being an entire industry we would have to divest from.”

Disentangling completely from the fossil fuel industry is a much bigger job than dissociating from the relatively short lists of companies targeted by earlier divestment campaigns. However, when the fossil free research movement began calling on universities to go beyond divestment, it seemed Princeton’s approach might have backfired in activists’ favor.

In September 2022, Princeton responded to years of student activism by announcing it would both divest from publicly traded fossil fuel companies, and ban research partnerships with 90 companies involved in coal and tar sands mining. This was at a time when climate action in the U.S. was at a zenith. The Inflation Reduction Act with its groundbreaking climate legislation had just been passed by Congress, and investors were pouring unprecedented amounts of money into clean energy.

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Why climate activists need to celebrate — even if we’re not feeling like it

Against that backdrop, Princeton’s new policy represented the biggest victory yet for the fossil free research movement in North America. Unfortunately, it was short lived. 

This October, barely two years after its divestment and dissociation announcement, Princeton said it would again accept donations from companies previously excluded under its dissociation policy, effectively backtracking on its fossil free research commitment. The move is part of the broader trend toward colleges dismissing students’ calls for change in a polarized political environment.

“Was the administration here trying to protect itself, in anticipation of a second Trump presidency?” Archibald said. “Elite universities are already disliked by Trump and his allies, and we were ahead of the game in terms of ending fossil fuel funded research. Reversing on something like that makes you less of a political target.”

Princeton’s abandonment of its fossil free research pledge may foreshadow headwinds campus activism are likely to encounter under a second Trump administration. At the same time, the movement to get climate-destroying industries off campus is becoming more organized than ever, proving victories are still possible.

Curbing industry influence

Around the time University of Toronto announced it would divest its endowment from fossil fuels, Erin Mackey was taking a class on American studies.

“I was assigned a couple readings about the influence of the fossil fuel industry on higher education in American universities, which is how I learned about the fossil free research movement,” Mackey said. “I assumed those sorts of influences don’t end at the border, but must extend into Canada.”

To Mackey’s surprise, there wasn’t much published information about fossil fuel money in Canadian academia, but she found the actions of U.S. students calling for fossil free research inspiring. “It got me thinking about the role of universities in enabling the climate crisis, and how divestment is an amazing win but addresses just one of the ways colleges are tied to the fossil fuel industry.”

Mackey and other Climate Justice UofT leaders decided to launch a fossil free research campaign, possibly the first in Canada. They joined organizing calls with a network of students across the U.S. and U.K. then known as Fossil Free Research, who were exchanging ideas and experiences as they built their own campaigns.

“We did teach-ins, rallies and banner drops,” Mackey said. In 2023, she and other students from Climate Justice UofT released a report finding that between 2008 and 2018, the university accepted over $64 million from the fossil fuel industry.

The students also began direct talks with faculty about a fossil free research policy specific to the School of the Environment. Responses from faculty members were generally supportive.

“There were moments of tension,” Mackey said. For example, students initially wanted a fossil free money ban to include banks that are major fossil industry funders. “We didn’t win that one. But overall, it was a good example of students and faculty working together to compel their university to act. We wouldn’t have gotten where we are without the support of faculty, and I don’t think they would have moved forward without students taking the initiative.”

In October, the School of the Environment announced it will no longer accept donations from or “enter into agreements for sponsorship” with fossil fuel companies. Just weeks earlier, Princeton had reneged on its fossil free research commitment, making the new ban at University of Toronto the strongest such policy anywhere on the continent.

Mackey recently graduated from UofT, but is still closely connected with the student climate movement there. “It was a big win,” she said of the School of the Environment announcement. “As a movement, it’s important we celebrate milestones like this because they show how organizing can and does work.”

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Donate A campus-based resistance movement

So far, universities in Canada have not faced the same level of political pressure to quash dissent as those in the U.S. However, the crackdown in higher education is not limited to south of the border.

In June, police fired tear gas on pro-Palestine protesters at McGill University in Quebec. At other Canadian universities, student encampments calling for schools to divest from Israel have been forcibly dispersed. In this atmosphere, the fossil free research victory at University of Toronto appears to be an especially important win for student protest. Meanwhile, at other schools in Canada and the U.S., students are pushing back against administrations resistant to change.

“We’re letting students, faculty and alumni know Princeton walked back its fossil free research commitments,” Archibald said. “Today, no one in higher education would consider letting tobacco companies fund a study on lung cancer — but that’s basically the equivalent of what Princeton is doing.”

At an international level, Fossil Free Research has changed its name to the Campus Climate Network to reflect a broadened focus on cutting ties with fossil fuels at every level. It now serves as an organizing hub for students involved in divestment campaigns, fossil fuel dissociation, decarbonizing campuses and more.

Students pushing to divest and dissociate from coal, oil and gas have also found valuable new allies by connecting with supportive alumni.

“At Princeton, it started with a couple young alums who were interested in divestment and started working with students,” said Archibald, who graduated in 1987. “Then the pandemic happened, and suddenly all the group’s organizing went online. It meant any student, faculty member or alum could participate from anywhere in the country. Even if you left Princeton 50 years ago, you could get involved.”

Back at the University of Toronto, Climate Justice UofT is building on momentum from its recent win.

“A lot of members are now involved in pushing for divestment from Israeli apartheid,” Mackey said. “And, we’re working to get the whole university to follow the School of the Environment’s example with a university-wide fossil free research policy. Institutions are movable until they’re not — and the progress we’ve made so far shows the strength of student organizing.”

This article University of Toronto students score a win for the climate — and campus protests more broadly was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article What international solidarity means to Palestinian women was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Nov. 29 is the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, marked by the United Nations since 1977. But how can solidarity be effectively shown in the context of ongoing, escalating war? Here is what women in Palestine say.

Doaa Ahmad, a women’s rights activist and the head of programs for a grassroots organization in northern Gaza, and her three boys just escaped death for the fourth time. Doaa fetches her laptop and work-related material every time she escapes. Even in genocide, Doaa says, I have a duty to help others, particularly women and girls. (Doaa and the other women in this story have had their names changed at their request.)

The widely recognized genocide in Gaza has claimed the lives of at least 50,000 Palestinians, and displaced nearly all its population, 1,000,000 of whom are women. Every hour, two mothers lose their lives. Sexual violence is used against Palestinian women and men. According to a U.N. report, the Gaza blockade has taken a heavy toll on women and girls by undermining living conditions, restricting access to essential services, increasing their care burden, and heightening vulnerability to all forms of gender-based violence. Experts are “appalled” by reports of deliberate targeting and extrajudicial killing of Palestinian women and children in places of refuge or while fleeing.

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The brunt of the work of survival in Gaza rests on local organizations. UN Women estimates that 83 percent of Gaza’s women’s organizations are still at least partially operational. Dina Sami, finds time to work on women protection services and support survivors of gender-based violence. She and her team, all of whom live in a school-turned-shelter in Khan Younis, installed a tent to provide counseling for women and girls in need.  “All of our programs were disrupted and changed, all our premises were destroyed, 10 of our colleagues were killed, and many of us are grieving,” Sami said. “However, we are committed to create safe spaces for women and girls and help them with whatever tools and capacities we have left.”       

Shaden Emad works in a local organization that provides pro bono legal representation services for survivors of gender-based violence in Tubas, in the northeast of the West Bank. Settler attacks make commuting between cities and villages dangerous for Palestinians. The increase in settler attacks limit Shaden’s ability to work in courts and shelters. “International solidarity can shed light on the challenges faced by grassroots women organizations working in Area C [an area administered by Israel, comprising of 60 percent of the West Bank] and the Jordan Valley,” she said. “International voices and donors must support us to amplify our voices in the face of the shrinking civic space.”   

Solidarity with the Palestinian people is solidarity with Doaa, Dina and Shaden. International solidarity with Palestinian women’s organizations and activists means influencing governments to uphold human and civil rights of Palestinians, including their right to independence and self-determination. At the same time, it’s important to hold Israel accountable for crimes against humanity, including the Gaza genocide, and the suffering inflicted under colonization and occupation — as well as for the dispossession from land and resources, and lost opportunities for the Palestinian people. 

Standing with Palestinians is not buying goods from companies that fund the genocide. We have the power to say no. Students around the world have been demanding divestment from Israel. Nobel Peace Prize laureate the American Friends Service Committee has compiled a thorough list of companies profiting from the ongoing war. One concrete way to stand with our Palestinian sisters is with our buying power.

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International solidarity means holding politicians accountable. Governments’ supporting Israel are complicit in terror. We cannot stand by in silence. This moment demands that all states that signed the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court now uphold their obligations by enforcing the court’s arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. (A warrant has also been issued for the military leaders of Hamas). This moment also demands an arms embargo. Britain, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada have suspended arms trade with Israel.

What can you, as one individual, do? Lobby your government, protest, demand action and lobby again.

Our struggle is the Palestinian struggle. Our fight is Doaa’s fight for resistance, Dina’s fight for justice, and Shaden’s fight for freedom.

On this day, as violence and misogyny echo across the world, let us reimagine feminist solidarity. Women everywhere must seek sisterhoods, we must foster direct partnerships with Palestinian women’s groups and amplify their voices and agency.

This article What international solidarity means to Palestinian women was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article The emergence of Germany’s decolonial climate movement was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Over the last few years, in response to the mostly white — and what has been called neo-colonial — German climate justice groups, a new movement has emerged. It’s based on the concept that there can be no climate justice without decolonization, and even questions whether the climate should be central in the justice discourse at all.

This movement has accelerated since October last year when the genocide in Gaza began. Mainstream climate groups, like much of the German left, are strongly pro-Israel. This created a rift within these groups, as pro-Palestine members, many of whom are people of color, left to form or join groups with decoloniality at their core.

Groups specifically made up of Black, Indigenous and people of color, or BIPOC, have grown, such as BIPOC 4 Future, Debt for Climate and Klima4Palestina. An alternative anti-colonial climate strike now takes place on the same day as the Fridays 4 Future climate strike, and there are climate justice camps focusing on anti-colonialism.

So what does decolonial climate justice really mean and what is being done in Germany to fight for it?

Tatu Hey, a member of Climate Justice Berlin, or CJB, an intersectional climate and environmental justice collective founded in Berlin, says that climate justice is inherently decolonial. Climate justice is seen through the lens of people in the Global South fighting colonial struggles, be this in the form of extractivism, continuation of colonial gender dynamics, land struggles or educational struggles.

“For me, climate justice defines the whole fight to deconstruct or break down the colonial ethic — the perception of control, hierarchies, oppression, competition and mix of capitalism, which are destroying our homes, earth and relations between humans, and between humans and non-human species,” Hey said. “Climate justice means economic justice, gender justice, queer justice. Everything is interconnected and without the one we can’t reach the other.”

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Hey says that the mainstream climate movement in Germany is “bourgeois,” made up of liberal groups begging the government, which is itself the cause of climate destruction, to change its policies. Instead, they should be demanding and fighting for true decolonial climate justice processes.

She gives the example of how long these groups have been silent about the genocide in Gaza, and how long it took them to publicly acknowledge the murder of George Floyd by police in the United States.

She blames this on a lack of understanding that racial injustice is a form of climate injustice, just like housing and mobility injustices.

Since CJB started in 2020, it has tried to focus on shortcomings of the white German climate movement. They have produced resources in the German language which talk about, for example, environmental racism, and breaking the narrative of environmental protection to focus on environmental and climate justice. It also places importance on “embracing care in struggles,” Hey said.

In September, the BIPOC Climate Justice Network held its second annual summit outside of Berlin.

The camp was attended by around 60 people over three days, individuals and activists from local and international groups including from Colombia, Sudan, Guatemala and Brazil, creating links and learning about each other’s struggles. During the camp, activists attended panel discussions, strategy workshops and inter-movement working sessions, and care spaces and a room in memorial of activists who had passed away were made available.

One of the members of the network, Minerva Figueroa says the group realized the camp was necessary after attending mainstream climate camps in Germany for several years.

“There were a lot of moments where I didn’t feel I had the space to be who I am, to stand up for what I want to stand up for and convey the voices I listened to back home,” Figueroa said. “[This] was a feeling shared by many people of color in these camps.”

White German groups lack anti-racist education, she says, and she had to be exposed to a lot of “white saviorism.” So she decided to put her efforts elsewhere and — with the BIPOC Climate Justice Network — start a camp of their own.

“At the camp, we didn’t have to be token POCs on a panel and negotiate topics and bargain to talk about what we found important,” she said. “We could just be ourselves and talk about what we are interested in and connect our struggles. We just felt freer for a little while.”

Figueroa says the growing decolonial climate movement in Germany can be attributed to the expanding community of migrants and people of color building up these movements.

To her, climate justice means to rethink the paradigm of how we think, interact, talk to each other and other living beings, as well as our relationships to water, the earth and ecosystems.

Making the movement anti-colonial means bringing social justice, gender justice and racial justice into the fight, she says. We need to understand that capitalism, racism and patriarchy are “the standing pillars of the systems that oppress us. Until we really take down all of them, we are not really free.”

An Abya Yala action in commemoration of the comrades from the Global South who have been killed for defending the environment. (Instagram/Abya Yala Anticolonial)

Another group working on decolonial climate justice in Germany is the Hamburg-based Abya Yala Anticolonial. This group is made up of Latin American activists who have moved to Germany, and according to their Instagram page, “continue the fight against the colonial order.”

“We are not following white thinkers. We are focusing on building our political understanding not through the books of Europeans but by the experiences of our territories,” said Camilo Arrieta, a member from Colombia. “Our work is to come together and generate more networks and relationships with other collectives and perspectives, sit with other people and discuss topics. When we discuss with people of other backgrounds, we complete our understanding of the world not based on a European agenda or what they impose as reality.”

The discussions bring together voices from the Global South — usually environmental activists — to talk about resistance, do care work and try to mobilize people.

The group also holds demonstrations, like the last one, held on Oct. 12, a day it calls the Day of Decolonial Resistance. This day, also known as Indigenous Peoples’ Day, or Day of Indigenous Resistance, is mainly commemorated in Abya Yala (the term used by Indigenous peoples to refer to the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean). The demonstration walked to, and stopped to hold speeches at streets, buildings and statues with colonial names.

Arrieta believes that the decolonial climate movement in Berlin is growing, but slowly and with baby steps. It is still at the point where its critiques and perspectives on power imbalances are not always heard by the mainstream climate movement.

One critique is that the main topic on the agenda should not be climate justice, but environmental justice, of which the climate forms only one part.

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“In our territories in the Global South, our people are yelling everyday about how they are dying, being displaced, their waters and lands polluted, but all everyone talks about is the climate,” Arrieta said. “In order to decolonize ourselves, we need to look beyond the European climate agenda, because that just gives them the opportunity to keep producing.”

Arrieta has seen some advancements in Germany. More and more groups are beginning to attach a decolonial idea to their discussions and agendas, which, when seen through a non-European lens is very powerful in understanding the world.

“It is crucial that the conversation of decoloniality is based on voices from the Global South and the lens of the people that have been colonized,” Arrieta added. “If the Global North colonizes the discourse, then we will lose. But as more Europeans listen to a non-European narrative, there is an opening for them to understand that decolonial dynamics are the basis of everything.”

After several years of attempting to create a decolonial climate movement in Germany, Hey has an idea of what a just future will look like. “My vision of a just climate future is a world which is based on reciprocity, care, solidarity, community,” Hey explained, “where we have a mode of production that produces things needed by the people — where people and workers decide what should be produced, there are no rich people, not this so-called democracy we have now. We will build a whole new understanding of living together.”

This article The emergence of Germany’s decolonial climate movement was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Meet the Indigenous leader using psychedelic medicine to heal the traumas of colonization was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

When you’ve endured a living hell, then a visit to heaven on earth can provide a healing counterweight. This premise underlies Rueben George’s psychedelic healing work with Indigenous peoples harmed by colonial dispossession and violence. 

Rueben is a well-known Indigenous leader in Canada, having led opposition to a major fossil fuel pipeline that captured national attention and became a flashpoint in multiple election cycles. Despite fierce resistance, the Trans Mountain pipeline was recently completed and now pumps oil from the Alberta tar sands to the Pacific Coast over lands and waters long governed by Rueben’s Tsleil-Waututh Nation. While the Canadian government and oil industry got their way, the resistance that Rueben led drew a line in the sand. According to Jon McKenzie, CEO of Canadian oil company Cenovus Energy, “It is increasingly difficult to build pipelines in this country, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this was the last pipeline.”

To bolster his land defense efforts, Rueben runs weekly Sweat Lodge ceremonies on Tsleil-Waututh territory, in what is now Vancouver (while not advertised, they are open to all). As a Sundance Chief, he also guides participants through that demanding and transformative ceremony. The Sundance involves feats of sacrifice and endurance that rigorously prepare participants for acts of generosity in regular life. Since the pandemic, Rueben has turned to psychedelic medicines, offered in a sacred and ceremonial context, because they helped him release his own embodied traumas. 

During his first ceremony with psychedelic medicine, Rueben experienced a profound and healing release. He felt the deep wounds of colonialism begin to heal; he felt free. He left that ceremony with a burning desire to share his experience of freedom with others. As he writes in his 2024 memoir “It Stops Here: Standing Up for Our Lands, Our Waters and Our People,” “That’s what our people deserve, and that’s what this medicine gives us. And this time, we’re not asking permission from the government or anyone else to help my people heal. No colonial government is going to tell us how to heal, especially after what they created with the residential schools.”

Rueben wants to make this healing available to everyone, but his priority is residential school survivors and their families. Residential schools, which ran in Canada from the mid 1800s until 1996, were designed by the government to remove generations of Indigenous children from their families, traditions and lands. The Canadian government has since recognized the schools as genocidal. Rueben’s own mother is a residential school survivor, and he writes in his memoir: “Thousands died in those residential schools … Each and every time one of those children was hit, or abused, or witnessed violence, or heard about someone dying and not coming back, a trauma spirit was born. How could that pain not have been passed down to Indigenous peoples across Canada?”

A healing vision

There is a long history of European colonizers interrupting Indigenous use of plant medicines. As journalist Michael Pollan reports in his book “How to Change Your Mind,” the Catholic Church declared in 1620 that the use of plants for spiritual purposes was “an act of superstition condemned as opposed to the purity and integrity of our Holy Catholic faith.”

Rueben knows his ancestors once used psychedelic plant medicines prior to colonization and the residential school system “because they knew every inch of our territory, and they knew the medicinal uses of every plant that grows here. They knew the benefits of this medicine, and they knew it was a gift given to us to help our people heal.” In Canada, psychedelic medicines such as psilocybin (magic mushrooms) remain illegal to produce, sell or possess, though limited access is available through the government for research. Rueben isn’t waiting for government approval. He sees the ceremonial use of psychedelic medicine as an act of sovereignty and cultural renewal. He is calling the government’s bluff. Do they really want to interrupt Indigenous healing on Indigenous land?

His vision is to build a healing center guided by Indigenous law where residential school survivors can receive the medicine for free while settler folk pay. He sees this as a reparative and just funding model given the harms and benefits that flowed from colonial dispossession. Ideally, the Canadian government and the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches — the entities that conceived and administered the schools — would fund the center as a form of reparations. But since achieving this outcome would require a protracted campaign, Rueben is focusing for now on support from civil society.

To promote healing and build momentum for his vision, Rueben already offers medicine to residential school survivors and their families. Working with experts in trauma and psychedelic therapy, he and his team have settled on a protocol that combines three medicines. They prefer the medicines remain unnamed to protect their knowledge and minimize legal scrutiny, but they are all well-known substances. They’ve found that when combined in the right dose and delivered in a sacred and ceremonial context, these medicines can help people heal their traumas without having to re-experience them. In other words, the protocol mostly avoids “bad trips” and maximizes healing. 

Generally, psychedelics are considered safe, especially when delivered in a therapeutic environment that tests for drug purity. But since psychedelics are not recommended for people with severe psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia, participants must undergo a detailed intake process, including a 12-page questionnaire. According to Rueben, they’ve collectively shared the medicine with over 150 residential school survivors and their families with uniformly positive results. Now they have an overflowing waitlist. 

Transforming settlers 

Rueben is also keen to work with settlers, or the people whose families settled in colonial Canada on Indigenous land. “The spirit of trauma has been transformed into a spirit of love and compassion. It has turned into something that allows us to understand the pain of others. That’s a feeling of freedom. And if we can alleviate some of that for others and show them a better way of life, then we will.”

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Achieving genuine reconciliation requires settlers to heal wounds that can manifest as acts of supremacy and colonial arrogance. Rueben describes sitting across the table from government leaders during negotiations over the Trans Mountain pipeline and feeling sorry for how colonized they were, for how disconnected they’d become from the spirit of the land. While many Indigenous people suffer from material impoverishment because of colonization, Rueben thinks many settlers suffer a spiritual impoverishment passed down along ancestral lines.

In his memoir, Rueben reflects on how colonial violence within Europe was a precursor to it being exported worldwide and how dispossession disconnected many Europeans from their spirits and the spirit of the land. “When our spiritual connection is severed,” Rueben writes, “we don’t make decisions that are right for the Earth. … We don’t make decisions that are right for our relationships with other human beings.” 

In his book “My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies,” author and trauma therapist Resmaa Menakem convincingly argues that unmetabolized trauma from colonial and racial violence in Europe (whether the Romans contra the English, the English contra the Irish, or European societies contra Jews) left settlers more likely to enact violence in North America to experience the power and control that had been lacking in their ancestral histories. In other words, victims can easily become perpetrators.

Rueben wants to interrupt this cycle for all peoples. As he reflects in “It Stops Here”: “We will open this medicine up to everybody living in our territories because we want to show them a higher state of spiritual consciousness. We want to show them heaven. We want them to understand that they carry a spirit inside themselves. We want to give them a right to heal and change their life. … And when they experience that, their lives will be better, and they will make better choices. Then collectively we will create change.”

A sacred medicine field trip

This summer, I was fortunate to experience a medicine journey with Rueben and his team. The settlers they’ve worked with so far are either friends or contacts who might be able to support the proposed healing center. I journeyed with six other settlers, all of us engaged in either environmental justice or healing justice work.

Although it was one of the most profound and transformative experiences of my life, research on psychedelic medicine tells me my experience of awe, re-enchantment and healing is downright predictable. In a landmark 2006 study, Roland Griffiths from Johns Hopkins University administered psilocybin to volunteers with no experience with psychedelics. Seventy percent said the experience, in terms of meaning, was on par with the birth of children, the death of loved ones and their wedding days. Subsequent research has found that psilocybin reliably produces mystical experiences when administered in a supportive therapeutic environment. 

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As an undergraduate student 25 years ago, I’d turned to psilocybin and LSD for fun, adventure and a dose of rebellion. Each experience was powerful and offered lessons that were probably more impactful than I realized. But none approached the ego-shaking healing intensity of Rueben’s protocol. I attribute the difference to the careful combination of medicines and the ceremonial container Rueben and his team created for the journey. Their protocol shares elements with academic studies exploring the healing potential of psychedelic therapy: a comfortable setting, a carefully crafted soundtrack and eye coverings to encourage an inward journey. 

But the experience was also shaped by Rueben’s lifetime of healing and ritual work rooted in Indigenous teachings. We were all cleansed with cedar and fanned with eagle feathers before the ceremony began. Rueben generously and powerfully sang during the ceremony, drawing his ancestors and other healing spirits he’d cultivated relationships with into the room.

It’s hard to articulate, but I think his team’s careful ritual work allowed me to better connect with my ancestors, my spirit and the spirit energy that is alive in all animate and inanimate matter. We were being gently invited to see and feel the world differently, to question assumptions inherited from a Western materialist and human-supremacist worldview. Might our ancestors, for example, still be with us, and might our family relations extend across the species line? 

Because of the fuzzy legality surrounding the medicine, I can’t share the names of all the guides. But one was Gary Turner, who is currently coproducing a documentary, “Medicine/St’élmexw,” on psychedelic medicine and de-colonial healing that features the work of Rueben and others. Turner, a fellow settler in his early 50s, struck me as a tender, caring man whose ego had been ground down by years of self-work, including his experiences with Rueben’s protocol. Rueben and his team are walking endorsements for the power of their medicine.

Facing fear, feeling connection

Before I took the medicine, the words “spirit” and “heaven” were abstractions. Even as a practicing Buddhist, concepts like “interbeing” — which seeks to capture the fundamental relationality of all earthly matter — lived in my body as ideas more than breathing realities. During the ceremony, these ideas came to precious life and danced in my viscera.

We began by sharing our intentions for the journey. I wanted to work on fear. I’ve struggled with anxiety since my late 20s and find it limiting. My academic research focuses on how existential fear — particularly fear of death — shapes bad behavior and unjust political outcomes. A scared animal is often a scary animal. Without cultural resources to metabolize our existential fears, it’s easy to seek security and safety in irrational but alluring fantasies of supremacy that compensate for feelings of powerlessness. 

I wanted to learn more about fear to relieve anxiety and lessen my own compensatory attachments to ego. As it turned out, fear was the most accessible emotion for me since I was buzzing with anxiety before taking the medicine. I was worried I’d have a panic attack, pass out, and create an embarrassing, disruptive scene. Worrying about worry, worrying about panic attacks consumes an unhealthy amount of psychic energy while paradoxically making panic more likely.

Ancestors all the way down

Once the medicine hit my bloodstream, my maternal grandmother who passed away 15 years ago visited. This was unexpected, but in hindsight, anxiety is common across my maternal line. I’ve long felt the surplus nervous energy in my organism exceeded my own lived experience. When my mother was inside my grandmother’s womb, like all fetuses with ovaries, my mother already held all her eggs, two of which would become my sister and me many years later. In other words, I don’t just share genes with my grandmother: I was part of her and my mother’s bodies long before I came into the world.

My grandmother’s face held pain, but it was beautiful to be visited by her. I realized my ancestors are very much with me. I rubbed my arm as I felt them alive in my organism and still with me. I didn’t know the source of my grandmother’s pain, but I understand from other family members that she experienced considerable status anxiety, having grown up poor, raised by her single mother from Scotland who was trying to eke out a living in a new land. As my journey progressed, my grandmother’s pain morphed towards joy. During her life, she and my grandfather had been avid ballroom dancers. I saw her dancing joyfully, feeling free. She was helping me heal, but the sacred medicine was also helping me heal her spirit. Ancestral wounds were being tended to; it was a deeply healing experience that still brings tears to my eyes.

As the journey advanced, my encounters with ancestors broadened. I was visited by lineage ancestors in the Buddhist tradition I’m trained in, by animal ancestors and by plant ancestors. The phrase that bubbled up from my unconscious was “ancestors all the way down.” In that moment, I understood my place in a deeply interwoven universe. The particles comprising my organism have shaped different assemblages of animate and inanimate matter on this planet and beyond and will continue doing so into the future. 

The protocol was doing its work.

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Donate Nəc̓əmat

Hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ is the language traditionally spoken by the Tsleil-Waututh, and its word for oneness or interconnection is nəc̓əmat (pronounced naut’sa mawt). For Rueben, to experience nəc̓əmat is to connect with “the interrelatedness of all beings — the spiritual realm from which everything that has a spirit comes. Some might call this heaven.” 

At my journey’s midpoint, I experienced reality folding into itself, forming a vortex or tunnel akin to those described in near-death experiences. On the other side, I found myself in what can best be described as heaven. For perhaps the first time in my conscious life, my body was without fear, and I experienced deep feelings of gratitude and love. 

After the journey, I devoured Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind,” and these words resonated: “What was merely known is now felt, takes on the authority of deeply rooted conviction. And more often than not, that conviction concerns the supreme importance of love.” I was later struck by how we walk around daily with the embodied potential to feel nəc̓əmat, to feel love, to feel gratitude. Despite the catalytic and “trippy” power of the medicine, it was my body that felt deep healing, connection and fearlessness. The journey gave me a new embodied baseline to refer back to. 

Pausing the default mode network

Scientists who have imaged the brains of patients journeying on psychedelics have noticed significant changes in what is referred to as the Default Mode Network, or DMN, which includes brain structures associated with our self-construct. Our DMN is particularly active when we engage in self-referential thought and tends to be overactive in many mental health disorders, such as PTSD. Scientists hypothesize that this hyperactivity stems from excessive rumination and self-criticism, what Buddhists call “suffering.” 

Psychedelics appear to deactivate the DMN. They can help us get out of our way, experience a more full reality, and be changed by the experience when our DMN comes back online, perhaps less vigilant given the liberation experienced on the other side of self. As Pollan writes, “Taking this particular network off-line may give us access to extraordinary states of consciousness — moments of oneness or ecstasy that are no less wondrous for having a physical cause.”

Meditation has also been found to deactivate the DMN. I’ve benefited tremendously from a regular meditation practice for over 20 years, but my psychedelic journey with Rueben blasted me into a positively altered state that I’ve never experienced sitting on my cushion. Unsurprisingly, meditation has been found to enhance psychedelic experiences and so the two modalities can work in tandem. 

Reuben George Coast Salish regalia. (Albert Normandin)

Rueben used to think that we should only experience heightened states of spiritual consciousness if they were self-induced, if we could get there on our own first. “Now I’ve changed my mind because I’ve seen my people benefit tremendously from the medicine, which brings them to a higher state of spiritual consciousness and that’s a good foundation to start from.”

He thinks that getting to viscerally experience nəc̓əmat can offer us new embodied baselines and insights that we can bring back into everyday life, helping us better address the different challenges we face. After the journey, Rueben spoke to us about the importance of maintaining some kind of daily practice to connect with spirit (our spirit, the spirit of our ancestors, and the spirit of the land). This daily practice is also a way of remembering our visceral experience of nəc̓əmat so that the medicine can keep doing its work. 

Our guides told us that integrating our experience is as important as the journey itself, otherwise what was deeply felt in ceremony will become an ephemeral dream that is hard to recall, let alone touch. I’ve noticed a renewed investment in my meditation practice, an opportunity to remember the heaven that we daily inhabit on this planet. I fully concur with Rueben that the living hell we humans — especially white settlers such as myself — regularly create for others is at least partly fueled by our disconnection from nəc̓əmat, from spirit, from heaven on earth.

Enduring effects?

Does the healing last? I’m still feeling the effects a few months out. Since the journey, I’ve felt fear and anxiety, but they feel less rooted in my body and pass more quickly. I’m less scared of these feelings; we’re in a better relationship. Maybe my DMN is more relaxed having witnessed the awe and wonder that my vigilant ego-defense had blocked me from seeing? Researchers have found that a single high dose of psilocybin is associated with enduring increases in “trait openness, psychological wellbeing and life satisfaction” in volunteers 14 months later.

Although no longitudinal studies exist on Rueben’s protocol, long waitlists for residential school survivors and their families suggest that the medicine worked for those who shared their journey experiences with community members. Moreover, the research on psychedelic therapy and trauma — even severe PTSD — is promising. (Though the U.S. Federal Drug Administration recently made the controversial decision to not approve MDMA-supported therapy, so more clinical trials will be needed before approval.)

Rueben and his team don’t expect one journey alone to heal complex trauma. But they’re convinced that their powerful medicine needs to be made widely available given the depth of pain among residential school survivors and their families. Moreover, the levels of polarization, injustice, supremacy thinking and suffering among settler peoples suggest that additional healing and transformation supports are needed for them as well. 

Visiting heaven on earth

Currently, the waitlist for medicine journeys is being generated through word-of-mouth and personal connections, but if Rueben’s vision comes to fruition and funding can be secured to staff and house the protocol, then this powerful medicine will soon be widely available. Rueben has honed his protocol in dialogue with other North American Indigenous leaders — so, if he is successful in launching his center, it will likely become a model for Indigenous nations across the continent. 

Rueben wants to heal the wounds caused by European colonization so that Indigenous people can better defend their lands and cultures. But he knows that securing a livable future requires that settler people heal their own colonial and ancestral wounds. He wants settlers to experience nəc̓əmat, connect with the spirit of the land and become allies in decolonization and collective healing. While his vision requires settlers to pay for access to the medicine, the return on investment is nothing less than a visit to heaven on earth, the experience of nəc̓əmat, the experience of living in beloved community with all beings, with the hope that these healing experiences will bend the moral arc of our communities toward care and justice. In other words, it’s priceless.

This article Meet the Indigenous leader using psychedelic medicine to heal the traumas of colonization was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article In times of crisis we need more people power — mass trainings are the key was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Social movements often face a contradiction: To expand and thrive, they need to bring in ever-greater numbers of new participants. And yet, knowing how to effectively absorb new people and plug them into a movement’s work can be very difficult. This is a problem even during normal times, but it grows even bigger during times of political crisis — such as the moment we are facing right now.

Imagine that you are an organizer and that you just pulled off a fantastic direct action. A small and powerful protest you held locally generated excitement and made news headlines. The public noticed, and the next day there are 10 people at your office door who saw the demonstration and are excited to get involved.

What would you do? Perhaps you would gather contact information and plan individual meetings.

But now imagine that these 10 people, with your support, pull off an even more audacious action, making a big splash with a sit-in at the office of a local politician. A few days later, you have 200 people coming to your door who want to join the movement. What do you do now?

You can hold a meeting, but you probably can’t do one-on-one outreach to everybody in a reasonable amount of time. You are scrambling.

Now think even bigger. Let’s imagine that there’s a massive external political event, and all of a sudden your issue is the leading topic across the media — banner news in major papers and a fast-trending subject people are talking about on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. People across the country are hungry to take action. And thousands of them, maybe even tens of thousands, are knocking on your door, sending you e-mails, calling your organization asking how they can get involved.

What do you do with them, and where can they go? What will you do to seize the moment?

This is a thought experiment that Carlos Saavedra and Dani Moscovitch use when talking to organizers about the topic of mass training. Carlos and Dani are two of the people I have worked most closely with on the subject, and I am always impressed by the wealth of expertise and insight that each brings. Carlos, who now runs the Ayni Institute, was a leader in the Dreamers movement of undocumented young people fighting for immigrant rights in the first decade of the 2000s, and he built a training program for United We Dream that brought thousands of activists into the organization.

Dani is a co-founder of IfNotNow, a movement led by young Jews working, in their words, “to end U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid system and demand equality, justice and a thriving future for all Palestinians and Israelis.” She was the lead architect of that group’s decentralized mass training program, which has conducted repeated one- and two-day trainings in 14 cities, led by more than 300 volunteer leaders.

When Dani does the thought experiment in workshops (you can see her in action here), she tells her listeners to take a deep breath. “If you felt a bolt of fear or dread at the idea of thousands of people outside your door — or even 200, or even 10 — you are not alone,” she says. Many organizational leaders have felt trepidation at the prospect of such a sudden influx.

“But what does it mean that we are not prepared for those moments?” Dani asks. Certainly, we know that the urgency of the present moment and the scale of the problems we are confronting require us to bring tens of thousands of people into our movements. And yet, too rarely are we planning to succeed in those times when this is possible. “If we don’t make a plan for how to bring new leaders in at the scale we need,” Dani says, “it’s because we don’t actually believe that we can win.”

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This is not a theoretical challenge. Rather, it is one that mass protest movements have repeatedly faced in recent years. At whirlwind moments when crowds of people take to the streets and seek to join movements for justice — think Black Lives Matter, or the Women’s March, or mass antiwar protests — organizers must somehow find a way to absorb the rush of energy and participation. Too often, they have few systems in place to truly handle the surge of interest. And so when the high-water period subsides, most of the newcomers drift away, and much of the promise of the moment is lost.

So how, then, can movements better respond, making the most of the opportunity to channel this precious wave of new participants into long-term involvement?

Mass training provides a crucial answer.

Why mass training matters

Coming to an appreciation of the power of mass training represented a major breakthrough for those of us who were starting Momentum, the training institute and movement incubator I was involved in founding in 2013. Carlos was another of the founders, while Dani would later become the Director of Advanced Programs. At Momentum, I worked with leaders who had experienced cycles of high movement activity, from the globalization and antiwar movements of the early 2000s, to the mass immigrant rights protests of 2007, to the 2008 Obama campaign, to the subsequent peaks of the Dreamers and Occupy Wall Street. In each case, periods of whirlwind activity were followed by stretches of disillusionment, demobilization and disorganization.

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We believed that movements could do better in harnessing and sustaining the power of these peak moments, as well as in channeling the energy into longer-term cycles of organizing. We sought to systematize methods for doing so, and we quickly realized that mass training would need to play a big part.

When discussing “mass training,” the type of program that I am talking about is different from a typical protest training that someone might attend in advance of participating in a nonviolent direct action — a relatively short session designed to brief newcomers on the scenario of how the protest will play out or orient them to the “action agreements” that participants might sign on to when joining the day’s demonstration. Instead, mass training is a way of bringing people into the movement in a more substantive way, fostering sustained involvement.

“Mass training gives you the ability to disseminate a lot of information and primary skills that can allow a group to succeed without as much centralized support,” Carlos says. “It also creates an emotional container where people really get excited about the work.” Its purpose is to transmit the entire DNA of a group — the story, strategy, structure, principles and culture of the movement.

Even with mass protest groups that are based around large-scale mobilizations, too often a big day of protest is the only thing that participants are invited to. If there is any follow up after that, it can be rote — an ask to sign a petition or make a donation. That can be an alienating experience for a new person who has just awoken to the magnitude of the struggle. “The goal of mass training is not just to give people a next step,” Dani says. “It’s to give them a whole path to deep and authentic leadership within the movement. It’s a means of giving people a sense of belonging, purpose, motivation and shared responsibility.”

Obviously, that’s a lot to accomplish. So how do you do it?

To make it work, there are four key components that must be in place: liminality, scalability, going beyond the initiation, and creating the right balance between training, coaching, and action.

A group experience of liminality

The first important component in how mass trainings work is liminality. This concept was initially developed in early-20th century anthropology, coined by European ethnographer Arnold van Gennep, who was interested in the rituals that marked important rites of passage. Contemporary anthropologist Bjørn Thomassen describes liminality as “spaces and moments in which the taken-for-granted order of the world ceases to exist and novel forms emerge.”

In recent decades, the importance of liminal spaces has been taken up in social psychology and a variety of other fields. For trainers in the activist world, the state of being in-between — the power of spaces in which people are open and receptive to personal transformation — is hugely significant because it helps address a key problem: how to enable many people to have breakthroughs in a limited amount of time.

In structure-based organizations such as unions and community groups, which focus on steadily building up organizational infrastructure over many years, the process of onboarding new participants and training new leaders is generally accomplished through one-on-one mentoring and apprenticeship. Organizers develop skills under the tutelage of an experienced master, and with time and practice they themselves can gain a deep understanding of the craft of movement building, but the organization’s capacity is capped at the dozen or two-dozen people that each lead organizer can realistically mentor.

Mass trainings create a space in which a much larger number of new participants can be initiated and put on a path of leadership development. When someone attends a training over the course of several days or a week, their life is disrupted. They have to travel to a new physical location, they are often surrounded by people they do not know, and they are wrestling with big, challenging issues that otherwise take a back seat in their routine lives.

The collective learning that takes place, combined with the shared vulnerability of participants and trainers alike, builds a culture of commitment to a common project. These ingredients open new mental and emotional doors for participants. And when used well by trainers, they create an environment conducive to transformational experiences that cannot be replicated in an individual setting. In short, mass trainings open up a new world for participants to walk into and then come out as leaders.

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“The training is a space of reflection, of learning and of listening,” Carlos explains. “A lot of people that participate have never been in a movement space like that before. What happens when people go through a deep listening and sharing process with one another — like in the Marshall Ganz model, which infuses public narrative as the centerpiece of the mass training program — is that there are a lot of stories that people tell that they haven’t told other people before.”

Carlos emphasizes how this generates a powerful bond within the group: “There’s something magical about telling stories to strangers that are going to be listened to,” he says. “That creates a special vulnerability that people rarely find in their lives.”

The effect created is very different from what can be achieved elsewhere. “Emotions grow bigger when you have more people,” Carlos says. “It creates a feedback loop where it’s like, ‘holy shit, we are all in this together.’ And there’s a faith that you can do something together in the world that might otherwise feel impossible.”

Dani echoes this sentiment: “What happens in a liminal space, as opposed to just smaller interactions or one-on-ones, is that it’s exponential,” she explains. “The emotional impact just reverberates. And that experience and that belief can strengthen really fast and really deeply in a way that is carried forward.”

The power of creating collective spaces that can nurture transformative experiences was famously modeled in the U.S. civil rights movement both through the training work of institutions such as the Highlander Center and in the church-based mass meetings that would take place nightly at the height of protest campaigns. The movement’s revival-like gatherings were not merely occasions for soaring oratory from well-known speakers; they also featured communal song, personal testimonials from rank-and-file activists and possibilities to segue into intensive trainings the next day. This made for an experience that built confidence, skills and purpose in participants, fostering a potent collectivity. As Martin Luther King, Jr. noted, “Through these meetings we were able to generate the power and depth which finally galvanized the entire Negro community.”

Dani Moscovitch facilitating at Momentum’s Advanced Campaign Skillshare in October 2022 in North Shore, Massachusetts. (Momentum/Vanessa Leroy)

We have seen the impact in many more recent movements as well. “At the end of IfNotNow trainings, we would go around and have people say what they were leaving with,” Dani explains. “Every time, at least four or five people would say, ‘I feel like I can finally be Jewish in a way that aligns with my values.’ Or, ‘I finally don’t feel helpless about this issue.’ People would talk about it as a turning point in their lives in terms of their sense of agency and belief that they could have an impact on the world.”

“In the Dreamer movement, a lot of people would share their stories about being undocumented, the struggles of not being able to go to school, dealing with deportations or having a family member be detained,” Carlos says. “People cried a lot, and there was a lot of emotional release.”

This practice grounded people and created a ritual, he argues. “All those stories really make everybody feel really, really clear about what was at stake for the movement. It makes people better activists because they get motivated. They can feel that this is extremely important for their lives, and they’re willing to put in the work to do something about it.”

Making a model that can grow to scale

The second key idea with mass trainings is that, in order to be able to reach the scale needed, they must be easy to replicate.

As IfNotNow’s program was gearing up, Dani and a few other key leaders — including Emily Mayer and Yonah Lieberman — found themselves frantically traveling around the country to lead trainings. “I essentially lived out of a car for a while,” Dani says. “I was traveling 20 to 25 days per month. I remember one time, I was so tired driving from a Boston training to one in New York that I crashed my car. I just parked and left and got on a bus so I could go run the training.”

There was so much demand for the program that new dates kept getting added to the calendar. But what should have been an organizer’s dream instead filled Dani with apprehension. “I was so exhausted, and just the idea of going to more and more trainings felt totally overwhelming,” she says. Her team realized that they could not run a true mass training program if it always ran into a huge bottleneck. “That bottleneck was me,” Dani laughs.

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In order to change their model so that it could be scalable, IfNotNow took a lesson from Otpor, a youth movement in Serbia in the late 1990s that was part of the successful drive to oust anti-democratic strongman Slobodan Milošević. In order to initiate new members into the civil resistance movement, Otpor’s founders designed a training program that could be used by local chapters. But once they figured out how the trainings should work, these leaders quickly stopped running the sessions themselves. Instead, they focused on codifying and standardizing their practices into a curriculum that could be taken up and used by local chapters, operating independently. This insistence on replicability allowed the movement to build exponentially within the Serbian public.

As I wrote with my brother Mark in our book “This Is An Uprising,” “By the time Otpor had 20,000 members, so many trainings were under way in so many different localities that the obvious locations for gatherings — community centers and youth clubs — were constantly booked. More difficult than finding qualified leaders for the sessions was securing the physical space needed to train.”

In addition to bringing this lesson into IfNotNow, Dani and her team emphasized the need to always be developing new people who could master the pedagogy and teach others how to lead the mass trainings. “You have to train the trainers to train the trainers to train the trainers,” Dani says. New leaders do not have to lead a full training on their first outing. But by giving them a role at the next training — perhaps being responsible for a section of content — they both gain new skills and attend the training with a fresh perspective. A participant who learns the material as a listener absorbs a certain amount of information; someone who has to go back and teach it themselves truly takes it to heart.

In systematizing their trainings, IfNotNow implemented mechanisms for quality control to uphold a high level of craft. “Before they ever did it at a training, every trainer did three run-throughs of any module they would lead,” Dani says, “and we trained volunteer coaches on how to give them feedback.” This allowed the group to maintain the sharpness, clarity and integrity of their content. The organization made clear the requirements for people who wanted to take on more responsibility and move up their ladder of engagement.

Furthermore, they established schedules for how preparations for a training should take place, with clear steps to complete even six to eight weeks before the session. They also formalized a set of participant roles that would allow many people in a training to take a part in ensuring its success. These roles included welcomers, feedback collectors, timekeepers, participant supporters, dinner orderers, and fun captains or party leads.

Having a systematized, decentralized and coachable mass training program is what enables exponential growth. “We cannot rely on staff organizers maintaining relationships with all these people, and we shouldn’t have to,” Dani says. “You have to create systems that enable leaders to develop leaders.”

We call it “giving away the keys” — setting up others to organize without centralized control. Once the more distributed model was in place, Dani says, she did not attend an introductory training for two years, instead spending her time on other crucial tasks such as developing high-level coaches.

Balancing training, coaching and action

The third idea that is essential in making a mass training program work is balancing the leadership development that takes place in the group context with the need for coaching and also learning from practice.

People are not passive recipients of information. One model of learning contends that people learn 70 percent by doing, 20 percent through mentors, coaches and relationships with other people, and just 10 percent through formal instruction or coursework. A training program must account for this by rejecting rote instruction and instead maximizing the ability of participants both to build relationships and experience the work of the organization.

This means not only making trainings participatory, but also encouraging behavior in training sessions that will be directly relevant in campaigns. “Whatever you model in training gets replicated,” Dani says. “So if you want people to leave the training and take on work in teams, there should be a part of your training where people sit in groups and start working in teams, making commitments for next steps. If you want people to join a Slack or WhatsApp for inter-movement communication, start using it as a way to bring people together during the training.”

Recognizing the importance of creating practices that acculturate people to the everyday work of the organization, Otpor had new participants plan and carry out a protest at the end of their week of training — coming up with a small but creative act of defiance to the Milošević regime. It was when they completed their first action that new members were officially considered part of the movement.

Since recruitment and development of more and more participants is an essential function of the movement, growing the mass training program is an important objective. But ultimately, training does not exist for its own sake. Organizations have to go out and act on their issue: raising awareness, cultivating allies, challenging those in power, disrupting business as usual, and forcing a response. Therefore, striking the right balance for learning must involve creating infrastructure for coaching that continues beyond the group training.

Movement work is hard and emotionally intensive, and members need regular encouragement and guidance to carry out the mission of the organization. In a decentralized mass movement, the group’s goal must be to create means for people to get individualized support — not from a single supervisor, as in the apprenticeship model — but from peers and leaders at multiple levels of the organization.

Carlos Saavedra leading a workshop on movement strategy in 2019. (Ayni Institute)

The process of building out a decentralized network of coaches is a distinct topic, the details of which deserve longer exploration. But, as a step towards this, organizations can make sure that people leaving their trainings are joining teams. “In some ways, mass training is really about how you can create a massive number of decentralized teams to work around a shared objective,” Carlos says. These teams allow people to learn through experimentation, to act autonomously in small groups while getting continual feedback on their efforts.

“We ran into a problem where we felt like sometimes people left our trainings with a vision for what should happen over the next five years, but they didn’t have a vision of what should happen next month,” Dani says. “You can get really inspired, and get a lot of ideas, and build a lot of relationships that will help you. But you can’t actually learn how to plan a mass mobilization in a day or two.”

Remedying this required being concrete about projects that new people could channel their energy into — whether it be running a phone bank, joining a working group, or taking responsibility for a specific aspect of an upcoming action — and also creating systems so that the teams doing these tasks could get the support they needed.

Going beyond the initiation training

The fourth key step for maximizing the power of mass trainings is going beyond the initiation sessions to create a culture of training in your organization.

One way in which participants can grow their leadership is by becoming trainers themselves and taking on ever-greater levels of responsibility in making the program work. But another way that groups can foster leadership development and promote the value of constant learning is by creating upgrade trainings that allow members to learn essential skills needed to sustain different aspects of the movement. These are designed not just for initiates into the program, but as ways to level up the leadership of older members as well.

The upgrade trainings serve several key functions. They convey that in addition to scale, we also need craft. They show a movement’s commitment to a rigorous practice of honing the skills of organizing and building a deep bench of committed leaders who can steer the movement through challenging times, without the hard cap of a command-and-control staff nerve center. They inoculate leaders against negativity and demobilization by giving them tools to address difficult issues, which inevitably arise during intensive campaigns. And they allow decentralized organizations to make interventions in their collective strategy and culture as time passes.

“Our organizations gain capacity by committing to retrain ourselves over and over again,” Carlos says. “It gives us a way to work out strategic issues, to work on specific skills, and to get people back in touch with their motivation. Once people get used to doing it, they understand that they can go to trainings when they need to get re-energized or when they don’t know what to do.”

Specialized sessions might take on media and communications, logistics, action planning, fundraising, coalition-building, or details of electoral campaigns or legislative processes. Or they can be designed to help a movement work through a specific dilemma. In the case of IfNotNow, one of their most innovative advanced sessions was a “strategy upgrade” training, which they ran in seven different cities with between 30 to 50 people in each. It involved doing a deep dive with top leaders about how to embody the organization’s theory of change and how they could facilitate discussions with their local chapters about creating good action logic, avoiding the “myth of the righteous few,” and keeping the movement focused on bringing in new people from outside the base of usual activist suspects. The training helped these leaders reinforce IfNotNow’s unique role in the social movement ecosystem — rather than drifting into a different mission.

“People felt really developed and invested in,” Dani says. “It was powerful.” She adds, “Doing that training really helped move people from doing one-off actions expressing moral outrage into doing more in-depth national campaigns.”

Constant leadership development is essential for organizations that want to remain volunteer-driven mass movements, rather than staff-driven advocacy groups. Putting a premium on training people to fill needed roles within the organization allows it to keep functioning without constantly turning to the market. And, for participants, recognition of advanced trainings as a pathway to leadership allows people to gain standing without a sense that everyone must join the paid staff in order to be recognized.

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Otpor formalized this type of recognition by providing color-coded pins to participants who had completed different levels of advanced trainings. Almost as soon as they were introduced, demand for these markers of esteem quickly climbed: People respected the skills of those who had thrown themselves into building the movement, and they wanted the pins to demonstrate the commitments they had made themselves.

“We don’t have masters programs, or high school classes, or vocational schools to train our organizers,” Dani says. “There’s a reason for this: The ruling class doesn’t want us to know how to dismantle it! It’s not in their self-interest. So we need to be making our own pipelines to develop leaders.”

Embodying the belief that we can win

At different times in the up-and-down cycles that social movements go through, trainings can serve different purposes. At peak moments, when new people are flocking to the streets, they function most crucially as a means of absorption — allowing organizations to capture this energy. But at times when movements have less momentum, the trainings can instead work as mechanisms for promoting on-going leadership development. In those moments, Carlos says, “They can generate a bit of energy, and start getting people working on things that feel slower but meaningful.”

In either case, the time to start is now. For those who want to start developing a mass training program, there is no doubt that a lot of advance planning is required. But Dani also advises, “Just put a date on the calendar!” No matter how much a group prepares, there is always going to be room to grow. And having that first session scheduled makes real the commitment to making it happen.

“I remember my first mass training,” Carlos says. “I was lost half of the time, and I wasn’t nearly as prepared as I thought I was. But the effect of it was still really powerful in the organization. So it doesn’t matter if the training at first is not as good as you want it to be. Just the act of doing it is quite amazing.”

Finally, Dani says, to pull off a mass training program, you have to believe that you can do it. This means visualizing those thousands of people knocking on your door and developing confidence that can bring them into the movement and ask them to step into leadership with you.

“When you embody the commitment to winning, it is infectious” Dani says. “One of the greatest forces holding our movements back from being powerful is our own sense of defeat and exhaustion. But if trainers in the front of the room do the work of tapping into a radical sense of hope and possibility, they allow every participant in that room to reconsider what they are capable of.”

“Everyone who attends that training is going to remember that feeling,” she adds. “And they’re going to want to pass it on, too.”

Research assistance provided by Matthew Miles Goodrich.

This article In times of crisis we need more people power — mass trainings are the key was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Inside the campaign to close California’s remaining women’s prisons was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

During her 12 years incarcerated, Laura Purviance was part of the settlement for unconstitutional strip searches in a Los Angeles County jail, sexual harrassment from a supervising officer at the Central California Women’s Facility and the suicide of her neighbor at the California Institution for Women. As a survivor of domestic violence, Purviance said these experiences were deeply triggering for her.

When she spoke up about the conditions she faced, Purviance said no one would listen. She said that “there’s a sense that the people that work here are in control, and we’re less than human.” But as her sentence progressed, she learned about the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, or CCWP. It is a grassroots organization of formerly and currently incarcerated women dedicated to supporting system-impacted women and challenging the abusive conditions inside California women’s prisons.

“This system is supposedly here to rehabilitate us, but it’s not,” said Purviance, who is still incarcerated at California Institution for Women. “So when I reached out to the CCWP, they absolutely went above and beyond to connect with me about that experience, to support me through my healing, to be able to speak about and move forward with that.”

But their work to support incarcerated women goes beyond that. The CCWP, along with coalition partners across California, recognize that like Purviance, many people in women’s prisons experience a cycle of trauma through incarceration. Now they are fighting to close the doors to the remaining two women’s prisons in the state — the California Institution for Women and Central California Women’s Facility — altogether.

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Up to 90 percent of women in prison experience some kind of trauma prior to incarceration. Advocates say that women often fall into the system when trying to meet their basic needs — such as participating in acts of robbery, sex or drug trafficking, property crimes, or being in an abusive relationship — that might lead them to defend their lives or be charged as an accomplice. They also say incarceration does not address trauma, but only perpetuates it, and that women often get left out of the larger conversation.

In place of incarceration, these advocates are pushing for community-based resources that address housing, poverty, mental health and jobs, to get to the root of incarceration causes. Activists have been holding rallies, marches, town halls and creating research reports documenting the harm of women’s incarceration. They say ending women’s incarceration is important as ever, at a time when one federal prison was ordered to close because so many women were assaulted, a woman in a California prison died a preventable death from a heat wave and many more women are getting transferred to ICE for deportation after prison, among other issues. 

“This is about supporting people in their communities and meeting people where they’re at, especially when it comes to incarcerated women,” Purviance said. “Coming to prison is not going to heal that. Being out in our communities that are able to support us, that’s what’s going to work.”

Closure is possible

This past summer, many California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or CDCR, facilities faced a heat wave, with some even experiencing temperatures up to 114 degrees. In early July, the heat wave became deadly. Adrienne Boulware, a grandmother incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility, died of a heat stroke that advocates say was preventable. She was on her way to cool off in a shower when she dropped to the floor and started shaking.

A rally outside of Central California Women’s Facility following the preventable heated related death of Adrian Boulware. (Facebook/CCWP)

In the aftermath of Boulware’s death, CCWP members called out the prison for failing to implement what they say were basic heat precautions. They held a large rally outside the Central California Women’s Facility, wrote letters to CDCR administrators, generated press and met with wardens and legislative teams to raise awareness about prisons as a climate issue. They also demanded free cooling rags to be distributed to the incarcerated population. Not long after, their request was granted, and the CDCR also promised them they’d install water stations in the prisons.

“It’s every year that this is an issue,” said Courtney Hanson, development and communications coordinator with the CCWP. “These things are all systemic, and we have to fight tooth and nail to just get the most basic, small movement in the right direction.”

The CCWP was started nearly 30 years ago in May 1995, when incarcerated women in California banded together to fight for better access to health care and challenge the medical abuse and neglect in prisons through filing a lawsuit, Shumate v. Wilson. They successfully escalated their complaints to the state Senate, where they were able to give testimony about the medical neglect. The connection the women formed through their collective battle for better living conditions grew into the CCWP.

In the past, they have successfully advocated for reparations for women who were involuntarily sterilized, ended the shackling of pregnant women and prevented ICE deportations of recently released women. Most recently, their advocacy in solidarity with the incarcerated women who were sexually abused in a federal prison in Dublin, California, put pressure on the Bureau of Prisons to close the facility. Now they want to close the remaining prisons and find alternatives to incarceration.

Their advocacy to close the two California state prisons for women picked up steam when they joined Communities United for a Responsible Budget. Together they produced a report last year that underscored the issues inside women’s prisons, such lack of medical care, sexual abuse perpetrated mainly by prison staff guards and family separation. 

“All of those issues point to an inescapable conclusion that women’s prisons do not make our communities any safer,” Hanson said.

Renae Badruzzaman, Health Instead of Punishment project director at Health Impact Partners, said that incarceration leads to worse health outcomes from medical neglect and by experiencing and witnessing high rates of interpersonal, physical, emotional and sexual violence and trauma. She also said that the use of solitary confinement and separating people from their families and communities “perpetuates that cycle of violence and trauma.” 

Badruzzaman said that instead of incarceration, investments should be made “into safe and stable affordable housing, increased employment, affordable health care, mental health care and accessible and reliable transportation, as well as non-carceral and non-punitive forms of accountability for harm.” She said that incarceration does more harm than good.

“What came forward [from this report] was this sharpened focus on gender identity based discrimination and violence, as well as the criminalization of trauma and gender identity,” Badruzzaman added.

The number of women incarcerated in California is already trending down. Since 2010, there has been a 70 percent drop — from 12,600 to just over 3,000 — of the state’s population of incarcerated women, resulting from policy change and practices pushed by advocates. Still, taxpayers foot an enormous bill to maintain the carceral system. In 2019, the CDCR reported that California invests $405 million a year in its women’s prisons.

“This is a reasonable demand to say ‘Look at all the gains over the past decade that have reduced the women’s prison population,’” Hanson said. “We can and should name that California’s north star should be shutting down both of these remaining women’s prisons and having alternative systems entirely.”

People in women’s prisons still face medical neglect and abuse similar to the conditions that led to the Shumate v. Wilson lawsuit in 1995 and the forming of CCWP, said Chyrl Lamar, a program and outreach advocate with the CCWP. She said that when she was incarcerated at Central California Women’s Facility, she knew a woman who was paralyzed from being given the wrong medications. Lamar herself spent a year fighting for a knee surgery while the medical staff tried to just give her medication for the pain. She said that a lot of the time, prisons aren’t prepared to offer the treatment people need, and just give them temporary fixes that do not address the real medical issue.

Lamar has been involved with organizing on CCWP’s sterilization reparation task force, advocating for the hundreds of women who were involuntarily or forcibly sterilized by medical staff while in state prisons up until just over a decade ago. In October, she also flew to Detroit to help a team of 2,000 volunteers phone bank and canvas ahead of the election. She said that she has been part of CCWP since a member of the organization picked her up from prison and helped her acquire resources.

Mary Shields, a founding member of CCWP, embracing another founding member, Diana Block, after she was released in 2011. Shields spent 19 years behind bars. (WNV/Dana Ullman)

“The system is broken, and doesn’t seem like anybody wants to try to fix it,” Lamar said. “That’s why CCWP is trying to find a solution.”

Community resources

At the same time that they are fighting to close the prisons, the CCWP is also uplifting ways that someone can be released from prisons to start bringing people home, said Katie Dixon, campaign and policy organizer with the CCWP. She said some ways they are doing this is compassionate release, resentencing, clemency and bringing home domestic violence and human trafficking survivors.

“What we’re learning is that while we are fighting for the closure, we must be not only demanding that freedom is necessary, but also working towards advocating, promoting and ushering pathways to freedom,” Dixon said.

Dixon said that she believes programs that offer job training and housing for women can make a big difference and be better suited for them than prison. When it comes to programming, Dixon said the focus is usually on providing opportunities to men. She said the campaign hopes to work with community members and local officials to find alternatives to incarceration and reimagine what it would look like to address harm differently. 

Dixon said that it is important to invest in resources such as job opportunities, affordable housing, healthcare and universal basic income, to address root causes of many people’s incarceration. She also said it is important to give young people opportunities to thrive, especially those who grow up in resource-barren neighborhoods. 

“We want to talk about shutting both of the women’s prisons down and not looking for another institution to send people to,” Dixon said. “We want to really get people engaged around a whole different alternative to incarcerating.”

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Similarly, Lamar said that incarceration is so expensive that society should instead be allocating the investments into organizations that help people come home. Many formerly incarcerated people come out and contribute to society because they are already used to programming and work to keep their minds active, Lamar said. 

“I think if everything was put in the right place by the community and started giving them help, instead of giving them prison terms, the majority of people would probably do good,” Lamar said. “Society needs to work on how to help people stay out, instead of locking them up.”

With so many incarcerated people in women’s prisons being survivors of abuse, Purviance said that it is important to end the cycle of trauma and offer healing in the community instead. She said prison prolongs the trauma most people already have, and it is better to offer them resources and resentencing avenues that help them come home and thrive. She said she hopes to see the California Institution for Women and Central California Women’s Facility demolished.

“People don’t commit crimes because they’re bad people or because they just don’t care if they’re committing crimes. [They see it as the only way] for them, under those circumstances, to respond to life,” Purviance said. “So let’s really focus on having healthy, strong communities where people are getting their basic needs met, so that crime isn’t happening.”

This article Inside the campaign to close California’s remaining women’s prisons was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article How mothers (and others) are making prison abolition possible was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The first time I met Kim Wilson, we were sitting across from each other in an Ethiopian restaurant in West Philly. It was empty, as restaurants often were during the first year of the pandemic. We sipped tea and talked about her family as we looked at childhood photos of her children. She had put out a call through her podcast “Beyond Prisons” for people to reach in to her oldest son who had been moved to the secure housing unit, and I was one of many people who did. With time, I had grown close to both of her sons, and my relationship with them was the impetus behind our meeting.

I was familiar with Wilson’s politics as an abolitionist, having listened to her podcast, and was an organizer myself. But we sat at that table as two mothers who understood the struggles that come with parenting, with trying to keep everything together as single parents in particular, and as two women connected through a shared love for her sons. That was the root of our bond. 

Now, years later, I am thrilled that Wilson has co-edited a collection of essays with Waging Nonviolence board member Maya Schenwar called “We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition.” The new book explores the ways that parenting and caregiving shape and make possible prison industrial complex abolition (and vice versa). I was able to read an advanced copy when writing a blurb for the book, and was struck by the ways I felt seen as a person who engages in abolitionist projects and relationship building because I am a parent and caregiver. I don’t just happen to be a parent, rather it informs why and how I do this work. 

Abolitionists are frequently disparaged by public officials and the media as being naive and idealistic. The people who come together to initiate abolitionist projects and collectively maintain them over the long haul, however, are often people who have a “stake” in disrupting and dismantling carceral logics and institutions. They are people who have been subjected to various forms of state violence and organized abandonment. They are victims of interpersonal violence. They are loved ones of people who are incarcerated. They know intimately what conditions create safety and have a clear analysis of how our current society actively undermines those conditions.

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If you put 10 abolitionist organizers in a room and ask them what abolition means, you’ll likely find consensus. Ask them how we do it, what our strategy should be or what we should prioritize, and you will likely get 10 different responses. For me, abolition is, as Maya writes in her introductory essay, “the work of tending relationships, of supporting our communities, of defying the brutality of racial capitalism by actually caring for each other.” This is how we cultivate spaces of joyful and generative connection amidst all this death and despair, as we grow the world we want and deserve.

By shifting our attention toward this “quieter and less visible” political work, we can start to see how abolition and parenting/caregiving are intertwined. In her forward to the book, anti-violence activist and distinguished professor Beth E. Richie highlights how the needs and critiques shared by parents and caregivers in response to their immediate material conditions overlap with the larger, structural demands and critiques that are foundational to abolitionist praxis. For the authors in this collection, cultivating radical resistance through care, to use the language of contributor Dorothy Roberts, is how we move us closer to freedom.

The book itself is divided into four sections which focus on lessons from loved ones on parenting and abolition, the role of parents in social justice movements, caregiving beyond the nuclear heteronormative family, and what caregiving toward abolition looks like in practice. It is an extraordinary collection of essays that demonstrates, in the words of contributors Alejandro Villalpando and Susana Victoria Parras, how “It is in our everyday interactions with humans and all life-forms where the real work lies… we know that together, we can withstand anything and interrupt the degradation with connectedness, care and dignity that begins in the home.”

Given my positionality as a parent and organizer, I want to zero in on the essays grouped under “Parents and Caregivers in Movement.” Dorothy Roberts demonstrates how white supremacist institutions, from the slaveholder to the Department of Children and Family, use family separation and disruption as a form of social control that targets Black working-class families. Although the impact of the family policing system in its current iteration is most visible within the home, it is part of a continuum of racist family separation practices that include incarceration and immigrant detention and deportation. 

In her discussion of how Black mothers have resisted this violence by radically caring for their children from enslavement through the present, she makes clear how the weaponization of their children raises the stakes for Black women engaged in these struggles. Roberts highlights the work of JMACforFamilies, an organization that seeks to abolish family policing and build community amongst system-impacted parents. It was founded by a Black mother named Joyce McMillan, whose two children were taken from her after an anonymous caller reported her for drug use.

Similarly, contributor Holly Krig co-founded the abolitionist collective Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration after being detained in Illinois’ DuPage County Jail while pregnant. As part of their work, they organize Reunification Rides to take children to visit with their mothers incarcerated at Logan and Decatur prisons, also in Illinois. It is a way to push back against family separation through incarceration, and mitigate the damaging effects it has on children and their mamas. According to Krig, “We can build from where we are, inside our own homes, on our blocks, reaching out along our own channels, outsmarting bars and walls, to create the interconnected communities of care about which [abolitionist organizer and author] Mariame Kaba and so many others have been speaking and organizing into the world.”

Part of how organizers who are parents are connecting with other impacted people is through the modalities of parenting that are shared by people raising children under similar conditions. In her essay on the formation of Mothers Reclaiming our Children in 1990s Los Angeles, Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes how the cofounder, Barbara Meredith, “forged an alliance among women in the projects, in spite of her own outsider status, by appealing to a power achieved through coordinated maternal practices; they made critical the activities of mothering as necessary, social and consequential by doing, as a group, what they already knew how to do as individuals.”

To be clear, mothers have played a significant role in abolitionist projects and along with other women in the family, often provide the life-sustaining support that their incarcerated loved ones need to survive — including but not limited to, answering phone calls, putting money on their books and showing up for in person visits. But the authors of this collection have a range of identities as parents and caregivers, and the unconditional love they exercise through their work as abolitionists is directed far beyond those in their immediate communities.

Dylan Rodriguez, in his essay on how the experiences of parenting can provide critical tools for people engaged in abolitionist struggles, says this best. He writes, “Parenting and caregiving can resituate ‘love’ beyond privatized relationships and individualized feelings by exemplifying a generalized, radical way of being in relation to other beings. What might it mean to consider abolitionist community as a project that cultivates a form of unconditional love that extends beyond specific people to the fight itself?” 

Kaitlin Noss’ essay on learning from international communist activist and journalist Claudia Jones demonstrates the political power of parents in the context of contemporary struggles for control of public education and schools. Jones recognized that local fights regarding education and access to public resources for their children could politicize marginalized parents toward broader struggles for economic security and social justice. But as Noss explains, the political consciousness of parents can also be leveraged by conservative forces as a means of capturing control of the state, as evidenced by groups like Moms for Liberty.

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What we parent toward matters. We are living in an era of immense uncertainty, precarity, violence and destruction. The climate is increasingly unstable, millions of people are in prisons and jails, untold millions are struggling to meet their basic needs — this, in the richest country in the world. On top of failing to provide for the welfare of its own citizens, our government invests in the instability, deprivation, exploitation and death of peoples in places like Palestine and the Middle East, and uses its influence to impoverish countries like Cuba and Venezuela that dare to forge their own path. 

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn write in their essay, “Identifying and naming injustice, organizing and agitating against it in the company of comrades, breaching barricades and overcoming barriers — that’s where freedom explodes onto the scene and comes to life as three-dimensional, vivid, trembling and real.” That work of political education, of building and sustaining community, of creating liberatory spaces and projects begins at home and in our neighborhoods. 

Whether or not you identify as an abolitionist, this insightful collection of essays is essential reading for people engaged in social justice work. It shows how our relationships with those we love, care for and protect, are the connective tissue that make new worlds possible.

This article How mothers (and others) are making prison abolition possible was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article How we can meet the challenges of authoritarianism was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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As analyses of the 2024 election results continue to pour in, the fact remains that despite (and perhaps, to a certain extent, because of) the 34 felony counts, the embrace of dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, the vows to enact revenge on political opponents and the disregard for democratic checks and balances, Donald Trump was re-elected president of the United States.

The many reasons for the election outcome — ranging from anti-incumbent energy, to inflation and core pocketbook issues, to staggering economic inequality, to deep-seeded racism, misogyny and xenophobia, to broadly felt disillusionment with political institutions and processes, to feelings of helplessness and the desire for a strongman, to rampant disinformation, to our duopolistic party system, to primaries that incentivize partisan extremism — all point to a very messy social and political reality in the United States.  

While many across the country are celebrating the election results, others are experiencing grief, anger and fear. Starting on Nov. 6, numerous predominantly Black organizers, activists and students across multiple states began receiving text messages with racist content telling them to report to their “nearest plantations.” Immigrants and transgender people have expressed fear related to Trump’s plans for mass deportations and deepening anti-trans hate and violence. Republicans who have spoken out against MAGA’s stranglehold on the party have expressed concerns related to Trump’s plans for retribution. 

At the same time, many are embracing this as a moment of radical re-imagination and transformation. Steely resolve and determination are driving many Americans who understand the gravity of the situation and are girding themselves for the work ahead. Many groups across the country, from grassroots movements to more centrist organizations, have been planning and preparing for this type of scenario for months, writing guides and preparing trainings. They have been building relationships and coalitions across issues, sectors and geographies, learning lessons from global experiences in challenging autocracy, holding mass calls to prepare the public for what comes next, and preparing training and coaching “hotlines.”

These efforts include some of the savviest, most experienced organizers and civic leaders across this country. As someone who has been part of some of these spaces, particularly those led by Black and brown leaders, I stand in awe and admiration of their willingness to rise to the occasion at this moment. 

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Another reason for hope is that we collectively know a great deal about the playbook authoritarians from around the world, from leftist dictatorships to far-right fascist regimes, use to pit people against one another, gut freedoms, institutionalize corruption and consolidate their power. The American Autocracy Threat Tracker is documenting these dynamics in the U.S., and there has been significant public education related to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan for government overhaul written by many Trump insiders. Those Americans living in predominantly rural areas and in states with MAGA trifectas are already intimately familiar with book bans, anti-trans and anti-protester laws, and violence by state and paramilitary forces.

We are also far more familiar with the time-tested strategies for defeating authoritarianism. This is not our first rodeo with authoritarianism in the U.S., as Black, Native American and other historically marginalized communities can attest. We can lean into our own history, notably the Black-led, multiracial civil rights movement anchored in the South that dismantled an odious form of white supremacist authoritarianism, the persistent Native American struggle for sovereignty and self-determination, and the struggles by conservatives, progressives and everyone in between to be included as equals in a United States of America “of, by and for the people.”

We know that every advance towards a more inclusive, multiracial democracy in the U.S. has been met by backlash. That, in turn, has been met by a new generation of courageous people willing to struggle for fundamental rights, freedoms and dignity in the face of bigotry, ignorance and violence. From abolition, Reconstruction and the civil rights movement, to modern-day struggles for worker rights, clean air and water, and gender and racial equality, Americans have collectively risen to seemingly impossible challenges with vision, resolve and strategy.

Authoritarians’ kryptonite

As we contemplate the next four years, we should recall that autocrats are always weaker than they appear, and we are often stronger than we might think. While authoritarian leaders, even those elected through democratic means (or so-called “electoral autocrats”) seem to be in complete control, they rarely are. Their kryptonite is a reliance on the active and passive support of ordinary people throughout society, who provide them with the resources and other sources of power they depend on to get things done. Power can be given, and power can be taken away. 

Workers and unions provide critical labor and economic power; businesses provide financial resources and campaign contributions; religious organizations and communities provide moral legitimacy and robust infrastructure; traditional and social media outlets provide communications networks; bureaucrats provide necessary knowhow and expertise to execute policies; cultural leaders and influencers offer reach and access to fandoms; and the police and military serve as agents for law enforcement and repression. 

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By targeting the pillars that uphold police violence, Black Lives Matter is shifting power to the people

We are all embedded in these pillars through our involvement at the workplace, as consumers and investors, as members of faith communities, as fans, as members of professional associations, and as members of grassroots organizations. Individually and collectively, we have social, political, economic and financial power in these spaces — power that can be used to either preserve or upend the status quo. The more organized we are, and the deeper our relationships with members of key pillars locally, at the state level and nationally, the more power we can collectively wield. 

Pillars are not homogenous, and there are multiple reasons why individuals in key pillars actively or passively support autocrats, ranging from identification with rulers, to values-based reasons, to economic and financial self-interest, to social and cultural reasons. It is important to understand the real motivations and interests of people in these pillars — what they want and what they aspire to — and not take for granted that they share the same analysis that we do. It then involves making interventions, ranging from quiet dialogue to more public forms of pressure, that could nudge them away from supporting authoritarian policies and practices and invite them into new formations.

Recent research has found that in the context of backsliding democracies (as opposed to closed autocracies), dialogue and engagement by movement actors with key institutional pillars is critical to shifting their calculations to get more involved. For example, Ukrainian activists proactively engaged business owners in the leadup to a mass movement in 2004-05 that challenged a Moscow-backed autocrat, securing their financial backing. Ukrainian veterans and retired military officers used quiet outreach to active-duty soldiers and military officials to encourage them to disobey illegal orders to shoot at unarmed protesters.

Once those loyalty shifts have occurred, more confrontational tactics by businesses, religious organizations, unions, professional associations and other key pillars appear to be most effective in shifting power and checking democratic backsliding.

Practically, that might include students and teachers walking out of classrooms in response to government actions or inactions, as we’ve seen with teachers in Hungary and in states across the U.S., and with walk-outs by youth activists from the climate justice movement. Or bureaucrats protecting government functions and slowing things down, as happened during the first Trump administration and in 1920 Germany to reverse the Kapp putsch. It could include labor unions stopping business as usual and paralyzing the economy, a critical factor in South Korea, when unions united the population in challenging the corrupt regime of President Park Geun-Hye, and when the U.S. Association of Flight Attendants threatened to go on strike, which helped end the government shutdown during the first Trump administration.

Successful movements organize campaigns based on realistic yet audacious assessments of what is possible.

It could mean businesses collectively denouncing autocratic policies and actively supporting pro-democratic civic groups, as German and Brazilian business associations have done in the face of far-right nationalism, and as the bipartisan Wisconsin Business Leaders for Democracy has done to hold elected leaders accountable to basic democratic norms. Or security forces could respect their Constitutional oath and refuse to obey regime orders to arrest, detain or shoot at protesters, as happened in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution, in Venezuela during the presidency of Hugo Chavez, and in the U.S. in response to Jan. 6. 

Attributes of successful anti-authoritarian campaigns

As my own research and multiple excellent analyses have demonstrated, the most powerful bulwarks against authoritarianism and democratic backsliding have historically been large, diverse movements capable of mobilizing people to withdraw consent and cooperation from autocratic policies and institutions and sustaining that participation through organization and powerful narratives about a better future. While the size of mass mobilizations is certainly important, quiet and more public acts of defiance by a smaller number of influential individuals and groups can be even more consequential. Quality of participation in nonviolent campaigns is as important as the quantity of people who show up for protests.

At the same time, as we saw with the 2017 Women’s March and the Movement for Black Lives protests in 2020, the largest and most sustained protests in US history, mass mobilizations involving large numbers of diverse people can signal a strong desire for change.

Successful movements have valorized people with different roles and skillsets, including activists, agitators, visionaries, weavers, storytellers, mediators, bridgers, caregivers, policy advocates, builders and a whole host of other roles. They help them find their roles, celebrate their contributions, and deepen their leadership potential. As Common sang in the theme song to the movie “Selma,” “It takes the wisdom of the elders and the young people’s energy, welcome to the story we call victory.” They have also understood that change takes organizing and pressure outside of institutions, while also working with change agents inside institutions — such an inside-outside strategy will be critical in the years ahead. 

Americans are prepared to flex their solidarity muscle.

Successful movements innovate tactically, drawing on the thousands of nonviolent tactics available to activists, organizers and bridge-builders based on a strategic calculus of which tactics are most likely to move specific constituencies. They organize campaigns, strategically sequencing different tactics to achieve specified goals, based on realistic yet audacious assessments of what is possible. Rather than over-relying on a small number of tactics like marches and street demonstrations, which become predictable and easy to repress, they strategize, plan and prepare themselves for openings that require tactical flexibility. The stronger the organizing infrastructure and the deeper the relationships within those structures, the more capable movements are of pivoting, adapting and innovating. 

We know that autocrats often deploy agent provocateurs to provoke protesters to use violence. They then use this violence to justify even more repressive countermeasures while rallying their base and delegitimizing the movement in the eyes of a more general public. Successful movements have planned for such provocations and discussed ways to avoid traps set by their opponents.

They have invested in protection, solidarity and collective care strategies and tactics to sustain momentum and morale in the face of violence and repression. They have planned and trained in de-escalation, invested in on and offline security protocols, recruited protest marshals and adopted codes of conduct. And they have developed strategies and tactics for expanding the base of support for the movement to make it more difficult for regimes to silence them through repression, co-optation or both.

Given that autocrats rely on fear and divide-and-rule tactics to bolster their power, successful pro-democracy movements often use humor and satire. This can surface the absurdity of authoritarian practices, get people to think differently and prod them into action. To strengthen the sense of collective defiance and solidarity, movements have turned to symbolic, lower-risk tactics (like the banging of pots and pans in Chile, the turning on and off of lights in Turkey, or the wearing of paper clips in Denmark). This sends the message that “we will not obey the autocrats” and “we are in this together” without putting people at unnecessarily high risk of repression. 

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Political violence is surging, but there’s a playbook to counter it

However, movements challenging power structures are almost invariably met with threats, intimidation and acts of physical violence by state and non-state actors. Incidents of hate-fueled violence are on the rise in the U.S., and threats, harassment and acts of physical violence are having a chilling effect on the ability of individuals and groups to participate meaningfully in political and civic life. Given the prospect of these threats intensifying, we need to plan and prepare ways to make the threats and violence backfire, raising the costs to perpetrators while protecting our communities. Across the U.S. and globally, communities have organized broad-based coalitions and mobilized using creative, often humorous tactics to make political violence backfire, and trainings are now available to support communities willing to take action. 

Signaling a strong commitment to solidarity (an attack on one is an attack on all) is especially important following the election of a president who has platformed violent rhetoric and the scapegoating of historically marginalized communities, and has vowed to enact revenge on opponents. Fortunately, as we saw with the popular response to the Muslim ban during the first Trump administration, and with the building of sanctuary mechanisms for undocumented immigrants in towns and cities across the country, Americans are prepared to flex this solidarity muscle.

Already, a new Congressional bill (H.R. 9495) that would grant the executive branch extraordinary power to investigate, harass and effectively dismantle any nonprofit organization — including news outlets, universities and civil liberties organizations  — of tax-exempt status based on a unilateral accusation of wrongdoing was met with a swift response. A coalition of over 120 civil liberties, religious, immigrant rights, human rights, racial justice, LGBTQ+, environmental and educational organizations wrote to the House of Representatives to oppose it. Days later, H.R. 9495 failed to pass a vote in the House, perhaps one of the earliest victories for the new anti-authoritarian coalition.

We need to work together to help ensure that when individuals, organizations and groups take courageous stands, risking punishment, they feel strong support and solidarity from the widest and most influential “we” possible. A Solidarity Pledge or a Freedom Pledge that individuals and groups across the country can sign on to is one possible action. In such a pledge, they would vow to not obey any orders that impinge on the rights, freedoms and dignity of other people, to not give up freedoms voluntarily, and to be guided by a spirit of love and solidarity.

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It will also take doubling down on investment in solidarity infrastructure. That includes safety and security support, legal aid, emotional and mental health support, financial assistance to cover lost livelihoods, strategic communications and narratives support to incentivize courageous action and creative coalition-building.

Blocking, bridging, breaking and building

Building and sustaining a movement-of-movements that draws on the beautiful diversity and profound gifts, talents and determination of the American people will take various interlocking strategies.

These strategies, which have been articulated by various social change groups here, here, and here include bridging across differences within and across movements and other key groups to deepen understanding, resolve conflicts, and build broad fronts grounded in mutual interest. That bridging work is important to be able to strategically block authoritarian practices and protect vulnerable people and groups from violence and repression. And to break the MAGA faction from its pillars of support and support healthy political pluralism, all while building broad-based power capable of achieving transformative changes to our political and economic systems.

These bridging, blocking, breaking and building strategies involve both institutional strategies, like advocacy and election-related mobilization to continue to contest for power, and extra-institutional organizing and direct action strategies that will allow us to push back in cases where institutions are under attack.

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This work will take significant investment in collective care, relational organizing within and across our movements — and with pillars that have powerful constituencies. We will also need to bolster our leadership, organizing and mobilization skills and capacities. It will take experimentation and adaptation for different rural and urban contexts, where distinctive conditions require different strategies and tactics. As preliminary research has found, cuts to essential programs (SNAP, Head Start), public schools and health care envisioned in Project 2025, further restrictions on abortion access, attacks on local unions, and botched responses to climate crises could lead to the formation of unlikely alliances, particularly in rural areas.     

There is significant movement infrastructure to build on in this country, notably local and state cross-issue, cross-sector coalitions, tables and movements that have been chalking up impressive wins. National networks and movement spaces exist and are currently strategizing and preparing for what comes next. Developing meaningful ways to connect these efforts to “big tent” spaces that bring in more ideologically diverse actors, including those from the business, faith, unions and veterans’ communities — plus political leaders and elected officials from across the political spectrum who remain committed to rejecting authoritarian policies and practices — remains both a challenge and an opportunity in this moment.

Building that relational infrastructure grounded in trust and mutual respect, while meaningfully confronting the deeper causes of our current democratic malaise, will require courage, curiosity, tenacity and a commitment to a truly beloved community. I believe we are up for the task.

This article How we can meet the challenges of authoritarianism was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Meet the US soldiers and bureaucrats defecting over Gaza was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

As the crisis in the Middle East rages on, a growing movement is confronting U.S. funding of Israel’s wars — including a perhaps-surprising number of those once charged with enforcing U.S. policies. Some are military veterans, while others worked for the State Department and other federal agencies.

Such resistance is critical to any nonviolent revolution, says Erica Chenoweth, co-author of “Why Civil Resistance Works.” Chenoweth describes such “defections” as foundational to any hope of real change; dissent by the government’s enforcers — security forces, civilian bureaucrats — show cracks in a regime’s powers. Those defections are happening in real time, among military personnel and federal agencies. And with Trump entering the White House, this trend will likely only escalate in the coming months.

Currently, war flashes in Lebanon and Iran are at times overshadowing the Gaza conflict in the public eye. But the responses from both military and civilian enforcers came in the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas brutalized Israeli civilians and soldiers alike, and the Netanyahu government responded by nearly destroying Gaza. Shortly after the war began, Air Force officer Juan Bettancourt gave notice to his command that if he was told to work in support of Israel, he would refuse. “I said I would consider it an illegal order,” he told me.

These defectors watched as U.S. arms were used to pummel villages in the hunt for Hamas militants, with U.S. politicians including President Biden refusing to put conditions on those shipments. Such a refusal was “an impulsive reaction built on confirmation bias, political convenience, intellectual bankruptcy and bureaucratic inertia,” wrote former State Department employee Josh Paul, when he resigned from the Political-Military Bureau, which facilitates arms transfers to allies.

Josh Paul, the former director of congressional and public affairs at the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. (Twitter/Nader Hashemi)

Paul resigned on Oct. 18, 11 days after Hamas’ attack — during which nearly 5,000 Palestinians had already been killed. He wasn’t alone; a new Reuters investigation shows that emails among staffers “reveal alarm early on in the State Department and Pentagon that a rising death toll in Gaza could violate international law and jeopardize U.S. ties in the Arab world.” They sent internal “dissent memos” to Secretary Antony Blinken urging a ceasefire, and in November 500 U.S. officials, from across 40 agencies, signed an open letter to Biden urging a ceasefire.

In the months to come, more and more of those officials would make their protest public, joining an international movement that saw 150 Dutch diplomats holding a sit-in at the Hague, the home of the International Court of Justice. Those sit-ins began in December and continued every two weeks, joined by activists from around the world.

As 2024 began, 100 Americans were among the 800 signatories of a “Transatlantic Civil Servants Statement on Gaza,” which urged the International Court of Justice to act and for all governments to “Use all leverage available — including a halt to military support — to secure a lasting ceasefire and full humanitarian access in Gaza and a safe release of all hostages.”(The full statement is here.) A few weeks after that Feb. 2 statement, the movement’s military wing strode into the limelight, when active-duty airman Aaron Bushnell immolated himself in front of the Israeli Embassy.

“Morale is being affected,” airman Juan Bettancourt told me in June 2024. He was talking about the images and videos from Gaza that have flooded social media. Israel’s bombing campaign has so far flattened much of Gaza, displacing around 1.9 million people — nine in 10 Gazans — and killing 43,000. Those images and realities have spurred many military members to question their involvement in an institution that is actively supporting Israel’s war.

Juan Bettancourt being interviewed on an episode of “Unauthorized Disclosure.” (YouTube)

“By wearing the uniform of a nation whose government is complicit in the brutal slaughter of innocent lives, I feel an overwhelming sense of embarrassment and despair,” Bettancourt said.

We were talking just after the launch of Appeal for Redress V2, a campaign to mobilize active-duty and reserve troops to tell their members of Congress that they oppose U.S. support of Israel’s current war in Gaza. At the Zoom launch on June 4, Bettancourt also announced that he was applying for discharge as a conscientious objector, or CO. The launch was co-sponsored by the Center on Conscience and War, which has received more than 50 inquiries about applying for CO status based on agony about Gaza.

The first Appeal for Redress, in 2006, was a brainstorm of former Center on Conscience and War director J.E. McNeil, after she was approached by then-Navy sailor Jonathan Wesley Hutto, now author of “Antiwar Soldier: How to Dissent Within the Ranks of the U.S. Military.” “How could they mobilize all the troops afraid to speak out publicly? The answer was in the Military Whistleblower Protection Act,” McNeil told me years later. That Act carves out a protection for servicemembers to seek redress from members of Congress.

The newer Appeal, hosted by Veterans For Peace, offers servicemembers a choice of letters, between a simple, informal approach (#1); a more formal military communication (#2); a more emotional testimony (#3), or a legal focus (#4) that goes into detail about the international law aspects of U.S. involvement. The site then matches the member’s address to the appropriate Congressional representative. “There is so much resistance inside so many who serve,” Bettancourt told me. “So much potential.”

Bettancourt, a Ph.D. candidate in history from Brown University, enlisted to serve the country where his parents brought him when he was 10, fleeing Colombia’s then-horrific violence. After he completed his coursework in 2019, he took a leave of absence and joined the Air Force. “I had ideas for public service, where I’d learn the ins and outs of government,” he said. “The idea of a true democracy, where progressive ideas like mine fit in every sect of society.” The latter idea met reality during basic training at Lackland Air Force Base. It was there that his desire to be a medic was squashed, and he shifted into intelligence.

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Aaron Bushnell opposed ‘all state-sanctioned violence’ — not just the war in Gaza

Then came Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing warfare that burst the blister of the status quo. “Everyone here is pretty plugged in,” Bettancourt said. The constant stream of images and videos of the devastation snapped him into action — including the death of fellow airman Aaron Bushnell. Bettancourt was shocked by the lack of official response from the Air Force in the days that followed. And he was furious about the memorial service held for Bushnell at his own base, Lackland AFB in Texas. “They didn’t even mention Palestine.” Bettancourt then did the only thing he felt he could do — place a small Palestine flag at the room’s vigil table.

Only 15 have joined the Appeal, most of whom are also working with the Center on Conscience and War on their CO applications. Other service members and veterans, eschewing the Defense Department-approved processes, expressed their concerns about Gaza by joining Veterans for Peace or About Face. “Since October 7, 2023, over 250 veterans and active-duty members have applied to become members of About Face: Veterans Against the War,” said About Face operations coordinator Shiloh Emelein.

Jon Hutto, who started the first Appeal, wrote on Facebook last spring: “I’m beyond moved and inspired by this current generation of active-duty being tip of the spear in the struggle against the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.” Hutto has emphasized that organizing those currently in uniform is crucial and often overlooked.

Veterans for Peace, which still hosts the Appeal, is a key forum for the new resisters; its summer conference was keynoted by Major Harrison Mann, whose public resignation from the Defense Intelligence Agency made him the summer’s media darling. Mann and Josh Paul were soon contacted by hundreds of other federal employees who were contemplating doing the same. Thus was born Service in Dissent, a joint statement by dozens of those who had resigned, issued on July 4: “Each of us has had our own experience of the cascading failures of process, leadership and decision-making that have characterized this administration’s intransigent response to this continuing calamity,” they wrote.

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“This intransigent policy risks U.S. national security and the lives of our service members and diplomats as has already been made evident with the killing of three U.S. service members in Jordan in January and the evacuations of diplomatic facilities in the Middle East,” the letter continues, “and also poses a security risk for American citizens at home and abroad.”

Those who remember the Vietnam era might hear history rhyming. The channel for the “dissent memos” during that time was established in 1971, after tumult inside the establishment over the Nixon administration’s Southeast Asia wars. “In 1968 alone 266 Foreign Service officers, 80 percent of them junior officers, resigned,” retired U.S. diplomat David Jones wrote decades later.

A group of retired senior military officers, including former Marine Corps commandant David Shoup, had become famous for their vocal opposition to the war, making the cover of Esquire as “Brass Lambs” in 1967. While Shoup and the other Brass Lambs were lauded by the nearly 3,000 underground G.I. newspapers, they were mostly ignored by the Pentagon, though turmoil at the State Department was exposed in 1971when former Marine and civilian adviser Daniel Ellsberg leaked a ton of those internal communications to the press in the Pentagon Papers.

The language of the Service in Dissent statements echoes that of Shoup and the other retired senior military officers 50 years ago, as does their decision to go public.

Josh Paul connected me to the July 17 webinar Voices of Conscience, where he spoke along with a fascinating mosaic of voices. These included the Interior Department’s Lily Greenberg, the first Jewish political appointee to resign in protest of U.S. policy in Gaza; the State Department’s Annabelle Sheline; Tariq Habash, former policy advisor in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development; and former members of the military, including Master Sergeant Mohammed Abu Hashem and Major Harrison Mann.

Mann spoke presciently about the Lebanon front, a conflict that “threatens to draw in the United States and put U.S. forces, bases, embassies and troops in the region at risk when we become a target, because we look like we’re a direct participant in that conflict.”

U.S. government employees with Feds United for Peace announced a day-long hunger strike to protest U.S. support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza in February 2024. (Twitter/Novendra Deje)

As things have evolved, many of the “Voices of Conscience” have become press contacts for media stories, while Feds United for Peace has openly joined Gaza protests since December. They have called on the Defense Department’s Inspector General to better investigate whether arms transfers to Israel are in violation of the Leahy Act and the Foreign Assistance Act.

These defectors also include many who haven’t yet spoken out, and they hope to bring in other federal employees who may share their concerns. Antiwar veterans groups are speaking with military personnel who are currently questioning U.S. involvement in the war more quietly.

A month after the Voices of Conscience webinar, the Appeal for Redress went international, with a press conference that included members of Combatants for Peace: ex-Hamas fighter Ahmed Helou and former Israeli special forces officer Eli Hanan. Both were congratulated by Veterans for Peace’s Mike Ferner, a Vietnam-era conscientious objector who also praised “all the U.S. active-duty CO applicants here.”

I first learned about Combatants for Peace from Stephen Eagle Funk, one of the founders of Iraq Veterans Against War (now About Face), nearly 20 years ago; those connections are just now being rediscovered, according to About Face’s Shiloh Emlein. And About Face’s September convention, which ended with testimony from Israeli Defense Forces resister Meital Eviv, brought together members of the 9/11-era cohort and dozens who joined recently, most of them passionate about Israel-Palestine and many feeling inspired by Aaron Bushnell.

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On the anniversary of his resignation from the State Department in October, Josh Paul announced the formation of a new political action committee, A New Policy PAC. “I do think that what we face here is a deep-rooted and very entrenched set of political, economic incentives that will make it very hard for anyone to change U.S. policy in this regard,” he told Democracy Now! “What we face here is actually not a policy problem. We know what the policy problems are. The people in government know what the policy problems are. What we face here is a political problem.” A New Policy’s team includes Tariq Habash and Robert Ford, former U.S. ambassador to Syria. All are relying on the built-in gravitas built on their experience serving the establishment — or, in other words, their status as defectors.

“Challenging or disobeying orders is abnormal behavior for members of security forces,” Erica Chenoweth noted in International Security in 2008. Nonetheless, “security force defections make nonviolent campaigns 46 times more likely to succeed than nonviolent campaigns where defections do not occur.” In that article, Chenoweth is talking mostly about defections much larger than what has occurred so far around the war in Gaza — what they call “large-scale, systematic breakdowns in the execution of a regime’s orders.” One example they cite is Myanmar, where bureaucrats in 1988 gave room for mass protests, and “some air force soldiers broke ranks to join the protests,” according to Gene Sharp.  

Most of the formations in relation to the Gaza war are quite new — as new as the war itself and the movement to end it. All of them have signaled their intention to keep resisting in the second Trump administration, including on any use of the military against civilians and immigrant communities. What their ultimate impact will be is unclear. But these defections might prove an essential element of any change to come.

This article Meet the US soldiers and bureaucrats defecting over Gaza was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article A new wave of movements against Trumpism is coming was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

For many of us, the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s decisive electoral victory has been a time of deep despair and mourning. There has been plenty of commentary trying to make sense of Trump’s win and the factors that led to it. But no analysis changes the fact that the outcome represents a serious blow to our most vulnerable communities, a sharp setback for causes of economic and social justice, and a profound challenge to whatever semblance of democracy America has been able to secure. We have lived through it before, and it feels even worse the second time around. It is right that we take this as a moment to grieve. 

But even amidst our feelings of sorrow or hopelessness, we can recognize that political conditions are not static. As we step out of our grieving and look ahead, there are reasons to believe that a new social movement cycle to confront Trumpism can emerge. And in making this happen, we can draw on lessons from what has worked in the past and what we know can be effective in confronting autocrats. Our job will be to take advantage of the moments of opportunity that arise in coming months to hold the line against Trump’s authoritarianism — and also link them to a vision for creating the transformative change we need in our world.

Here’s why we can expect a new wave of movements to arise.

Trump is a trigger

We have often written about the importance of “trigger events” in sparking periods of mass protest. Social movement organizers can labor for years in relative quiet, carrying out the long-term “spadework” — as civil rights icon Ella Baker called it — of consciousness raising, leadership development and building organizational structure. But there are also moments when issues of social and economic injustice are thrown into the spotlight by a dramatic or expected public event: A shocking scandal, a natural disaster, a geopolitical conflict or an investigative report revealing gross misconduct stokes widespread outrage and sends people into the streets. 

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In these moments, activists who had previously faced a drought of public interest now find themselves in a torrent. The rules of ordinary politics seem to be suspended. And movements that can capitalize have unique opportunities to alter the political landscape, redefine the terms of debate around an issue and have impacts that ripple throughout the system. 

In 2016, Trump’s election itself served as a trigger event. A wide range of groups, from the liberal ACLU to the more radical Democratic Socialists of America, saw membership and donations surge as concerned progressives braced for what was expected to come from his administration. New groups also emerged, such as Indivisible, which began as a viral Google Doc about how to confront elected officials and compel them to resist the Trump administration. It then quickly grew into an organization with more than 4,000 affiliated local groups by 2021. 

At the same time, outrage among women about Trump being able to take office in spite of his overt misogyny led them to mobilize in record-breaking numbers. A call to action went out immediately after the election, and on January 21, 2017, the day after Trump’s inauguration, upwards of four million people rallied in Women’s March events, spread across every state in the nation. Scholars tracking participation identified this as “likely the largest single-day demonstration in recorded U.S. history.”

This time around, the mood is different. The shock of “how could this ever happen” that many experienced eight years ago feels distinct from the gut-churning sense of “it is happening again” that is sinking in this time around. As the New York Times described it, there is a “stunned, quiet and somber feeling,” sometimes accompanied by resignation, rather than an immediate impulse to rise up in resistance. That said, established progressive groups that have created space for members to gather to make sense of the electoral outcome and plan a response have seen a strong response. Most notably, a mass call two days after the election organized by a coalition of 200 groups — including the Working Families Party, MoveOn, United We Dream and Movement for Black Lives Action — drew well in excess of 100,000 people, with thousands signing up for follow-up community gatherings.

There is no better antidote to hopelessness than action in community. 

There will be more opportunities to come. It is highly likely that future trigger events will arise as Trump begins implementing his agenda. Although he won a commanding electoral victory, a significant portion of his gains can be attributed to rejection of the status quo and a desire on the part of voters to sweep out a broken political establishment. On a policy level, Trump is often incoherent. Although he presents himself as a champion of those left behind, he cannot deliver for working people. Instead, many of the things that he will attempt may prove to be deeply unpopular, from tax cuts for the wealthy and attacks on women’s rights, to unconstitutional power grabs and cuts to social services or public benefits. 

Should Trump begin to carry out the program of mass deportations that he has promised, resulting in separated families and shattered communities, conservatives could quickly find that their overreach has sparked backlash and defiance — not only from defenders of human rights but even from business people alarmed at the economic disruption.

In late 2005, when the Republican majority in the House pushed through a piece of anti-immigrant legislation known as the Sensenbrenner Bill — a measure which, among other impacts, would have created penalties for providing humanitarian services to undocumented immigrants — it gave rise to a series of massive immigrant rights protests in the months that followed. Hundreds of thousands marched in 2006, not only filling the downtowns of major cities like Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles, but also flooding public squares in places such as Fresno, Omaha and Garden City, Kansas. These actions galvanized the Latino vote and had lasting impacts in multiple election cycles that followed. 

Likewise, in the early days of Trump’s first term, his administration’s “Muslim ban” prompted rallies and civil disobedience at airports around the country. While the ban was being challenged in court, the actions served as major public flashpoints, both bolstering local groups and giving rise to national formations such as #NeverAgainAction, while also prompting cities to make vows to protect migrants. 

Public revolt can cut both ways: The rise of the Tea Party in 2009 became a significant hindrance to Barack Obama’s ability to pursue a progressive economic agenda. But whether such mobilizations come from the left or right, it is important to recognize that they can have significant consequences. 

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Activism during Trump’s first term was able to create a sense of an administration that was embattled and mired in controversy, rather than one carrying out a popular mandate. While most presidents can expect to enjoy a bump in popularity following their inaugurations, Trump instead faced record-low approval ratings. And while conservatives passed a major tax law that favored the rich, they were unable to realize other top goals such as the repeal of Obamacare. With the 2018 midterms, movements played a significant role in creating one of the most dramatic swings in recent electoral history, propelling a wave that both swept Democrats into power in many states and deprived Republicans of control of the U.S. Congress, closing their window of maximum legislative power.

Looking forward, Trump will trigger outrage. But outrage alone is not enough. It needs to be translated into action. Movements must be ready to capitalize on and extend the opportunities that Trump’s policies create. Here, preparation is helpful: By anticipating and planning for trigger events, movements can position themselves to take maximum advantage.

Different strategies for change can work together

When we track the impacts of mass protests, one of the most consistent things that we witness is that critics are eager to denounce activist tactics and preemptively declare new movements as ineffectual, even when they have scarcely just appeared. When mass protests erupted in Trump’s first term, there were a plethora of voices condemning them as pointless and even counterproductive. 

In the New York Times, David Brooks conceded that the Women’s March was an “important cultural moment,” but argued that “Marching is a seductive substitute for action,” and that it ultimately amounted to little more than “mass therapy” for participants. “Change happens when people run for office, amass coalitions of interest groups, engage in the messy practice of politics,” Brooks wrote, contending that “these marches can never be an effective opposition to Donald Trump.” Such pessimism was sometimes echoed by left-wing commentators as well, who devoted more energy to dissecting the political limitations of the Women’s March than capitalizing on the opportunities it created to draw new people into long-term organizing campaigns.

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In fact, people newly activated by the march became part of many subsequent efforts, and the following year the mobilization fed directly into the #MeToo movement, which erupted after another trigger event — namely, publicity that shed light on the sexual abuses perpetrated by Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. Not only did #MeToo have far-reaching implications for policy, in the legal system, and in other arenas of public life, it also significantly affected voting patterns, with the the Washington Post reporting on a “women-led army” that was “repulsed by Trump and determined to do something about it” driving abnormally high turnout in 2018 and 2020. 

But the even bigger problem for the argument of those who dismiss mass protest is the assumption that different approaches to creating change are mutually exclusive. To the contrary, key to both defeating Trumpism and winning what we actually want in the future is cultivating a healthy social movement ecosystem in which multiple approaches to change complement and play off one another. There is strong evidence from past mobilizations that mass protest in fact feeds such an ecology in many different ways. Following peak periods of unrest, which we describe as “moments of the whirlwind,” those who have been laboring for years in the trenches often remark on how the surge of interest and support significantly expands their horizon of possibility. 

Social movements alone have the potential to produce a response to Trump that both invites mass participation and that is connected to a broader vision for change. The alternative — relying on legal cases or other insider challenges to the administration’s policies, hoping that politicians will save us, or relying on Democrats, by themselves, to not cave or conciliate themselves to Trumpism — is a recipe for defeat and demobilization.

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The bright spots of the first Trump era came as movements not only rallied large numbers of people in defensive battles against the White House, but also carried forward popular energy by organizing around a positive vision for change. Here, the model offered by Bernie Sanders was very important. Sanders achieved far greater success in his 2016 primary challenge to Hillary Clinton than anyone in the Washington establishment could have imagined by running on a resolute platform of Medicare for All, free higher education, and confronting the power of corporations and the rich. Whether or not “Bernie would’ve won” in 2016 had he been in the general election, as many of his supporters believe, the senator was nevertheless vital in pointing to a model of how Trumpism could be combated with a progressive populist vision, rather than a retreat to the center and the adoption of “Republican-lite” versions of policy. 

Groups motivated to build active support for such a vision — which included progressive unions, community organizations investing in electoral work in a more concerted way than ever before, and new or re-energized formations such as the Democratic Socialists of America, Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, the Working Families Party and the Poor People’s Campaign — entered into contests that gave rise to the Squad at the federal level, as well as an unprecedented number of movement champions taking office locally. 

The Sunrise Movement, another group that contributed to this push, exploded onto the scene in 2018, playing a key role in putting the Green New Deal at the center of policy debate and, along with Fridays for Future, revitalizing climate activism. Trigger events around police violence ignited a new round of Black Lives Matter protests and a national reckoning on race that has helped secure important gains around criminal justice reform — strides toward which have continued in spite of backlash.  

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This time around, we must be more clear than ever that our goal is to win over a majority of Americans. Movements should not be afraid to engage in polarizing protest, but they should be mindful of the challenge of producing positive polarization that reaches out to include more people in the fight for justice, while minimizing negative polarization that pushes away potential supporters. Crucial to this is always seeking to expand the coalition of allies, engage in political education to bring in newcomers, and not accept the myth of the righteous few, or the idea that the path to victory is through demanding ever-greater levels of moral purity among those we associate with, even if that means ever-greater insularity.

The day after the election, Sunrise tweeted: “Trump loves corporations even more than Democrats do, but he ran an anti-establishment campaign that gave an answer to people’s desire for change.” As social movements respond to outrage over Trump’s policies and tie their actions to a real agenda for transformative change, they puncture the pretense that he offers any sort of real alternative to a democracy ruled by elites and an economy designed to serve the wealthy. “We can stop him, and we must,” Sunrise added. “But it’s going to take many thousands of people taking to the streets and preparing to strike. And it’s going to take mass movements putting out a better vision for our country than Trumpism and proving that we can make it happen.”

If ever there was a time to allow ourselves a space for mourning as we contemplate the fate of our country, it is now. But ultimately, only we can save ourselves from despair. David Brooks intended to be dismissive in characterizing collective protest as “mass therapy,” but in one respect he is onto something: There is no better antidote to hopelessness than action in community. 

Our past experience tells us that coming months and years will offer moments that trigger public revulsion. Social movements provide a unique mechanism for responding, creating common identity and purpose between strangers and allowing genuine, collective participation in building a better democracy. If we are to make it together through Trump’s second presidency and emerge in its aftermath to create the world we need, this may be our greatest hope. Indeed, it may be our only one.

This article A new wave of movements against Trumpism is coming was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Diez maneras de prepararnos y centrarnos ahora que Trump ganó was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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This article is also available in English.

Este artículo fue publicado con anterioridad a la elección y actualizado el 6 de noviembre para reflejar los resultados de la votación.

Es importante que afrontemos directamente la victoria de Trump y lo que podemos hacer al respecto. 

Trump ya dio señales sobre el tipo de presidente que será: vengativo, sin posibilidad de control e inmune a las normas previas o leyes actuales. No voy a enumerar la letanía de cosas horribles que se ha comprometido a hacer, ya que eso ha quedado bien establecido con sus palabras, los planes del Proyecto 2025 y los excelentes análisis de personas expertas en autoritarismo. 

Enfrentarnos a un futuro aún más desestabilizado no es fácil. Si eres como yo, ya sientes agotamiento; la perspectiva de aún más dramatismo es abrumadora. Pero el autoritarismo no desaparecerá, independientemente de los resultados electorales. Por ello, quiero plantear algunas reflexiones sobre cómo orientarnos para que podamos centrarnos mejor y afrontar lo que viene.

He tenido la suerte de haber dedicado un buen tiempo a escribir escenarios sobre lo que podría suceder, diseñar talleres para enfrentar una posible victoria de Trump y trabajar junto a colegas que viven bajo regímenes autocráticos, quienes continuamente me recuerdan que la buena psicología equivale al buen cambio social. El poder autoritario se deriva del miedo a la represión, el aislamiento y el agotamiento ante el caos total. Ya lo estamos sintiendo.

Por lo tanto, para ser de alguna utilidad en un mundo Trumpista, tenemos que prestar mucha atención a nuestros sentires para no perpetuar los objetivos del autócrata de miedo, aislamiento, agotamiento o desorientación constante.

1. Confía en ti

Comencé a escribir esta lista listando principios estratégicos (por ejemplo, analizar las debilidades de tus oponentes y aprender a manejar la violencia política), pero en realidad el mejor lugar para comenzar es con nosotres mismes.

Trump llega en un momento de gran desconfianza social. De manera general, la sociedad ha reducido su confianza en las instituciones tradicionales y vemos mucha más desconfianza hacia los medios de comunicación, profesionales de la salud, les expertes y la clase política. Pero se extiende más allá de eso, pues vemos mayor desconfianza hacia las instituciones comunitarias y coaliciones. Ya sea por el COVID o por la polarización política, hemos experimentado una reducción de la confianza en nuestros círculos de amistad y familiares. Incluso hemos perdido la confianza en la posibilidad de predecir el clima.

La desconfianza alimenta la llama de la autocracia porque fomenta la división. Podemos ver eso en la naturaleza casual de la retórica de Trump: decirle a la gente que desconfíe de les inmigrantes, demócratas, socialistas, la gente de Chicago, las mujeres manifestantes, la gente mexicana, la prensa y así sucesivamente.

Este es un mal social: Sabemos en quién confiar con base en lo que nos dicen sobre en quién desconfiar.

La construcción de la confianza comienza con nosotres mismes. Incluye confiar en nuestros propios ojos y en nuestro instinto así como protegernos de las formas en que podemos internalizar la confusión. 

También significa ser confiable, no solo con la información sino con nuestras emociones, ya que así podrás reconocer lo que sabes y admitir las partes que corresponden a miedos inciertos que te agobian y tomar medidas para responder a lo que necesitas. Si estás cansade, descansa. Si tienes miedo, haz las paces con tus temores. Puedo referenciarte recursos para ello, como Buscando terreno firme, aunque lo valioso aquí es comenzar a confiar en tu propia voz interior. Si necesitas dejar de revisar tu teléfono compulsivamente, hazlo. Si prefieres no leer este artículo en este momento y salir a dar un paseo, hazlo.

Confía en todas estas cosas dentro de ti porque la autoconfianza es parte de los cimientos de un movimiento saludable.

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2. Busca las personas en quienes confías

Prometo que pronto hablaré de estrategias prácticas de resistencia, pero el panorama emocional importa mucho. En “Los orígenes del totalitarismo”, Hannah Arendt explora cómo se fortalecen las ideologías destructivas como el fascismo y la autocracia. Ella nombra la palabra verlassenheit — a menudo traducida como “soledad” (referencia en español) — como un ingrediente central. Tal como ella lo entiende, la soledad no es un sentimiento sino una especie de aislamiento social de la mente. Tu pensamiento se cierra al mundo y surge una sensación de abandono en relación con les demás.

Ella nombra un colapso social que estamos experimentando actualmente. Bajo la presidencia de Trump, esta tendencia continuará acelerándose. Los constantes ataques a los sistemas sociales — docentes, la infraestructura y atención en salud — nos hacen dejar de apoyarnos mutuamente y en cambio nos acercan a respuestas ideológicamente simples que aumentan el aislamiento (por ejemplo, “desconfía del gobierno”, “Los MAGA están locos”, “a quien vota así no le importa el resto”).

En casos extremos, como el de Chile en los años setentas y ochentas, la dictadura intentó mantener a la gente en nodos de confianza tan pequeños que cada persona era una isla. En reuniones sociales y fiestas, la gente usualmente no se presentaba por su nombre por miedo a involucrarse demasiado. El miedo engendra distancia por lo que tenemos que romperla de manera consciente. En Chile se organizaron bajo la apariencia de grupos de afinidad. Como su nombre lo indica, eran grupos de personas que compartían algunas conexiones y confianza. Es fundamental encontrar unas pocas personas en quienes confíes para interactuar y contactar regularmente.

Encuentra personas de confianza con quienes reunirte regularmente. (What If Trump Wins/ilustración de Elizabeth Beier)

Tras la victoria de Trump: Identifica personas con quienes comunicarte regularmente y usa esa confianza para explorar colectivamente tus reflexiones, apoyarse mutuamente y mantener la mente aguda y centrarse.

Desde hace unos meses he invitado a mi casa un grupo para “explorar qué ocurre en estos tiempos”; tenemos diferencias de opinión pero dedicamos energía en confiar: mostramos nuestras emociones, lloramos, cantamos, reímos, nos sentamos en silencio y pensamos juntes. 

Escribí una agenda que puedes usar para tener este tipo de reuniones justo después de una victoria de Trump.

Todes nos beneficiamos de tener nodos organizados activamente para que nos ayuden a estabilizarnos. En una sociedad desestabilizada, necesitas personas que te ayuden a aterrizarte y centrarte.

3. Dale espacio a tu duelo

Sin importar lo que intentemos hacer, habrá muchas pérdidas. Lo más humano para hacer es sentir el duelo que ello nos genera. (Bueno, aparentemente los seres humanos también somos muy buenos en compartimentar, racionalizar, intelectualizar e ignorar, pero el daño que esto le hace al cuerpo y la psique está bastante bien documentado.)

Si no eres una persona que expresa sus emociones, déjame decirlo de esta forma: La incapacidad de hacer el duelo es un error estratégico. Después de que Donald Trump ganó en 2016, vimos muches colegas que nunca hicieron duelo, no le dieron espacio a sus emociones ni al futuro y como resultado de ello, se mantuvieron en shock durante todo el período. Por años decían: “No puedo creer que Trump esté haciendo eso…” 

Una alternativa posible: Comienza por nombrar las cosas y permite que las emociones afloren. La noche que Donald Trump ganó la primera vez, me quedé despierto hasta las 4 de la mañana hablando con mi colega; fue una noche llena de lágrimas en la que nos dedicamos a nombrar las cosas que acabábamos de perder. La lista iba desde lo político hasta lo profundamente personal: 

“Trump se saldrá del Acuerdo de París y eso significa que gran parte del mundo ralentizará sus planes climáticos”.

“Ugh, voy a soñarme con este man… Vamos a dormir menos y nos vamos a despertar con titulares absurdos todas las mañanas”.

“Trump atacará constantemente a les inmigrantes: el muro puede o no construirse, pero definitivamente elevará el umbral del racismo. ¡No creo poder soportarlo!”.

“La gente cercana que conozco que se registró para DACA nunca volverá a confiar en el gobierno”. (Nota de la traductora: DACA es la ley que permite obtener estatus a personas migrantes indocumentadas que llegaron a EE.UU. cuando eran menores de edad)

Y así sucesivamente. No era solamente una lista, sino que hacerla nos ayudó a identificar el impacto que nos causaba la tristeza, la ira, la parálisis, el shock, la confusión y el miedo. Alternábamos entre gritos de rabia y lágrimas. Nos lamentamos. Lloramos. Nos sostuvimos. Respiramos. Volvíamos a nombrar todas las cosas que sabíamos que habíamos perdido y las cosas que pensábamos que probablemente perderíamos. 

No era ni de cerca una sesión de diseño de estrategia o planeación, sino parte de aceptar que perder la presidencia a un hombre tan horrible significaba que nosotres y nuestras comunidades perderíamos mucho. Al final, esto nos ayudó a creerlo, para así no pasar años en estado de shock: “No puedo creer que esto esté sucediendo en este país”.

Créelo y créelo desde ya. El duelo es un camino hacia la aceptación. 

4. Libera lo que no puedes cambiar

Durante mi niñez, mi madre tenía una copia de la Oración de la Serenidad: “Dios, concédeme la serenidad para aceptar las cosas que no puedo cambiar, el coraje para cambiar las que sí puedo cambiar y la sabiduría para reconocer la diferencia”. Cabe destacar que esta oración proviene del teólogo Reinhold Niebuhr al observar el ascenso de los Nazis en Alemania.

El primer día de Trump probablemente incluya el indulto a los insurrectos del 6 de enero, la reasignación de dinero para construir el muro, la retirada del Acuerdo Climático de París y el despido de más de 50.000 empleados del gobierno para comenzar a reemplazarlos por sus seguidores. Seguramente el segundo día no será más tranquilo.

Bajo la presidencia de Trump, habrá tantos problemas que será difícil aceptar que no podemos resolverlo todo. Recuerdo a un colega de Turquía que me dijo: “Todos los días pasa algo malo, si tuviéramos que reaccionar a todo lo malo, nunca tendríamos tiempo para comer”. 

Una de mis mentoras una vez me vio intentando hacer todo, me llamó a un lado y me dijo, “esa no es una sana estrategia que te vaya a servir en la vida”. Ella había sido criada en Alemania por la generación de sobrevivientes del Holocausto que le enseñaron el lema de “Nunca más”. Ella se lo tomó muy a pecho, y lo asumió como si tuviera que corregir todos los males y esto terminó quebrándola y contribuyó a que tuviera que vivir con condiciones graves y crónicas de salud. Podemos aceptar nuestra humanidad o sufrir por esa falta de aceptación.

El caos es amigo del autócrata. Una forma en la que podemos ayudar sin darnos cuenta es creyendo la historia de que tenemos que hacerlo todo. 

En los últimos meses he estado probando una herramienta tremendamente desafiante. Es un ejercicio que te invita a escribir reflexiones individuales sobre en qué gastarás tu energía. Pregunta: ¿en qué asuntos te sumergirás por completo, harás mucho, poco o — a pesar de que te importen — no harás nada? Esa última pregunta puede parecer una especie de tortura para muches activistas, aun cuando racionalmente sabemos que no podemos detener todo lo malo.

Si no se aborda, este deseo de actuar sobre todo conduce a una mala estrategia. Hace nueve meses, cuando reunimos a activistas para diseñar juntes el plan de posibles escenarios, identificamos dos tendencias viscerales de la izquierda que terminaron siendo en gran medida callejones sin salida de cara a Trump:

• Indignación pública: publicar notas de indignación en redes sociales, indignarse en sus círculos sociales, compartir noticias terribles todo el tiempo.
• Acciones simbólicas: organizar marchas y hacer comunicados.

La primera es cuando miramos las cosas malas que suceden a nuestro alrededor y nos aseguramos de que otras personas se enteren de ellas. Con ello satisfacemos la presión social para que mostremos indignación, pero las acciones a las que nos lleva esta tendencia son sólo reactivas. El resultado final no es ni lo que queremos ni una población más informada, pues solo nos desmoraliza y perjudica nuestra capacidad de actuar. La indignación pública como estrategia es como suplicarle al agujero del barco que no permita que nos hundamos.

Las acciones simbólicas pueden lograr un poco más bajo la presidencia de Trump. En cualquiera que sea la versión de democracia que teníamos, la lógica de las protestas y pronunciamientos de indignación era construir un frente unido que le mostrara a la oposición que muchas voces les eran contrarias. Pero bajo un fascismo desatado, si esto lo único que haces, es como rogarle al capitán suicida que tape el agujero del barco. 

Quiero decirlo con mucha claridad. Estas estrategias serán parte de la mezcla de cosas que hagamos. Necesitaremos de la indignación pública y de las acciones simbólicas. Pero si apoyas una organización o grupo que solamente usa esas tácticas, escoge otra. Hay otras formas más efectivas de actuar.

5. Encuentra tu camino

He estado escribiendo escenarios de cómo podría desarrollarse una presidencia de Trump. (Puedes leerlos como un libro de “elige tu propia aventura” en WhatIfTrumpWins.org o pedir el libro.) Pase lo que pase, las primeras semanas son caóticas, pero con el tiempo, empiezan a surgir algunas vías específicas de resistencia.

Una vía se llama “Proteger a las personas”. La implementan aquellas personas que sobreviven y protegen nuestras comunidades, especialmente a quienes que son el blanco directo de los ataques, como las personas trans, las personas que deciden abortar o les inmigrantes. Esto puede significar organizarse fuera de los sistemas existentes para proveer atención en salud y apoyo mutuo, o distribuir recursos a las comunidades que están siendo atacadas. Otros ejemplos incluyen la creación de comités de bienvenida a inmigrantes, fondos de apoyo al aborto o capacitación de voluntaries en habilidades de seguridad para responder a la violencia nacionalista blanca.

Otro camino es “Defender las instituciones cívicas”. Este grupo puede o no ser consciente de que las instituciones actuales no le sirven a todo el mundo, pero se unen en la comprensión de que Trump quiere derrumbarlas para poder ejercer un mayor control sobre nuestras vidas. Cada burocracia liderará su propia lucha para defenderse. 

Quienes están dentro de las instituciones librarán una batalla central contra el fascismo de Trump. Quizá recuerdes a les científiques del gobierno que transfirieron abundantes datos climáticos en servidores externos, preparándose para las órdenes de Trump. Esta vez, muchas más personas de adentro entienden que estamos en alerta roja. Ojalá muchas de ellas valientemente se nieguen a renunciar y escojan quedarse tanto tiempo como les sea posible. 

Los pilares institucionales entienden que una presidencia de Trump es una grave amenaza. El ejército, por su parte, es muy consciente de que las posibles órdenes de Trump de utilizarlo para reprimir las protestas civiles lo politizaría permanentemente. 

Quienes están adentro requerirán apoyo externo. A veces, solo se trata de mostrar compasión porque algunos de nuestres mejores aliades están dentro de las instituciones, resistiendo en silencio. Una cultura de celebrar que las personas son despedidas por las razones correctas ayudaría (y luego ofrecerles ayuda práctica para que puedan seguir con su vida). En otros momentos necesitarán apoyo abierto y activación pública.

Luego hay una tercera ruta crítica: “Irrumpir y desobedecer”. Esto va más allá de protestar para exigir mejores políticas públicas y entra en el terreno de las personas que diseñan intervenciones para parar malas políticas y resistir.

Al inicio, gran parte de ese trabajo prefigurativo puede ser puramente simbólico. En Noruega, para crear una cultura de resistencia durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, la gente usaba clips de papel inofensivos como señal de que no obedecerían. El simbolismo era para preparar el terreno para las huelgas masivas y la resistencia abierta. En Serbia, las protestas contra su dictador comenzaron con huelgas estudiantiles antes de escalar a huelgas de jubilados (ambas en gran medida simbólicas) para finalmente escalar a la huelga revolucionaria de los mineros del carbón que cambió el panorama. 

Las acciones efectivas del tipo “Irrumpir y desobedecer”, tienen como objetivo final allanar el camino para la no cooperación masiva: resistencia fiscal, huelgas nacionales, cierres laborales y otras tácticas de desobediencia masiva no violenta, que son las estrategias más efectivas para desbancar a los autoritarios. (Puedes encontrar herramientas sobre cómo hacer eso en una nueva era de Trump aquí.)

Por último, hay un cuarto rol clave: “Construir alternativas”. No podemos estancarnos reaccionando y deteniendo lo malo. Tenemos que tener una visión. Éste es un trabajo de crecimiento lento para construir formas alternativas que sean más democráticas. Incluye trabajo de sanación y de consolidación, un rico trabajo cultural, formas alternativas de cultivar alimentos y cuidar las infancias, presupuestos participativos o la creación de convenciones constitucionales para construir una alternativa mayoritaria al desastre de sistema de Colegio Electoral en el que nos encontramos.

Cada persona resonará más con algunos de estos cuatro caminos.

Yo, por mi parte, resueno más con el camino de “Irrumpir y desobedecer”, aunque sé que en ciertos momentos me veré arrastrado a una estrategia de “Protección de personas” inmediata. Tal vez soy demasiado impaciente para la mayoría de las acciones bajo “Construir Alternativas” y me siento demasiado frustrado con el status quo como para “Defender las instituciones públicas”. Sin embargo, celebro que otres tengan la disposición de hacerlo.

Viene a mi mente otra forma de encontrar tu rol que viene del abuelo de mi amiga Ingrid, quien vivió en Noruega bajo el régimen Nazi y se enteró que la resistencia estaba ocultando personas en el sótano de una iglesia cerca de un cementerio. Como florista, ya viajaba hacia y desde el cementerio, por lo que encontró un rol contrabandeando mensajes en coronas funerarias y entregándolas por toda la ciudad. 

No tuvo que definir su rol perfecto diseñándolo previamente. De hecho, no creo que si hubiera leído esta lista de posibles roles habría encontrado su camino político. En lugar de ello, descubrió su rol de forma circunstancial.

En otras palabras: Puede que tu camino no esté claro en este momento y eso está bien. Habrá muchas oportunidades para unirse a la resistencia.

6. No obedezcas de antemano, no te autocensures

La cobarde negativa del Washington Post y de Los Angeles Times a respaldar a un candidato político es, al parecer, un ejemplo clásico de autocensura. Trump no tuvo que amenazar de forma directa a estos medios de comunicación. Sus propios dirigentes les dijeron que en esta ocasión, esperaran.

¿Por qué? Porque querían mantenerse a salvo.

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Si los autócratas nos enseñan alguna lección valiosa es esta: El espacio político que no usas, lo pierdes.

Este es un mensaje para todos los niveles de la sociedad: abogades que asesoran a organizaciones sin fines de lucro, personas en posición de liderazgo que les preocupa su financiación, personas preocupadas por perder sus empleos.

No les estoy diciendo que no se protejan nunca. Pueden decidir cuándo decir lo que piensan. Sin embargo, autocensurarse es una pendiente muy resbaladiza que debemos observar y combatir. 

Timothy Snyder escribió un libro muy útil llamado “On Tyranny” (Sobre la tiranía), el cual convirtió en una serie de videos. En él se refiere a la cesión de poder como el primer problema a abordar y escribe lo siguiente: “La mayor parte del poder del autoritarismo se otorga libremente. En tiempos como estos, los individuos piensan de antemano en lo que querrá un gobierno más represivo y se ofrecen sin que se les pida. Una ciudadanía que se adapta de esta manera le está enseñando al poder lo que éste puede hacer”.

En pocas palabras: Usa el espacio político y la voz que tengas. 

7. Reorienta tu mapa político

Hace unos meses me senté en un salón con generales retirados, republicanos como Michael Steele, ex gobernadores y congresistas. Estábamos planificando escenarios para evitar el uso de la Ley de Insurrección para atacar a manifestantes civiles, imaginando paso a paso quién daría las órdenes a quién y cómo podría evitarse lo peor.

Para un activista comprometido contra la guerra como yo, la frase “durmiendo con el enemigo” no alcanza para describir la extrañeza que sentí en ese espacio. 

Salí de allí dándome cuenta de que una presidencia de Trump reconfigura las alineaciones y las posibilidades. El lenguaje belicoso y blasfemo de Trump se enfrentará a la realidad práctica de gobernar. Cuando no estás en el poder, es fácil unificarse, pero las grietas de su coalición emergerán rápidamente. Tenemos que estar alertas para identificar oportunidades para que pierda apoyo.

La forma en que nos posicionamos importa mucho: ¿Nos interesa interactuar con personas descontentas con el régimen, ya sea porque aman las actuales instituciones o porque están en desacuerdo con las políticas de Trump sobre estas? ¿Tenemos la capacidad de contar una historia de cómo llegamos aquí y hacer educación política? ¿O sólo nos interesa mantener la pureza ideológica y predicarle a quienes ya piensan como nosotres?

Incluso si no quieres interactuar con estas personas (lo cual está bien), tenemos que dar espacio a quienes experimentan con un nuevo lenguaje para atraer a quienes no comparten nuestra visión sobre una verdadera democracia multirracial.

La empatía será útil aquí. Escribo todo esto con un momento particular en mente: Al final del día de planeación de escenarios, recorrimos toda la sala recogiendo conclusiones. Los generales dijeron: “El ejército no pueden impedir que Trump dé estas órdenes”. Los políticos dijeron: “El Congreso no puede impedirlo”. Los abogados dijeron: “No podemos detenerlo”. 

Podía ver el gran dolor que sentían personas de alto rango con gran poder que admitían una especie de derrota y sentí un nivel de compasión que me sorprendió.

Solamente les activistas de izquierda dijeron: “Tenemos un enfoque de no cooperación masiva que puede detener esta situación, pero necesitaríamos de su ayuda”.

No estoy seguro de que la confianza que proyectaron haya sido bien recibida. Pero si vamos a apostarle a ello (y estoy lejos de estar seguro de que podamos), tenemos que ser realistas sobre el poder.

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Donate 8. Seamos realistas sobre el poder

En el primer período de Trump la forma en que la izquierda se organizó produjo resultados mixtos. Con la ayuda de John McCain, pudimos bloquear la propuesta de salud de Trump. Las manifestaciones resultaron cada vez menos efectivas a medida que pasaba el tiempo. Los bloqueos en los aeropuertos demostraron que las acciones disruptivas pueden activar al público y allanaron el camino para la decisión judicial sobre la prohibición de ingreso de nacionales de países musulmanos. Pero aún así, Trump logró que se aprobaran enormes recortes fiscales y el nombramiento de magistraturas de derecha en la Corte Suprema. La narrativa tambaleó y grandes sectores de la población han sido cautivados por la “Gran Mentira”. Fueron las elecciones las que finalmente detuvieron a Trump. (Nota de la traductora. La “Gran Mentira” hace referencia a la historia de que las elecciones de 2020 fueron robadas y en realidad Donald Trump fue el ganador).

Esta vez será mucho más difícil. El agotamiento psicológico y la desesperación son mucho mayores. Enviar gente a las calles a que hagan manifestaciones masivas sin que haya un resultado claro aumentará esa frustración, lo que conducirá al desistimiento y a acciones radicalizadas ajenas a cualquier estrategia. 

Trump ha sido muy claro al afirmar que usará su poder político al máximo, flexibilizando y violando las normas y leyes que se interpongan en su camino. Los movimientos sociales se preguntarán constantemente: “¿Podremos detener este nuevo desastre?” 

No vamos a convencerlo de no hacer estas cosas. Ninguna presión sobre los republicanos se traducirá en algo más que pequeñas migajas (al menos al inicio). No vamos a impedirle que haga estas cosas simplemente con tácticas persuasivas o demostrando que somos MUCHES quienes nos oponemos a ellas.

La pirámide invertida. (What If Trump Wins/Ilustración de Elizabeth Beier)

Será útil tener en mente un análisis de poder, específicamente el que conocemos como la pirámide invertida. Esta herramienta fue creada para explicar cómo funciona el poder incluso bajo dictaduras. 

El principio central es que, como una pirámide invertida, el poder puede ser inestable. Se cae naturalmente sin nada que lo sostenga. Para evitarlo, el poder se apoya en pilares que lo mantienen en pie. Casualmente, la izquierda a menudo se centra en pilares de apoyo que incluyen gobiernos, medios de comunicación, corporaciones, accionistas y tomadorxs de decisiones. Al describir los pilares de apoyo, Gene Sharp escribió (referencia en español):

Por sí solos, los gobernantes no pueden recaudar impuestos, aplicar leyes y regulaciones represivas, garantizar que los trenes funcionen a tiempo, preparar presupuestos nacionales, dirigir el tráfico, gestionar los puertos, imprimir dinero, reparar carreteras, mantener los mercados abastecidos de alimentos, fabricar acero, construir cohetes, entrenar a la policía y al ejército, emitir estampillas o incluso ordeñar una vaca. Es la gente la que proporciona estos servicios al gobernante a través de una variedad de organizaciones e instituciones. Si la gente dejara de proporcionar estas habilidades, el gobernante no puede gobernar.

Eliminar un solo pilar de apoyo a menudo puede dar lugar a concesiones importantes que salvan vidas. En respuesta al cierre del gobierno de Trump en 2019, el gremio de auxiliares de vuelo preparó una huelga nacional. Una huelga de ese calibre dejaría en tierra aviones en todo el país y una red clave de transporte. A pocas horas de anunciar que se “movilizarían inmediatamente” para llevar a cabo la huelga, Trump capituló.

Otro ejemplo viene del recientemente fallecido y experimentado activista Dick Taylor. En su libro “Blockade” (Bloqueo), escribe sobre cómo él y un pequeño grupo cambiaron la política exterior de los Estados Unidos al bloquear repetidamente los armamentos enviados para apoyar al dictador paquistaní Yahya Khan. La variopinta tripulación enviaba canoas para bloquear los poderosos barcos cargueros militares que salían de los puertos de la Costa Este hasta que finalmente el sindicato de estibadores (International Longshoremen’s Association) se convenció de negarse a cargar los barcos. Esto quebró la columna vertebral de la política nacional.

Para lograr un cambio más amplio del sistema tenemos que mirar más allá de los métodos recientes de organización comunitaria en Estados Unidos. Un buen lugar para comenzar es con la reciente serie de entrevistas publicadas en Waging Nonviolence, con personas que comparten lecciones clave sobre la lucha contra las autocracias y el objetivo de un cambio de sistema. 

En nuestro país, la presión sobre el poder de las élites está llegando a su límite. El poder tendrá que surgir de personas que decidan desobedecer el injusto sistema actual. El punto de inflexión de la no cooperación masiva será complejo y desordenado. Significa convencer a mucha gente de tomar enormes riesgos personales a favor de una mejor opción. 

Como persona que resuena con el camino de “Irrumpir y Desobedecer”, tenemos que movernos deliberadamente para ganar la confianza de quienes escogen los otros caminos, como quienes prefieren “Proteger a las personas”. La no cooperación masiva hace lo contrario de su objetivo de protección: expone a las personas a más riesgos y a más represión. Pero con ello también surge la posibilidad de que podamos tener el tipo de gobierno liberador que realmente nos merecemos.

9. Manejar el miedo, hacer que la violencia rebote

Otpor en Serbia nos proporciona abundantes ejemplos sobre cómo afrontar la represión. Eran jóvenes que reaccionaban con sarcasmo ante las palizas habituales de la policía. Bromeaban entre sí: “Sólo duele si tienes miedo”.

Su actitud no era arrogante, sino táctica. No iban a alimentar el miedo. Así que cuando la policía golpeaba cientos de personas en un solo día, su respuesta era: Esta represión no hará más que endurecer la resistencia.

Esto es actitud.

También llevaban sus acciones a lo práctico. Seguían a les manifestantes arrestados a las celdas de la cárcel e insistían en asegurarse de que les trataran bien. Iban a las casas de los policías que cometían la violencia con fotos de las personas a las que habían golpeado. Su llamado se basaba en el futuro que querían: “Tienes la oportunidad de unirte a nuestra lucha”.

Gestionar el miedo no consiste en suprimirlo, sino en redirigirlo constantemente. Una activista me describió dos movimientos que ocurren en el universo: contracción y expansión. Cuando Donald Trump ordene al Departamento de Justicia presentar cargos de sedición contra manifestantes o arrestar a sus enemigos políticos como Jamie Raskin o Liz Cheney, ¿cuál será nuestra respuesta?

El activista/intelectual Hardy Merriman publicó una guía muy bien fundamentada sobre la violencia política que contiene algunos hallazgos que me sorprendieron al leerlos. El primero es que la violencia física por motivaciones políticas no ha crecido dramáticamente en este país: todavía sigue siendo relativamente poco común. Sin embargo, las amenazas de violencia han incrementado, como muestra este informe de la CNN: “Las amenazas por motivos políticos a funcionarios públicos aumentaron un 178 por ciento durante la presidencia de Trump” y provienen principalmente de la derecha.

Su conclusión no es que la violencia política no va a crecer, sino todo lo contrario. Sin embargo, señala que un componente clave de la violencia política es intimidar y contar una historia en la que ellos son las verdaderas víctimas. Para lograr que la violencia política rebote es necesario no dejarse intimidar y resistir las amenazas. (HOPE-PV publicó un manual sobre cómo implementar esta técnica de rebote).

Podemos reducirnos a una cacofonía y dedicarnos a repetir “esto no es justo”, lo que a su vez alimenta el miedo a la represión. O podemos aprender de una página de la historia del gran estratega Bayard Rustin.

Les lidereses afro del movimiento de derechos civiles fueron blanco del gobierno de la ciudad de Montgomery, Alabama durante el boicot de buses en la década de 1950. Líderes como el recientemente nombrado Martin Luther King Jr. buscaron ocultarse tras las amenazas de la policía de arrestarles usando anticuadas leyes antiboicots. El organizador comunitario Rustin incidió para que les lidereses fueran a la estación de policía y exigieran que les arrestaran con base en su rol de liderazgo — logrando efectivamente hacer de la represión un espectáculo a favor de la causa. Algunes lidereses que no estaban en las listas policiales también exigieron que les arrestaran. Quienes recibían cargos formales eran vitoreados por un gran público a la vez que sostenían en alto los papeles de citación. El miedo se tornó en valentía.

10. Visionar un futuro positivo

No tengo certeza y no estoy prediciendo que ganaremos. Pero a estas alturas ya nos hemos imaginado todo lo malo que puede pasar. Nos haríamos un favor si dedicáramos la misma cantidad de tiempo a pensar cómo podríamos avanzar nuestra causa en estas condiciones. Tal y como dice la escritora Walidah Imarisha: “El objetivo de la ficción visionaria es cambiar el mundo”.

En mi mente, tarde o temprano tendremos que expulsar a Trump del cargo. Hay dos caminos disponibles.

El primero: Sacarlo con nuestros votos. Dado el sesgo del colegio electoral, esto requiere defender con éxito casi todas las elecciones locales, estatales y nacionales de modo que sigan siendo relativamente justas y libres.

Tanto las organizaciones progresistas hegemónicas como las instituciones democráticas, tienen amplia experiencia y defienden el camino de ganar por la vía electoral. Hacerlo será el principal impulso.

En mi redacción de escenarios he explorado cómo podría lucir esa estrategia, incluida la preparación de quienes trabajan en instituciones electorales para que se opongan a los intentos de último minuto de Trump de cambiar las normas electorales e incluso obstaculizar las elecciones a través de dudosas órdenes de emergencia. En el escenario, les trabajadorxs desobedecen y siguen adelante con las elecciones.

La segunda estrategia es si Trump se niega ilegalmente a dejar el cargo o a permitir que haya elecciones justas: Expulsarlo. Eso significa que somos capaces de desarrollar una campaña nacional de resistencia no violenta lo suficientemente potente como para obligarlo a dejar el cargo.

He escrito varias versiones de esto: Uno en el que se realizan huelgas a gran escala que inhabilitan parte de la economía estadounidense. Algo que evidenció la pandemia, es que nuestros sistemas son extremadamente vulnerables. En tanto muchos negocios usan un sistema de inventario exacto, esto es, piden insumos solo en función de la demanda exacta, podemos entender que pequeños contratiempos en el sistema pueden tener un efecto cascada. 

Las huelgas sostenidas enfrentarían una resistencia profunda, pero podrían influir en comunidades que actualmente están indecisas, como la comunidad empresarial, que ya está preocupada por el carácter temperamental de Trump. Las propias políticas de Trump podrían hacer que estas condiciones sean mucho más fáciles. Si realmente realiza deportaciones masivas, el daño económico podría ser fatal.

En otro escenario exploro otra estrategia para sacar provecho de una extralimitación de Trump. Los autócratas exageran sus poderes. Y en este escenario imaginario, Trump se excede cuando intenta obligar al gremio del sector automotor a dejar de construir autos eléctricos. En el escenario, les miembros del sindicato automotriz (United Auto Workers -UAW) se niegan y mantienen las fábricas en funcionamiento. Al final no puede detenerlos, pero en el proceso es humillado públicamente.

Una pérdida tan pública como esta puede provocar lo que Timur Kuran llama una “revolución inesperada”. Señaló muchos incidentes en los que los líderes políticos parecen tener pleno apoyo, pero luego, de repente, éste se evapora. Pone como ejemplo la revolución iraní de 1978-79. “Ninguna de las principales organizaciones de inteligencia — ni siquiera la CIA o la KGB — esperaban que el régimen de Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi colapsara. Hasta justo antes de la revolución, se esperaba que resistiera la tormenta que se avecinaba”.

El análisis de Kuran nos recuerda que debemos mirar la debilidad política de Trump. Los políticos como Lindsay Graham parecen aduladores pero si tuvieran la oportunidad de clavarle el cuchillo en la espalda a Trump, tal vez lo harían. Esto significa que las debilidades políticas expuestas podrían rápidamente poner a mucha gente que ahora hace parte de la campaña de Trump, en su contra.

Hoy, esa parece una opción muy lejana. Pero todas estas siguen siendo posibilidades. Practicar este pensamiento futuro y mirar en esas direcciones me da cierta esperanza y cierta sensibilidad estratégica. 

En los días en los que no puedo percibir ninguna de estas posibilidades políticas (que es la mayoría de las veces), pienso en el tiempo de vida de los árboles y las rocas y me anclo en recordatorios espirituales de que nada dura para siempre.

Todo futuro es incierto. Sin embargo, al usar estas herramientas tendremos más posibilidades de tener un futuro y una experiencia un poco más esperanzadora mientras vivimos estos turbulentos tiempos.

ACTUALIZACIÓN 6/11/24: Esta historia fue escrita antes de las elecciones y actualizada para reflejar los resultados de la votación.

CORRECCIONES 6/11/24: El nombre de Hardy Merriman aparece incorrectamente escrito en el artículo original. La cita de Otpor es incorrecta, la frase corregida es “Sólo duele si temes”.

This article Diez maneras de prepararnos y centrarnos ahora que Trump ganó was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article 10 ways to be prepared and grounded if Trump wins was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Polls are close and the ultimate election outcome may not be known for some time. Amidst the uncertainty, it’s important we squarely face the possibility of a Trump victory and what we’d have to do about it. 

Trump has already signaled the kind of president he would be: revengeful, uncontrolled and unburdened by past norms and current laws. I won’t go through the litany of awful things he’s pledged to do, since that’s been well-established with his words, Project 2025 plans and excellent analyses from authoritarian experts. 

Looking into an even more destabilized future is not easy. If you’re like me, you’re already tired. The prospect of more drama is daunting. But authoritarianism isn’t going away no matter the election results. So here’s some thinking about ways to orient so we can ground ourselves better for these times ahead.

I am blessed to have spent time writing scenarios about what might happen, developing trainings if Trump does win and working alongside colleagues living under autocratic regimes. One of the things they keep reminding me is that good psychology is good social change. Authoritarian power is derived from fear of repression, isolation from each other and exhaustion at the utter chaos. We’re already feeling it.

Thus, for us to be of any use in a Trump world (or a Harris world, for that matter), we have to pay grave attention to our inner states, so we don’t perpetuate the autocrat’s goals of fear, isolation, exhaustion or constant disorientation.

1. Trust yourself

I started writing this list with strategic principles (e.g. analyze your opponents weakness and learn to handle political violence), but actually the place to start is with your own self.

Trump is arriving at a time of great social distrust. Across the board, society has reduced trust in traditional institutions. Yes, there’s more distrust of the media, medical professionals, experts and politicians. But it extends beyond that. There’s reduced trust in most community institutions and membership groups. Whether from COVID or political polarization, a lot of us have experienced reduced trust in friends and family. Even our trust in predictable weather is diminished.

Distrust fuels the flame of autocracy because it makes it much easier to divide. We can see that in the casual nature of Trump’s rhetoric — telling people to distrust immigrants, Democrats, socialists, people from Chicago, women marchers, Mexicans, the press and so on.

This is a social disease: You know who to trust by who they tell you to distrust.

Trust-building starts with your own self. It includes trusting your own eyes and gut, as well as building protection from the ways the crazy-making can become internalized. 

This also means being trustworthy — not just with information, but with emotions. That way you can acknowledge what you know and admit the parts that are uncertain fears nagging at you. 

Then take steps to follow through on what you need. If you’re tired, take some rest. If you’re scared, make some peace with your fears. I can point you to resources that support that — like FindingSteadyGround.com — but the value here is to start with trusting your own inner voice. If you need to stop checking your phone compulsively, do it. If you don’t want to read this article now and instead take a good walk, do it.

Trust all these things inside of you because trust in self is part of the foundation of a healthy movement life.

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2. Find others who you trust

I promise I’ll head towards practical resistance strategies. But the emotional landscape matters a great deal. Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” explored how destructive ideologies like fascism and autocracy grow. She used the word verlassenheit — often translated as loneliness — as a central ingredient. As she meant it, loneliness isn’t a feeling but a kind of social isolation of the mind. Your thinking becomes closed off to the world and a sense of being abandoned to each other.

She’s identifying a societal breakdown that we’re all experiencing. Under a Trump presidency, this trend will continue to accelerate. The constant attacks on social systems — teachers, health care and infrastructure — make us turn away from leaning on each other and towards ideologically simple answers that increase isolation (e.g. “distrust government,” “MAGA is nuts,” “anyone who votes that way doesn’t care about you”).

In extreme cases, like Chile in the 1970s and ‘80s, the dictatorship aimed to keep people in such tiny nodes of trust that everyone was an island unto themselves. At social gatherings and parties, people would commonly not introduce each other by name out of fear of being too involved. Fear breeds distance.

We have to consciously break that distance. In Chile they organized under the guise of affinity groups. This was, as its name suggests, people who shared some connections and trust. Finding just a few people who you trust to regularly act with and touch base with is central.

Find people you trust to meet with regularly. (What If Trump Wins/Elizabeth Beier)

If Trump wins: Get some people to regularly touch base with. Use that trust to explore your own thinking and support each other to stay sharp and grounded.

For the last several months I’ve been hosting a regular group at my house to “explore what is up with these times.” Our crew thinks differently but invests in trust. We emote, cry, sing, laugh, sit in stillness and think together. 

I’ve written an agenda for such gatherings right after a Trump win that you can use.

All of us will benefit from actively organized nodes to help stabilize us. In a destabilized society, you need people who help ground you.

3. Grieve

No matter what we try to do, there’s going to be a lot of loss. The human thing to do is grieve. (Well, apparently humans are also very good at compartmentalizing, rationalizing, intellectualizing and ignoring — but the damage it does to our body and psyche is pretty well documented.)

If you aren’t a feelings person, let me say it this way: The inability to grieve is a strategic error. After Donald Trump won in 2016, we all saw colleagues who never grieved. They didn’t look into their feelings and the future — and as a result they remained in shock. For years they kept saying, “I can’t believe he’s doing that…” 

An alternative: Start by naming and allowing feelings that come to arise. The night that Donald Trump won, I stayed up until 4 a.m. with a colleague. It was a tear-filled night of naming things that we had just lost. The list ranged from the political to the deeply personal: 

“Trump will leave the Paris Climate Agreement and that means much of the world will soft pedal its climate plans.”

“Ugh, I’m gonna have this man in my dreams. We’re all going to sleep less and wake up to bat-shit crazy headlines each morning.”

“Trump’s gonna constantly attack immigrants — the wall may or may not happen, but he’s gonna raise the threshold for racism. I don’t think I can take it.”

“Friends I know who signed up for DACA are never going to trust government again.”

And on and on. It wasn’t only a list, but it was finding the impact inside of us of sadness, anger, numbness, shock, confusion and fear. We alternated between rageful spouts and tears. We grieved. We cried. We held each other. We breathed. We dove back into naming all the bad things we knew we’d lost and things we thought we’d be likely to lose. 

It wasn’t anywhere near strategizing or list-making or planning. It was part of our acceptance that losing a presidency to an awful man means you and your people lose a lot. Ultimately, this helped us believe it — so we didn’t spend years in a daze: “I can’t believe this is happening in this country.”

Believe it. Believe it now. Grief is a pathway to that acceptance. 

4. Release that which you cannot change

Growing up my mom had a copy of the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.” Notably, that prayer comes from theologian Reinhold Niebuhr as he was watching the rise of Nazis in Germany.

Trump’s first day likely includes pardoning Jan. 6 insurrectionists, reallocating money to build the wall, pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, and firing 50,000-plus government workers to begin replacing them with loyalists. There’s little reason to believe that day two will get much quieter.

Under a Trump presidency, there are going to be so many issues that it will be hard to accept that we cannot do it all. I’m reminded of a colleague in Turkey who told me, “There’s always something bad happening every day. If we had to react to every bad thing, we’d never have time to eat.” 

An elder once saw me trying to do everything and pulled me aside. “That’s not a healthy lifelong strategy,” she said. She’d been raised in Germany by the generation of Holocaust survivors who told her, “Never again.” She took it personally, as if she had to stop every wrong. It wracked her and contributed to several serious ongoing medical conditions. We can accept our humanity or suffer that lack of acceptance.

Chaos is a friend of the autocrat. One way we can unwittingly assist is by joining in the story that we have to do it all. 

Over the last few months I’ve been testing out a terribly challenging tool. It’s a journaling exercise that invites you to reflect on which issues you’ll spend energy on. It asks: what are issues you’ll throw down on, do a lot for, a little for, or — despite caring about it — do nothing at all for? That last question can feel like a kind of torture for many activists, even while we’re intellectually aware that we cannot stop it all.

Unaddressed, this desire to act on everything leads to bad strategy. Nine months ago when we gathered activists to scenario plan together, we took note of two knee-jerk tendencies from the left that ended up largely being dead-ends in the face of Trump:

• Public angsting — posting outrage on social media, talking with friends, sharing awful news
• Symbolic actions — organizing marches and public statements

The first is where we look around at bad things happening and make sure other people know about them, too. We satisfy the social pressure of our friends who want us to show outrage — but the driving moves are only reactive. The end result wasn’t the intended action or an informed population. It’s demoralizing us. It’s hurting our capacity for action. Public angsting as a strategy is akin to pleading with the hole in the boat to stop us from sinking.

Symbolic actions may fare little better under a Trump presidency. In whatever version of democracy we had, the logic of rallies and statements of outrage was to build a unified front that showed the opposition many voices were opposed to them. But under an unleashed fascist — if it’s all you do — it’s like begging the suicidal captain to plug the hole. 

Let me be clear. These strategies will be part of the mix. We’ll need public angsting and symbolic actions. But if you see an organization or group who only relies on these tactics, look elsewhere. There are other, more effective ways to engage.

5. Find your path

I’ve been writing scenarios of how a Trump presidency might play out. (You can read the scenarios written as a choose-your-own-adventure-style book at WhatIfTrumpWins.org or order the book.) The initial weeks look chaotic no matter what. But over time some differentiated resistance pathways begin to emerge.

One pathway is called “Protecting People.” These are folks surviving and protecting our own —  especially those of us directly targeted, such as trans people, folks choosing abortions and immigrants. This might mean organizing outside current systems for health care and mutual aid, or moving resources to communities that are getting targeted. Further examples include starting immigrant welcoming committees, abortion-support funds or training volunteers on safety skills to respond to white nationalist violence.

Another pathway is “Defending Civic Institutions.” This group may or may not be conscious that current institutions don’t serve us all, but they are united in understanding that Trump wants them to crumble so he can exert greater control over our lives. Each bureaucracy will put up its own fight to defend itself. 

Insider groups will play a central battle against Trump fascism. You may recall government scientists dumping copious climate data onto external servers, bracing for Trump’s orders. This time, many more insiders understand it’s code red. Hopefully, many will bravely refuse to quit — and instead choose to stay inside as long as possible. 

Institutional pillars understand a Trump presidency is a dire threat. The military, for one, is well aware that Trump’s potential orders to use them to crack down on civilian protesters would politicize them permanently. 

These insiders will need external support. Sometimes it’s just folks showing compassion that some of our best allies will be inside, silently resisting. A culture of celebrating people getting fired for the right reasons would help (then offering them practical help with life’s next steps). Other moments will need open support and public activation.

Then there’s a critical third pathway: “Disrupt and Disobey.” This goes beyond protesting for better policies and into the territory of people intervening to stop bad policies or showing resistance.

Initially a lot of that prefigurative work may be purely symbolic. In Norway, to create a culture of resistance during World War II people wore innocuous paperclips as a sign they wouldn’t obey. The symbolism is to build preparation for mass strikes and open resistance. In Serbia, protests against their dictator started with student strikes before escalating to strikes by pensioners (which were both largely symbolic) before finally escalating to the game-changing strike of coal miners. 

In effective “Disrupt and Disobey” type actions the ultimate goal is paving a path for mass noncooperation: tax resistance, national strikes, work shut-downs and other nonviolent mass disobedience tactics — the most effective strategies to displace authoritarians. (Training on how to do that in a new Trump era can be found here.)

Lastly, there’s a key fourth role: “Building Alternatives.” We can’t just be stuck reacting and stopping the bad. We have to have a vision. This is the slow growth work of building alternative ways that are more democratic. It includes grounding and healing work, rich cultural work, alternative ways of growing food and caring for kids, participatory budgeting or seeding constitutional conventions to build a majoritarian alternative to the Electoral College mess we’re in.

Each of us may be attracted to some pathways more than others.

Myself, I’m attracted to “Disrupt and Disobey” — though I know when certain moments hit I’ll be pulled into some immediate “Protecting People.” I’m perhaps too impatient for most “Building Alternatives” and too unhappy with the status quo to do “Defend Civic Institutions.” However, I’m delighted others will do that work!

I’m reminded of another way of finding your role that comes from my friend Ingrid’s grandfather, who lived in Norway under the Nazi regime. He learned that the resistance was hiding people in the basement of a church near a cemetery. As a florist he already traveled to and from the cemetery — so he found a role smuggling messages in funeral wreaths, delivering them all over the city. 

He didn’t go out designing his perfect role. In fact, I’m not sure he would have looked at the list of possible “roles” and found his political path. Instead, he found his space by circumstance.

In other words: Your path may not be clear right now. That’s okay. There will be plenty of opportunities to join the resistance.

6. Do not obey in advance, do not self-censor

The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times’ cowardly refusal to endorse a political candidate is, it appears, a classic example of self-censorship. Trump did not have to make a direct threat to these media outlets. Their own leadership told them to “sit this one out.”

Why? Because they wanted to stay safe.

Previous Coverage

WNV’s guide to protecting and expanding democracy

If autocrats teach us any valuable lesson it’s this: Political space that you don’t use, you lose.

This is a message to all levels of society: lawyers advising nonprofits, leaders worried about their funding base, folks worried about losing their jobs.

I’m not coaching to never self-protect. You can decide when to speak your mind. But it is a phenomenally slippery slope here we have to observe and combat. 

Timothy Snyder has written a helpful book called “On Tyranny” — and turned it into a video series. He cites ceding power as the first problem to tackle, writing: “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”

Put simply: Use the political space and voice you have. 

7. Reorient your political map

A few months ago I sat in a room with retired generals, Republicans like Michael Steele, ex-governors and congress people. We were scenario-planning ways to prevent using the Insurrection Act to target civilian protesters, playing step-by-step who would give the orders to whom and how the worst could be avoided.

For a committed antiwar activist, the phrase “strange bedfellows” doesn’t begin to describe the bizarre experience I felt. 

I came out of it realizing that a Trump presidency reshapes alignments and possibilities. The bellicose, blasphemous language of Trump will meet the practical reality of governing. When you’re out of power, it’s easy to unify — but their coalition’s cracks will quickly emerge. We have to stay sharp for opportunities to cleave off support.

How we position ourselves matters: Are we interested in engaging with people unhappy with the regime — whether because they love the current institutions or are unhappy with Trump’s policies on them? Are we able to tell a story that explains how we got here — and do political education? Or are we only interested in maintaining ideological purity and preaching to our own choir?

Even if you don’t want to engage with them (which is fine), we’ll all have to give space to those who do experiment with new language to appeal to others who don’t share our worldview of a multiracial true democracy.

Empathy will be helpful here. I write all this with a particular moment in mind: At the end of the scenario day, we whipped around the room with conclusions. The generals said “The military cannot stop Trump from giving these orders.” Politicians said “Congress cannot stop it.” The lawyers said “We cannot stop it.” 

I could see a lot of pain in high-ranking people of great power admitting a kind of defeat. I felt a level of compassion that surprised me.

Only the left activists said: We have an approach of mass noncooperation that can stop this. But we’d need your help.

I’m not sure that projected confidence was well-received. But if we’re going to live into that (and I’m far from certain we can), we have to get real about power.

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Donate 8. Get real about power

In Trump’s first term, the left’s organizing had mixed results. With John McCain’s assistance, we were able to block Trump’s health proposal. Rallies proved less and less effective as time went on. The airport shutdowns showed that disruptive action can activate the public and helped pave the way for the court’s dismissal over the Muslim ban. But Trump was still able to win huge tax cuts and appoint right-wing Supreme Court judges. The narrative lurched, and sizeble chunks of the population have now been captivated by the “Big Lie.” It was elections that ultimately stopped Trump.

This time will be much harder.

The psychological exhaustion and despair is much higher. Deploying people into the streets for mass actions with no clear outcome will grow that frustration, leading to dropout and radicalized action divorced from strategy. 

Trump has been very clear about using his political power to its fullest — stretching and breaking the norms and laws that get in his way. The movement will constantly be asking itself: “Are you able to stop this new bad thing?” 

We’re not going to convince him not to do these things. No pressure on Republicans will result in more than the tiniest of crumbs (at least initially). We’re not going to stop him from doing these things just by persuasive tactics or showing that there are a LOT of us who oppose them.

The upside down triangle. (What If Trump Wins/Elizabeth Beier)

It will be helpful to have a power analysis in our minds, specifically that’s known as the upside-down triangle. This tool was built to explain how power moves even under dictatorships. 

The central tenant is that like an upside-down triangle, power can be unstable. It naturally topples over without anything supporting it. To prevent that, power relies on pillars of support to keep it upright.
Casually, the left often focuses on pillars of support that include governments, media, corporations, shareholders and policy makers. Describing the pillars of support, Gene Sharp wrote:

By themselves, rulers cannot collect taxes, enforce repressive laws and regulations, keep trains running on time, prepare national budgets, direct traffic, manage ports, print money, repair roads, keep markets supplied with food, make steel, build rockets, train the police and army, issue postage stamps or even milk a cow. People provide these services to the ruler though a variety of organizations and institutions. If people would stop providing these skills, the ruler could not rule.

Removing one pillar of support can often gain major, life-saving concessions. In response to Trump’s 2019 government shutdown, flight attendants prepared a national strike. Such a strike would ground planes across the country and a key transportation network. Within hours of announcing they were “mobilizing immediately” for a strike, Trump capitulated.

Another example comes from the recently deceased long-time activist Dick Taylor. In his book “Blockade,” he writes about how he and a tiny group changed U.S. foreign policy by repeatedly blocking armaments sent to support Pakistani dictator Yahya Khan. The ragtag crew sent canoes to block mighty military shipments leaving from East Coast ports until eventually the International Longshoremen’s Association was persuaded to refuse to load them. This broke the back of national policy.

For larger system change we have to look outside of recent U.S. organizing. A good place to start is with Waging Nonviolence’s recent interview series with folks sharing key lessons on fighting autocracies and aiming for system change. 

In our country, pressuring elite power is reaching its end point. Power will need to emerge from folks no longer obeying the current unjust system. This tipping point of mass noncooperation will be messy. It means convincing a lot of people to take huge personal risks for a better option. 

As a “Disrupt and Disobey” person, we have to move deliberately to gain the trust of others, like the “Protecting People” folks. Mass noncooperation does the opposite of their goal of protection — it exposes people to more risk, more repression. But with that comes the possibility that we could get the kind of liberatory government that we all truly deserve.

9. Handle fear, make violence rebound

Otpor in Serbia has provided an abundance of examples on how to face repression. They were young people who took a sarcastic response to regular police beatings. They would joke amongst each other, “It doesn’t hurt if you’re afraid.”

Their attitude wasn’t cavalier — it was tactical. They were not going to grow fear. So when hundreds were beaten on a single day, their response was: This repression will only stiffen the resistance.

This is attitude.

They were also practical. They would follow their arrested protesters to jail cells and insist on making sure they were being treated well. They would target police who beat them up — showing up outside their houses with pictures of the people they beat up. Their call was rooted in the future they wanted: “You’ll have a chance to join us.”

Handling fear isn’t about suppressing it — but it is about constantly redirecting. One activist described to me two motions in the universe: shrinking or expansion. When Donald Trump directs the Justice Department to use sedition charges against protesters or arrest his political enemies like Jamie Raskin or Liz Cheney, what’s our response?

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Political violence is surging, but there’s a playbook to counter it

Activist/intellectual Hardy Herriman released a studied response about political violence that had some news that surprised me. The first was that physical political violence hasn’t grown dramatically in this country — it still remains relatively rare. The threats of violence, however, trend upwards, such as this CNN report: “Politically motivated threats to public officials increased 178 percent during Trump’s presidency,” primarily from the right.

His conclusion wasn’t that political violence isn’t going to grow. Quite the opposite. But he noted that a key component to political violence is to intimidate and tell a story that they are the true victims. Making political violence rebound requires refusing to be intimidated and resisting those threats so they can backfire. (Training on this backfire technique is available from the HOPE-PV guide.)

We can shrink into a cacophony of “that’s not fair,” which fuels the fear of repression. Or we take a page from the great strategist Bayard Rustin.

Black civil rights leaders were targeted by the government of Montgomery, Alabama during the bus boycott in the 1950s. Leaders like the newly appointed Martin Luther King Jr. went into hiding after police threats of arrest based on antiquated anti-boycott laws. Movement organizer Rustin organized them to go down to the station and demand to be arrested since they were leaders — making a positive spectacle of the repression. Some leaders not on police lists publicly demanded they, too, get arrested. Folks charged were met with cheers from crowds, holding their arrest papers high in the air. Fear was turned into valor.

10. Envision a positive future Spend some time envisioning how we might advance our cause. (What If Trump Wins/Elizabeth Beier)

I don’t feel certain, and I’m not predicting we win. But we’ve all now imagined storylines about how bad it might get. We would do ourselves a service to spend an equal measure of time envisioning how we might advance our cause in these conditions. As writer Walidah Imarisha says, “The goal of visionary fiction is to change the world.”

In my mind if Trump wins, we’ll have to eventually get him out. There are two paths available to force him out.

The first: Vote him out. Given the bias of the electoral college, this requires successfully defending nearly all local, state and national takeovers of elections such that they remain relatively fair and free.

Winning via the path of electoral majority has a wide swath of experience and support from mainstream progressive organizations and Democratic institutions. It’s going to be a major thrust.

In my scenario writing I’ve explored what that strategy could look like, including preparing electoral workers to stand against last minute attempts by Trump to change election rules and even stymie the election with dubious emergency orders. They don’t obey — and go ahead with elections anyway.

The second strategy is if he illegally refuses to leave or allow fair elections: Kick him out. That means we are able to develop a national nonviolent resistance campaign capable of forcing him out of office.

I’ve written several versions of this: One where large-scale strikes disable portions of the U.S. economy. If you recall from COVID, our systems are extremely vulnerable. Businesses running “just in time” inventory means small hiccups in the system can cause cascading effects. 

Sustained strikes would face deep resistance, but they could swing communities currently on the fence, like the business community, which already is concerned about Trump’s temperamental nature. Trump’s own policies might make these conditions much easier. If he really does mass deportations, the economic injury might be fatal.

In another scenario I explore another strategy of taking advantage of a Trump overreach. Autocrats overplay their hands. And in this imagined scenario, Trump overreaches when he attempts to force autoworkers to stop building electric vehicles. UAW workers refuse and keep the factories running. Eventually he’s unable to stop them — but in the process he’s publicly humiliated.

A very public loss like this can cause what Timur Kuran calls an “unanticipated revolution.” He noted many incidents where political leaders seem to have full support, then suddenly it evaporates. He gives as an example the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79. “None of the major intelligence organizations — not even the CIA or the KGB — expected Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s regime to collapse. Right up to the revolution, they expected him to weather the gathering storm.”

Kuran’s analysis reminds us to look at Trump’s political weakness. Political hacks like Lindsay Graham appear to be sycophants — but if given the chance to turn their knife in his back, they might. This means exposed political weaknesses could quickly turn the many inside Trump’s campaign against him.

That feels far away from now. But all these remain possibilities. Practicing this future thinking and seeing into these directions gives me some hope and some strategic sensibilities. 

On the days when I can’t sense any of these political possibilities (more than not), I zoom out further to the lifespans of trees and rocks, heading into spiritual reminders that nothing lasts forever.

All of the future is uncertain. But using these things, we’re more likely to have a more hopeful future and experience during these turbulent times.

This article 10 ways to be prepared and grounded if Trump wins was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Why I regret casting an antiwar protest vote in the 1968 election was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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In 1968, I was a full-time anti-Vietnam War organizer and voted for a third-party candidate. I now regret that protest vote, which has led me to think differently this time around.

I certainly sympathize with many progressives who intend to either sit out this election or vote for the Green Party’s Jill Stein or Cornel West. Kamala Harris’s continuing support for Israel’s war on Gaza and now Lebanon is abhorrent to anyone opposing war. For the past year the Biden-Harris administration has functioned as a willing ally and enabler of Israel’s genocide. Though not a self-proclaimed Zionist like the president, Harris parrots Israel’s talking points and lies about the war on Gaza. At the Democratic convention, she didn’t even permit a Palestinian representative to speak for five minutes from the platform.

But come election day, I won’t be casting a protest vote as I did in 1968 — even though I see so many parallels with the choice we faced then.

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Like Harris, that year’s Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, served as vice president, standing loyally by as Lyndon Johnson sent more than a half-million U.S. troops to Vietnam, hundreds of whom were dying every week in 1968. Far from distinguishing himself from the war hawks, Humphrey made speeches supporting the U.S. and its South Vietnamese allies as thousands of American soldiers were killed and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were slaughtered.

Adding to this outrage, Humphrey was nominated at the infamous Democratic convention in Chicago where the local cops brutally assaulted antiwar demonstrators in what was later described as a “police riot.” I was one of those protesters and was jailed for my efforts. Many antiwarriors demonstrated against Humphrey during the subsequent campaign, often chanting “Dump the Hump.” So, when election day came, I just couldn’t bring myself to vote for someone I considered a war criminal and cast my ballot for comedian Dick Gregory, who was running on a third-party ticket.

What I did not consider, however, was Humphrey’s opponent — Richard Nixon. At the time, I considered the parties as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Both seemed indistinguishable on Vietnam. And both reflected the same Cold War anticommunist mentality that underlay the American imperialist project and the growing military-industrial state.

I ignored, however, the profound differences between the two candidates on a host of other issues. For example, Nixon’s campaign revolved around what he called a Southern strategy. By using thinly disguised racist “law-and-order” rhetoric, he hoped to peel away white Southern and Northern white working-class voters from the Democrats. Ronald Reagan and later Republican administrations have solidified their appeal to white voters to effectively roll back the hard-won gains of the civil rights movement, especially on voting rights.

Today, the differences between the two parties are even more stark on a wide variety of issues – from women’s and LGBTQ+ rights to the climate and consumer protections to electoral integrity. The evidence can be found in Project 2025, the Republican blueprint for a new Trump presidency. Or in what Trump proclaims at his rallies. Earlier this month, he declared that he intends to use the military against protesters whom he considers “the enemy within.”

This kind of authoritarian rule is happening around the world, including Erdogan’s Turkey, Orban’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia. There is very little to protect it from happening here. We certainly can’t rely on the current Supreme Court.

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5 ways to approach the election with a movement mindset 

In the face of such a prospect, shouldn’t we do whatever is possible to forestall an autocratic regime? I no longer see casting a symbolic protest ballot — or sitting on the sidelines — as an act of conscience. Real acts of conscience imply taking a risk and being willing to accept the consequences.

Still, some might argue that it’s worth voting for the Green Party’s Jill Stein to send a message to the Democrats that they can’t literally get away with murder in Gaza. But would it convey that message?

In 2016, when Stein last ran for president, she received more votes than Trump’s margin of victory in three key states: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In this election, that could be enough to help him retake the White House. Trump’s solution to the Gaza war: Netanyahu should “finish the job.” Is that something that would help the Palestinians?

More than anything, they need us to continue challenging the U.S.-Israeli genocide by street actions, by supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, and by educating our fellow citizens about the reality of the Zionist settler-colonial project. When it comes to radically transforming the two major political parties it’s going to take a lot more than one election cycle. It will require building powerful movements that address systemic issues like racism, poverty, ecological devastation, and war and militarism.

This article Why I regret casting an antiwar protest vote in the 1968 election was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article How can movements advance Palestinian rights this election — and beyond? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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This is a crucial inflection point in the movement for recognition of Palestinian rights. A moment of unprecedented opportunity. But, potentially, also a moment of tragically missed opportunity. 

The opportunity is that there is a powerful movement, finally, pushing U.S. foreign policy toward a more just position on Israel-Palestine. The U.S.’s bipartisan consensus for an ironclad relationship with Israel has long relegated claims for basic Palestinian rights to the margins. The Democratic Party side of that previous bipartisan consensus has, however, been slowly cracking over the last decade. Even before Hamas’ unconscionable Oct. 7 attack on Israeli civilians, Democratic voters were for the first time more sympathetic to Palestinians (49 percent) than to Israelis (38 percent). In the year since Oct. 7, an unprecedented coalition has mobilized to protest Israel’s brutal response of accelerated ethnic cleansing, systemic war crimes and forever war. 

This leads us to where we are on the eve of the 2024 elections: For the first time, voters who want to stop U.S. support for Israel’s war machine have both a base in one major party and the leverage in a few key states to be politically salient.

At the same time, a majority of Americans still sympathize with Israel over Palestinians with 68 percent viewing Israel “very or mostly favorably.” In an Oct. 2024 YouGov poll, 61 percent of Americans felt it very or fairly important for the U.S. to “cooperate closely with Israel,” versus 16 percent who say it is not important (22 percent don’t know). This increasingly fractured but still overall pro-Israel environment has been a conundrum for the Kamala Harris campaign. Despite shifts among Democratic voters, Joe Biden embodied the long-standing consensus in close support of Israel. Harris’ rhetoric is slightly more distant, but she clearly has made a choice to not break with Biden’s policies, at least for the duration of her presidential campaign. 

That has led to the “Abandon Harris” movement — along with some prominent Palestinian figures — endorsing Jill Stein’s presidential campaign. The Green Party presidential candidate earned 0.26 percent of the vote in 2016. Stein is currently polling at roughly 1 percent nationally. By contrast, a recent Michigan poll has Stein at a considerably higher 2 percent in that swing state (with Harris having a 1 percent advantage over Trump). Consequently, while Stein may be a marginal candidate, she is also a serious factor in Michigan. This is evidenced by the attack ads Democrats are running there against Stein, as well as the Republican PAC-funded ads that seek to surreptitiously boost support for her. 

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The rage of those driven to support Stein is understandable. Yet, some have posited that it might also be self-defeating. The Green Party is after all a fringe party without national infrastructure (and led by an eternal candidate who Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently characterized as “predatory”). Aligning with it might very well lead to a path of political irrelevance, signaling a retreat from an ethical responsibility to engage in the frustrations of power politics in favor of virtue signaling from the sidelines.

Meanwhile, some on Stein’s campaign have openly proclaimed a far more nihilistic purpose, which is to punish Democrats by effectively costing them the election. This comes at a time when Trump has been openly supportive of Israel “finishing the job” in Palestine, saying that “Biden has been holding [Netanyahu] back” — not to mention his simultaneous promise to bring analogous ethnic cleansing/“mass deportation” policies to the United States (as well as the threats he poses to women, LGBTQ+ people, Black people, migrants and all who stand in the way of his White Christian supremacist movement). 

Such a “strategy” runs the risk of fracturing a budding intersectional coalition for Palestinian rights in favor of one-issue politics, effectively ignoring allies who may be balancing their support with other issues they also consider urgent. Georgia State Rep. Ruwa Romman expressed her disappointment in the fragmenting of this coalition by saying “what Harris does after she is elected is going to be completely and entirely dependent on how well our coalition survives. That is the only way we can push her, whether it’s on Palestine, reproductive rights, housing, FTC regulations or unions.” 

It is not just the spurning of intersectional alliances that is problematic. Absolutist rhetoric in demonizing potential allies can be equally counterproductive — a prime example being Stein’s running mate Butch Ware, who has been demonizing potential allies by suggesting that Muslims who vote for Harris will burn in hell for it. (Ware also commemorated Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks with praise for the operation and denounced Harris as, among other things, “a Nazi … married to a committed Zionist.”)  

There is a political price to be paid for rhetoric that burns bridges with needed partners. These are tactics that can turn a moment of opportunity for positively impacting Palestinian rights into fringe shouting into the wilderness. It is not a path to substantive policy change. Humanizing opponents is key, even if their conversion is not likely. As Mark and Paul Engler put it: Movements don’t win by converting opponents, but rather by “turning neutrals into passive supporters and turning passive sympathizers into active allies and movement participants.” 

The best way to do that is to foster a culture of empathy for the emotions felt by all — something the prominent reproductive rights advocate Lorettta Ross refers to as “calling-in.” Rhetoric that closes off possibilities for mutual recognition is self-defeating. In other words: It is both moral and strategic to think in ways that are nonviolent, inclusive and human.

Previous Coverage

WNV’s guide to building lasting peace in Israel-Palestine

Others, such as the Uncommitted National Movement, have taken a more calibrated position that moves at least partly in that direction. Uncommitted has refused to endorse Harris, but in more reasoned language that recognizes the substantial difference between Harris and Trump. Uncommitted rejects Trump for his plans to “accelerate the killing in Gaza while intensifying the suppression of antiwar organizing” and also spurns Stein out of fear a vote for her would “inadvertently deliver a Trump presidency.” Indeed, Uncommitted has gone so far as to say that “It’s clear Netanyahu will be doing everything in his power to get Trump elected. And we have to do everything in our power to stop him.” 

This equivocal Uncommitted position is understandable, given both Harris’ formal stances and her rejection of Uncommitted’s request to be represented by a speaker at the Democratic National Convention (a request supported by a broad range of Democratic Party actors, speaking both to the inroads mentioned earlier and their limits up until now). It is also, however, a confused position. It seemingly acknowledges that Harris is the better option and that Trump is an ideological bedfellow with Netanyahu, but doesn’t take that to its logical conclusion. Perhaps they are fenced in by the rhetorical maelstrom of those more eager to criticize Harris than Trump? Whatever the motivation, the mixed messaging might end up being self-defeating.

Uncommitted’s position is part of the difficult conundrum facing those advocating for change in U.S. policy. How do movements turn shifts in public opinion into real policy change? Or, to put the question more specifically: How do movements effectively push the U.S. to take positions that actively advance Palestinian human rights when there is no ideal champion in the race? 

There is clearly no blueprint for a journey into uncharted territory, but there are both short-term and long-term considerations to take into account. In the short-term, if the Green Party receives enough support — or enough people stay neutral — that could help Trump win, thereby giving Netanyahu what he wants regarding Israel-Palestine. Alternatively, Harris nonetheless may win and Palestinian activists will have thereby shown their political irrelevance — i.e., that the nationwide mobilization on behalf of Palestinian rights can be and should be ignored by Democrats concerned with winning elections. 

A third, more promising scenario for activists concerned with Palestine is that they find themselves in a position to take credit for slim margins of victory in key states like Michigan. That could potentially be leveraged — in the longer term — for further influence with U.S. policymakers, at least within the Democratic Party. 

If the work of connecting the short-term to the long-term is to result in real change — both during and after the U.S. presidential election — there are guiding principles from nonviolent, coalition building movements around the world from which to learn. Here are a few such principles to consider in the hopes that the movement against Israeli war crimes in Gaza can be a powerful political force to change U.S. foreign policy toward Israel-Palestine as a whole.

1. Engage power: Change comes from engaging complicated structures of power rather than assuming they are static. Much of the hesitancy in supporting Kamala Harris comes from assuming change in the Democratic Party is not possible. This is naïve. The Democratic Party moved from being the party of slaveholders and Jim Crow to the party of the civil rights movement and affirmative action to rectify histories of racial discrimination. More recently, the energy behind Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign forced a more progressive Democratic Party platform, one element of which led to the creation and passage of the U.S.’s most meaningful climate legislation. These changes don’t happen without movements engaging power structures.

There are no perfect partners in a two-party system; change in imperfect partners is a more realistic goal. The radical climate change group Climate Defiance, drawing from author Rebecca Solnit, perhaps put it best, saying: “A vote is not a valentine. It is a chess move.” Self-righteous indignation from the fringes may be psychologically satisfying, but change comes from building power in the short and long-term, not being separate from it.

2. Engage morality: Taking power seriously means also taking morality seriously. Human rights scholar author Shadi Mokhtari wrote powerfully in the wake of Oct. 7 on the need to combine moral clarity (plainly calling out gross injustices by any and all parties) and moral complexity (recognizing the validity of multiple emotional frames through which communities see contentious politics). In her words, we need moral clarity to call out the “Israeli state’s deplorable and devastating violence against Palestinians as well as the maddening ways the United States government facilitates and funds it.” At the same time, we need moral complexity to shed light on “Palestinian suffering while also recognizing the immense pain wrought by Hamas’ cruel acts of violence … and within the context of Jewish populations’ historical traumas and suffering.”

In short: condemnation is important but insufficient. It is urgent that we develop a political morality that calls out injustices while also recognizing that, to end such injustices, we must confront the depths of emotion, memory and experience that justify them. If not, we risk being reduced to seeing politics as a futile zero-sum game in which one side must lose for the other to win. Unfortunately, a failure to engage moral complexity has too often characterized discourse around Israel-Palestine. 

3. Engage law (consistently): Prizing a singular narrative over moral complexity results in mutual dehumanization — one side is less than human, hence not worthy of international humanitarian law’s protections. The relentless dehumanization of Palestinians has justified Israeli extermination tactics just as, in a vicious circle, Hamas’ targeting of Israeli civilians is justified by an analogous denial of humanity. The moral failure of mutual dehumanization has real world consequences; it justifies the endless cycles of war crimes that we see playing out on the ground. 

Even if we must have the moral clarity to state the obvious — that the Palestinian side is paying a (far) higher price in these cycles of Israeli-Palestinian war crimes — it lacks integrity to only denounce violations from one side. As Ta-Nehisi Coates says, “If you lose sight of the value of individual human life you have lost something.” Selective denunciations of war crimes do not just surrender moral integrity, they also sap such denunciations of their political power. A clear position that all targeting of civilians is unacceptable is essential if law is to have moral and political weight, rather than be solely rhetoric evoked when convenient.

4. Engage agency: Activism grounded in all of the above principles helps us move past monolithic conceptions of identity and, instead, engage the agency of complex individuals and communities. One of the frustrations of recent arguments around Israel-Palestine has been how complex groups are reduced to a singular monolith, ignoring the intricate histories of Israel and Palestine. To the contrary, each “side” has a history of internal political divisions, ideological evolutions and battles over positions and tactics.

Monstrous acts are committed, but not all are monsters. It is true that after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and the Israeli nationalist frenzy that has followed it is easy to reduce Israel to Netanyahu and Palestine to Hamas. In that context, it is tempting to feel the choice is solidarity with one of those actors against the other. To buy into this binary, however, empowers those most invested in total war without distinction. And it thereby erases the agency of those with a different political imagination of how to address this conflict. 

There is a reason why Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders contributed to Hamas’ birth. It is the same reason that, prior to Oct. 7, Israel was invested in boosting Hamas’ power, diminishing the feckless Palestinian Authority, and focusing its particular ire on those organizing nonviolent resistance — be it through international law and human rights or the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Israeli leaders knew the political advantage to their expansionist project of an enemy equally dedicated to total war. Nonviolent opposition is precisely what these leaders feared most. 

Analogously, in the heyday of the post-Oslo peace process — with staged Israeli withdrawals from Palestinian territories underway and Hamas deeply unpopular among Palestinians — Hamas engaged in a series of suicide bombings to kill civilians in public places. The purpose was not a military victory but rather a rational political calculation on how to best undermine momentum behind implementing Oslo. Then, as after Oct. 7, Israel responded to Hamas’ bait with unrestrained collective punishments, unleashing a fresh cycle of violence which empowered Hamas.
 
In essence, those extremes got what they wanted: the marginalization of peaceful political possibilities in favor of the myth that violence is the only way to deal with the savage other. It is essential that activists not take the same bait. Israel is not simply Netanyahu and his extremist allies, and Palestinians should not be reduced to Hamas.

One can better and more honestly advocate both for an end to Israeli war crimes and Palestinian self-determination by embracing pluralism and agency on all sides. Forgetting this pluralism — and the agency of different Palestinian political actors — undermines the sort of political imagination needed not only to effectively resist Israeli war crimes in the immediate, but to also build a just Palestine in the future.

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More than anything, what is needed is a movement informed by principles that effectively advocates in the immediate — but is also sustained by a vision of the future. The throughline in all of the principles listed above is that forms of resistance are not just tactics, they are how we constitute what such struggles hope to achieve in the future. 

As feminist and gender studies scholar Judith Butler writes, “Liberation struggles that practice nonviolence help to create the nonviolent world in which we all want to live. I deplore the violence [in Israel-Palestine] unequivocally at the same time as I, like so many others, want to be part of imagining and struggling for true equality and justice in the region, the kind that would compel groups like Hamas to disappear, the occupation to end, and new forms of political freedom and justice to flourish.” 

Activism that lacks such a vision of the future, contenting itself with immediate outrage, blinds itself to the world of political possibilities that human agency can bring. Without dismissing the righteousness of such outrage, we cannot be imprisoned by it. There is an urgent necessity to build power in ways that are grounded in self-conscious political practice. A practice that is informed by pluralist agency and engages power via principles of moral clarity, complexity and consistency is the path to movements that create real change. 

This article How can movements advance Palestinian rights this election — and beyond? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.