B4. Radical Ecology

Good-bye 2025, Hello 2026! 2025 was an intense year for politics quite busy on the Green and Red Podcast. We did over 95 episodes, three live events and lots of…

This article Our top stories of 2025 was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This year has seen the most egregious threats and attacks on our democracy and vulnerable communities in decades. But at the same time, courageous Americans have risen to meet the moment — organizing the largest protests in U.S. history.  

However, for much of the year, you wouldn’t know that if you only paid attention to the corporate media. For months, most other outlets bemoaned the lack of protest. If people bought this disempowering narrative — that few were standing up against our rapid authoritarian turn — it risked becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. It was also dangerous because it was simply not true. 

We spent months publishing stories countering this widely-held perception, by documenting how nonviolent actions were proliferating in the spring. Rivera Sun’s exhaustive account of the movement over the first 50 days of the Trump administration was key. We also published a series of stories this year by Erica Chenoweth and their colleagues at the Crowd Counting Consortium with hard numbers on the historic size and scale of the resistance. This research played a critical role in changing the narrative, and was cited in the New York Times, Washington Post and even featured in a segment on MSNBC.  

Indivisible called Daniel Hunter’s article on how to respond if the Insurrection Act is invoked “one of the clearest roadmaps” when they launched their national campaign to help people across the U.S. prepare for the possible domestic deployment of the military. This organizing happened before Trump deployed the National Guard in many cities. When those deployments did occur, communities were more informed, better equipped to understand what was happening, and able to respond more effectively on the ground.

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These stories dominate our most-read stories of the year (see the full list below), but they were just the tip of the iceberg. We also published on-the-ground reporting on movements for democracy, peace and justice from 17 countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Palestine, Peru, South Korea, Turkey and Ukraine. 

2025 was our biggest year yet in terms of impact and readership, with nearly 2 million pageviews. None of this would have been possible without the support of our generous readers. We are so grateful. 

Without further ado, here are our top 10 stories of the year:

10. ‘Tesla Takedown’ underscores the importance of withdrawing consent
By Edward Hasbrouck
The growing protests at Tesla showrooms point to nonviolent tactics that can force change. (February)

9. The resistance reaches into Trump country
By Erica Chenoweth, Soha Hammam, Jeremy Pressman and Christopher Wiley Shay
The large and wide-reaching turnout of No Kings 2 was historic for the pro-democracy movement in the US. (October)

8. DOGE is hiring. The response did not disappoint.
By Rivera Sun
Humor and defiance have played an important role in bleak times throughout history. DOGE’s hiring site has become a focal point for this cathartic—and strategic!—outrage. (February)

7. Resistance to Trump is everywhere — inside the first 50 days of mass protest
By Rivera Sun
The actions of regular Americans are already having an impact as they bravely push back against the administration in a number of ways. (March)

6. New data shows No Kings was one of the largest days of protest in US history
By Erica Chenoweth, Soha Hammam, Jeremy Pressman and Christopher Wiley Shay
The historic number of these protesters and their expansive geographic spread are signs of a growing—and durable!—pro-democracy movement. (August)

5. What would a general strike in the US actually look like?
By Jeremy Brecher
General strikes have played a key role in overcoming tyrants throughout history, so it’s important to understand how we can organize one. (April)

4. We’re seeing the beginnings of mass noncompliance
By Daniel Hunter
Over a million federal workers refused to comply with Musk’s “five things you did last week” email ultimatum, showing what mass noncooperation can look like. (February)

3. American Spring? How nonviolent protest in the US is accelerating
By Erica Chenoweth, Soha Hammam, Jeremy Pressman and Christopher Wiley Shay
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the size and scale of anti-Trump protests this year have dwarfed those in 2017, and they have been extraordinarily peaceful. (June)

2. Resistance is alive and well in the United States
By Erica Chenoweth, Soha Hammam and Jeremy Pressman
Protests of Trump may not look like the mass marches of 2017, but research shows they are far more numerous and frequent — while also shifting to more powerful forms of resistance. (March)

1. What to do if the Insurrection Act is invoked
By Daniel Hunter
With the Insurrection Act looming, now is the time to learn how it might unfold and the strategic ways to respond — including the power of ridicule. (April)

There will be many more stories like these to come in 2026, thanks to generous readers like you!

This article Our top stories of 2025 was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Happy New Year! In our close out to this year, we talk about the best of Green and Red in 2025, those people that impacted us that we lost and…

This article Inflatables, rainbow crosswalks, flooding snitch lines — creative action was off the charts in 2025 was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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This article is co-published with Nonviolence News.

The rise of authoritarianism in the United States had devastating consequences in 2025. It was a year of unrelenting injustice, maddening and terrifying at once. Amidst the cycles of heartbreak and hope, resistance surged to unprecedented levels. Along with mass demonstrations and powerful boycotts, there were countless acts of creative protest that rekindled spirits, made us laugh out loud, and kept us rising up. 

In nonviolent struggle, creativity is an enduring superpower — and we’ve seen it working powerfully for us in 2025. It broke through the stranglehold of fear. It helped us scrape past defeat by the seat of our pants. It tapped into the strategic potential of nonviolent struggle. It gave us a superpower at a time when power seems stacked against us. From Jan. 20 onward, unexpected, unusual and off-the-wall actions kept our movements nimble and courageous. 

Here’s a blow-by-blow of how creativity served us well as millions of people moved into action.

Rev. Budde calls for compassion

In the chilling first moments of Trump’s inauguration, the first person to speak out was Rev. Mariann Budde. During the inauguration mass — with tech billionaires in the front row and hundreds of appalling and destructive executive orders waiting on the Resolute Desk — Rev. Budde invoked compassion, imploring Trump to have mercy for migrants, refugees, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community. This act of defiance stood in stark contrast to the sycophancy and frightened silence that gripped the nation at the time. Trump’s response was petulant and sullen — a reaction that would become very familiar over the next 11 months of cyclical repression and resistance. 

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Rev. Budde’s gentle plea set in motion the first critical wave of strategic resistance that broke through strangling fear and timid self-censorship. Her act of compassionate courage awakened similar responses in others. When thousands of hate letters were sent to Rev. Budde, people across the country rallied to support her, sending numerous letters of gratitude and support. Her action embodied a principled stance not only against the authoritarian slide, but also in the context of the deeper struggle between the politics of hate and the politics of care. 

Rev. Budde’s prayerful remarks set an example for the nation. Next, a hefty dose of humor and feisty, rebellious pranks would fracture the fear-grip people felt in the early days of the Trump administration.

Flooding snitch lines

In the first weeks of Trump’s second term, a set of prankish tactics unleashed waves of protest actions through flooding phone lines, websites and reporting systems associated with objectionable policies. The approach drew on previous campaigns, like crashing Kellogg’s scab-hiring website with fake applications or overloading an anti-trans Missouri tip site with “Bee Movie” script excerpts and fanfiction. A satirical post went viral saying that the ICE hotline was suspended after 90 percent of the calls reported Elon Musk. Originally fictional, the viral post inspired people to call in false reports in one of the first pushbacks against the announcement of massive ICE raids. When DOGE set up a hiring portal to expand its “chainsaw” cuts to public services, people sent in applications from Ebenezer Scrooge, Cruella de Vil, the Grinch, Hitler and Mussolini. When the administration created an inbox for snitching on federal workers who upheld DEI policies, people flooded it with protest messages and false reports.

These tactics tapped into popular fury, offered a relatively safe method of protesting at a time when people were uncertain about attending street protests, and sometimes crashed websites and tip lines. The humorous pranksterism cut through fear and immobilization. It set the stage for riskier, more impactful acts of defiance and resistance to come. 

5 things emails 

As online protest comments rose and the 50501 protests on Feb. 5 demonstrated that the U.S. tradition of protest was alive and well, a message went out to federal workers, institutions and political leaders: do not comply in advance. 

Previous Coverage

We’re seeing the beginnings of mass noncompliance

One of the early forms of mass noncompliance came in response to the obnoxious “5 Things You Did This Week” emails that Elon Musk required from every federal worker. Amidst Musk’s  cuts to federal spending, firing of federal workers, illegal seizures of databases and takeovers of institutions, the requirement was widely seen as an offensive overreach. Over a million federal workers refused to comply. Numerous agency heads — both Trump appointees and ones who were not — instructed their staff not to reply. Unions echoed the call for widespread resistance. Among those who responded, many sent in snarky or mocking responses. The White House Press Secretary claimed that around 1 million federal workers did send in a reply, which indicates that more than 50 percent of the 2.4 million non-military federal employees flat out refused to obey the order even when threatened with losing their jobs. Ultimately, Musk and the Office of Personnel Management conceded and scrapped the requirement.

More than a protest, this action was a direct rejection of Trump and Musk’s tyranny through DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management. It indicated that federal workers would not be in lock-step with the administration — a sentiment their fellow Americans were increasingly making loud and clear.

Acts of defiance

From booing Trump at football games to flipping off Trump Tower, people found numerous ways to voice their dissent, displeasure and defiance. Each time someone spoke up, it emboldened others to take a visible stand, too. 

These protest actions were widely creative and tactically diverse. Upside down flags — a symbol of a nation in distress — appeared across the country, including from the top of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park and at the State Department in Washington, D.C. Statues mysteriously popped up overnight on the National Mall showing Trump and Epstein as hand-holding besties or honoring “dictator-approved” figures like Putin. Singer Nezza belted out the national anthem in Spanish in solidarity with immigrants as federal agents swarmed over Los Angeles. When Trump tried to co-opt the Army’s 250th anniversary military parade for a birthday spectacle, the soldiers trudged sullenly through the streets. The rest of D.C. boycotted the event, holding a D.C. Joy Day in contrast. Rock ‘n Roll legend Bruce Springsteen made a series of blistering speeches against authoritarianism during his international concerts. 

Acts of defiance like these tap into our inner rebels, sparking courage and sometimes even laughter. This kind of defiance keeps people’s spirits up and cuts through the illusion of the authoritarian’s invincibility.

And Canada (of all places) showed the world just how powerful a feisty rebellion can be.

Oh Canada! 

In an attack that stunned everyone, Trump tried to pummel Canada with a set of crushing tariffs and insulting comments about becoming the 51st state. To the surprise of many, Canada ditched its notorious politeness and took a page out of its hockey teams’ “elbows up” fighting spirit. A rapid and widespread boycott of U.S. goods was launched. People cancelled their vacation rentals in the U.S., and border crossings dropped by close to 20 percent. Hats and T-shirts saying “Canada is not for sale” went viral. An anthem singer changed the lyrics of “O Canada” into a firm statement of sovereignty. Trump’s endorsement of right-wing Pierre Poilievre for prime minister turned into a death knell at the polls. When a Canada goose fended off a bald eagle, the photos and video circulated widely. Another iconic moment unfolded when the Canadian national hockey team beat the United States … and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau captured popular sentiment in his post: “You can’t take our country — and you can’t take our game.” 

Previous Coverage

Trump’s tariffs have ignited a wave of economic defiance in Canada

Canada’s fierce resistance to the U.S. ignited over national self-respect, yet it had broader international impacts. Seeing Canadians refuse to be cowed into submission galvanized others around the globe, both everyday people and political leaders. South Africa suspended U.S. businesses in its territories and canceled mineral exports to the U.S. amidst Trump’s threats and bullying. After Canada’s right-wing leader Doug Ford said he would cancel Ontario’s StarLink contracts, a Mexican telecommunications industry giant and billionaire, Carlos Slim, canceled his contracts with Musk, effectively denying StarLink access to 25 countries.

Economic resistance also surged within the United States, becoming one of the most powerful and effective branches of the anti-authoritarian struggle. 

Boycotts and economic resistance

While the historic turnout of 7 million people at the No Kings Protests on Oct. 18 offered a high-visibility glimpse of the movement’s strength, the most powerful strategic engine of the anti-authoritarian movement has been its economic resistance. 

Using protests outside showrooms and humorous trolling of cybercar owners, Tesla Takedown contributed to a crash in sales at Musk’s business, lowering net income by 71 percent, costing the company over $2 billion and 1 million electric vehicle sales. The global campaign helped to pressure Musk into leaving DOGE on schedule instead of extending his stay as he had previously hinted. 

Other economic campaigns had powerful impacts, too. Target Fast made it costly to reverse DEI policies and the business sector noticed. Shareholders of 30 companies worth $13 trillion voted overwhelmingly to defeat a slew of anti-DEI proposals during the 2025 proxy season. Close to 1.5 million people cancelled their Disney+ subscriptions to defend free speech and reverse the suspension of comedian Jimmy Kimmel. Amidst backlash over deportation flights, Avelo Airlines was forced to close its West Coast hubs as the boycott against them picked up steam.

In a struggle that holds stark dividing lines between the billionaires and the rest of us, economic resistance holds strong potential in the coming year. There’s an easily graspable, tit-for-tat logic to the boycotts: “You come after us, we’ll come after you.” It resonates deeply with people’s sense of power, the need for consequences for abusive behavior and people’s intuitive understanding of what’s happening. After all, this isn’t just an authoritarian slide. It’s a billionaire-backed, corrupt authoritarian regime that rewards its wealthy loyalists while imposing economic hardship on everyone else. 

Economic resistance falls under a certain section (noncooperation) of the immense toolbox of nonviolent action that includes over 300 methods of waging struggle in four broad categories: protest, noncooperation, intervention and building alternative systems. Individuals or groups of people engaging in acts of noncooperation organize to withdraw their participation from a system. To encourage more people to use tools like boycotts, strikes, and refusing to obey orders, a group called Freedom Trainers partnered with Indivisible to train over 130,000 people in strategic noncooperation. This helped shift activists to engage in tactics beyond marches, rallies and street demonstrations. Increasingly, they found ways to withhold support, refuse to obey and resist unjust policies. 

Making injustice visible

One of the crucial tasks of any movement is to render the invisible visible. If activists can make the injustices clear in memorable, galvanizing ways, they can bring participants into their campaign and start to sway decision-makers to their side. Whether this looks like older student debt holders holding a knit-in for debt cancellation in rocking chairs or people suffering from long Covid writing testimonials on pillowcases, these dramatic actions bring the issues out of the shadows with symbolism that tugs at heartstrings.

Artist-activists project an image of an ICE agent arresting Jesus in Los Angeles. (Instagram/vjaybombs)

At the Brooklyn Public Library, for example, 20 activists held a banned words protest with signs displaying the words banned from government documents by the Trump administration, including LGBTQ, BIPOC, disability, activists and hundreds more. In the struggle against the immigration crackdown, activists have used light projections on detention centers to show the faces of community members snatched off the streets. Some of the projections also included pictures of Jesus Christ, others displayed the message: “We’re not Nazis. We’re just following orders.” 

As Trump cracked down on “negative history” and tried to erase hard truths about genocide, colonization, racism, patriarchy and climate issues, people rallied to preserve and protect the truth, especially at national parks. When the government tried to get people to report displays of “negative history,” NPS employees and supporters instead sent in socially-just, historically truthful, fact-checked updates to any inaccurate or misleading plaques they spotted. They also posted comments in support of the national parks and employees. On top of that, the “Save Our Signs” Preservation Project set up a publicly-sourced archive of over 10,000 historical and educational placards to preserve them ahead of potential removal. 

One of the most starkly stunning visibility actions has been the “Signs of Fascism” brigades. Dressed in funeral black, groups of 10-20 walk in a single-file line through public spaces carrying black signs with white lettering. Each displays an indicator that the U.S. is sliding into fascism, including “military used on civilians,” “manipulating history,” “voter suppression,” “ignoring due process” and “violating the constitution.” Each time they take action, they raise awareness among the general public that what’s happening is not normal. They bring together the many grievances and often remind onlookers that fascism is un-American. 

Rainbow crosswalks

When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered officials to paint over the rainbow-colored crosswalk that commemorated the Pulse Night Club Massacre in Orlando, Florida, the LGBTQ+ community took action. Showing up on the heels of the Florida Department of Transportation, they repainted crosswalks, not just once, but several times. The tactic spread to other cities in Florida, including Fort Lauderdale where activists also left sidewalk chalk messages that read “Pulse — you will not erase us.” Ultimately, Fort Lauderdale officials voted to keep their rainbow crosswalks. Across the state, people drew chalk rainbows around potholes to indicate places FDOT could do something useful. On Halloween, a group of friends wore colored costumes and laid down in the Orlando crosswalk to recreate the rainbow. To make sure visible symbols of support for the queer community did not vanish entirely, a church painted their front steps in rainbow colors and a restaurant owner turned 49 parking spots into art spaces in support of LGBTQ+ rights. 

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These crosswalks may be symbolic, but erasing celebration of LGBTQ+ people from the public eye is a dehumanizing strategy that can be a precursor to discriminatory policies and further violence. It sends a message that our cities don’t honor queerness, nor will they protect LGBTQ+ people from harm. It’s a shift into the monochromatic bleakness of heteronormativity — a bleakness that activists in Hungary made visible earlier this year when 10,000 people gathered for a mocking “Gray Pride” rally. Protesting a ban on Pride marches, they wore gray clothes and waved gray flags, stripping the color from the world to show the depressing reality of these policies, especially paired with authoritarianism. The monochromatic protest was strange and shocking — and a perfect symbolic embodiment of the issue.

If signs and symbols didn’t matter, authoritarians wouldn’t strive so desperately to erase history, ban books, remove flags, paint over crosswalks, and suppress any visible sign of diversity. 

Everyone Is Welcome Here

We saw a grotesque example of this heartlessness on display in Idaho when a MAGA-supporting school board forced an elementary school teacher Sarah Inama to take down a banner that simply read: “Everyone Is Welcome Here.” Illustrated with the eagerly-raised hands of multiracial students, the banner seemed like a kind message that affirms the dignity of all children. But Idaho school officials claimed it was a political message and forced Inama to remove it from her classroom. 

After a soul-searching night, she put it back up in an act of civil disobedience and social conscience. The students rallied in support, wearing bracelets with the message. When a local print shop was recruited to make T-shirts, they received a whopping 40,000 orders in a few short weeks. Crews of volunteers came together to help fulfill them. Meanwhile, students, teachers, and parents held chalk-ins on the sidewalks in front of several local schools, reaffirming their support for diversity and inclusivity. School officials hosed the heartwarming chalk drawings away. 

The Idaho school officials’ rejection of “Everyone Is Welcome Here” ultimately pressured Inama to change schools. But the widespread support in the community and across the country rallied tens of thousands of people to stand up for basic values of kindness, respect and dignity. 

This is an example of the Aikido effect (sometimes called backfire effect), where activists make an attempt at repression backfire so hard that the opposition wishes they hadn’t meddled with the issue in the first place. This backfire effect took on hilarious proportions when the high court of the United Kingdom walked right into a Banksy art trap. Banksy had put up an image of a judge using a gavel to beat a helpless protester on the walls of the Royal Courts of Justice. The courts swiftly ordered guards to paint over it — and the photos of the censorship were so inflaming that they became even more notorious than the original Banksy art. The fiasco caught global attention because it so perfectly embodied the challenges protesters have faced under increasing censorship and repression. 

When it comes to the Aikido effect, however, nowhere was this displayed better than in a creative response to ICE in Portland, Oregon. 

Inflatable frog

The Portland inflatable frog became one of the most enduring — and endearing — icons of resistance in 2025. Appearing just as Trump was misinterpreting Fox News reruns of old footage as an indication that “war-ravaged Portland” needed National Guards to protect it, a protester in an inflatable frog suit showed up at the local ICE facility protests. Somewhat predictably, the ICE agents pepper sprayed the frog — a reaction so ridiculously unwarranted that it grabbed headlines nationwide and demonstrated that ICE is the actual violent threat. The inflatable frog leaped into an iconic symbol that took the hot air out of the administration’s bluster, making it harder and harder for them to justify their use of armed federal agents against protesters wearing ridiculous costumes. When Portland’s trademark “weirdness” brought out rollerblading protesters, jazzercise and salsa dance classes, yoga groups and musicians, the humorous scene convinced judges and the general public that there was no need to send troops to Portland. 

Previous Coverage

We’re entering a new phase of the resistance

Portland’s inflatable frog protester set off a cascade of other inflatable costumes appearing in cities nationwide, including dinosaurs, unicorns and chickens. As the inflatables caught on, their charming qualities carried the resistance movement through a dangerous juncture. The murder of Charlie Kirk had begun to snowball into an Antifa witch hunt that the administration was trying to use to crack down on the entire left. With vague accusations of terrorism against a group that isn’t a group and doesn’t technically exist, the administration was well-poised to use misinformation to repress “violent” protesters. Instead, they got inflatable frogs dancing in the streets. 

As the nation headed toward the Oct. 18 No Kings protests, Republicans tried to dismiss them as “Hate America Rallies,” a line that fizzled out as the U.S.’ largest single-day protest in history brought 7 million people into the streets, many of them in cheerful, colorful inflatable costumes. 

It was a classic Aikido effect in which disciplined and creative nonviolence made the violent rhetoric, threat of repression and actual violence by the administration look unfounded and even unhinged. The puffy green frogs made it possible to disprove the lies and uphold the truth: We’re just everyday people who want to live in a democracy. 

Portland’s frog was just one of the many iconic, unexpected resistance moments that won hearts and minds as the National Guard and federal agents swarmed across U.S. cities. Each city responded with local flair, perhaps making Americans fall in love with their country in a whole new way.

Whistles and rapid response ICE resistance

As ICE raids crashed down in cities nationwide, locals brought their signature styles to the resistance. New Yorkers got rude and confrontational. Free D.C. made the case for statehood and autonomy. Los Angeles rallied around the 10 percent of the city’s populace who are undocumented. Chicago turned on its fierce, cultural history of organizing. San Francisco promised such ferocious resistance that ICE backed out of their plans. Memphis sued and won. Charlotte ran ICE out of town in 10 days with what was dubbed “bless your heart” resistance. 

At the same time, organizers shared strategies, preparing each city — from Los Angeles and D.C., to Chicago and Charlotte — to be better organized to resist. Know Your Rights trainings empowered tens of thousands of people to thwart ICE or document abuses. Mutual aid networks, often coordinated by faith groups, provided groceries, medical care and child care for targeted migrant communities. Lawyers won injunctions against National Guard deployment faster and faster. City governments and state attorney generals set up reporting websites for cataloging illegal or abusive behaviors. Municipal governments banned ICE from city property. 

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Door-to-door canvassing with Signs of Solidarity trained business owners in how to create safe spaces for migrants. Teachers unions from Los Angeles to Chicago coordinated lookouts, safety corridors and protective accompaniment for migrant families and students. Cyclists and community members bought out tamale vendors’ stock so they can go home early and stay safe. Groups handed out thousands of whistles to alert people to the presence of federal agents, rally a crowd and raise a ruckus until the agents left the neighborhood. 
One creative action that brought a smile to tens of thousands of people as the video went viral on social media happened in Washington, D.C. Someone followed federal agents around blaring the Star Wars Imperial March on loud speakers. Storm troopers deserve a soundtrack, after all.

And so much more

There are many more examples of creative nonviolent actions that could be mentioned. Satire was in fine form throughout 2025, despite having difficulties keeping up with the ludicrous, unbelievable nonsense coming from politicians. California Gov. Gavin Newsom trolled Trump by mimicking the president’s social media style. The Onion — known for its “laugh until you cry” satire — took out a full page ad in The New York Times calling on Congress to do nothing. In France, a Dutch artist put up a mural depicting the Statue of Liberty covering her face in shame over the U.S.’ cruel immigration policies. The N.I.C.E. Agents in Canada ripped the U.S. ICE’s heartless policies by contrasting them with basic decency. 

The surge in creativity was not confined to the U.S. Amidst immense Gen Z uprisings in Kenya, Nepal, Morocco, Mozambique and beyond, humor and social memes mobilized millions of people to take action against authoritarians, corruption and economic hardship. The arrest of Istanbul’s mayor sparked carnivalesque protests. 

As we close out a year of unprecedented nonviolent resistance in the United States, the key takeaway is that irresistible creativity bolsters our hearts, emboldens our spirits, breaks through fear, dispels lies, makes the administration’s violence backfire on them and gives us a wildly diverse strategic power that can help us win. May 2026 deliver even more creative action as we deepen, broaden and intensify our efforts for social justice, democracy and change.

This article Inflatables, rainbow crosswalks, flooding snitch lines — creative action was off the charts in 2025 was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article After COP30, Indigenous narratives are more important than ever  was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

As last month’s COP30 climate negotiations unfolded in Belém, Brazil, activists converged on the city to advocate for keeping fossil fuels in the ground and protecting carbon-rich ecosystems. At the center of large public demonstrations in Belém were an unprecedented number of people from Indigenous, Afro-descendant and other communities with deep ties to traditional lands.

COP30 stood out from other recent U.N. climate summits, partly because of the key role Indigenous representatives played. It also featured large protests after three successive years of the annual COP summits being held in countries whose governments are friendly to fossil fuels and hostile to dissent. 

“For the first time since 2021, we saw major climate protests inside and outside COP,” said Yurshell Rodríguez, who attended as a member of the Indigenous and community-led group If Not Us Then Who? “Indigenous delegates were there not just to participate, but to lead.”

In all, more than 900 representatives of Indigenous nations and Indigenous-led groups attended COP30 as registered participants, while thousands more advocated outside the negotiations. At least 385 distinct Indigenous nations were represented, including over 300 from Brazil alone. 

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Under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil has projected the image of a country eager to lead on climate and sympathetic to demands from its Indigenous population. Brazil’s Minister for Indigenous Peoples, Sônia Guajajara, played a key part in COP30. Partly as a result, activists had high hopes that the summit might lead to breakthroughs for global recognition of Indigenous land rights.

Not all these hopes were realized. However, events at COP30 showed that the role of Indigenous peoples as defenders of Earth’s climate is gaining widespread recognition, despite the slow rate of progress toward returning lands to Indigenous control.  

“Social movements are connecting dots the official COP negotiations avoid,” Rodríguez said. “Our message is clear: You want climate solutions? You need us.”

Centering Indigenous voices 

Rodríguez’s path to attending COP30 began when she was growing up in Colombia. Home to around 10 percent of Earth’s biodiversity and the third largest expanse of Amazon rainforest, Colombia is also at the center of centuries-old struggles against colonization. Rodríguez, who belongs to Colombia’s Afro-Indigenous Raizal ethnic group, grew concerned at an early age about how extractive industries endanger both communities and Earth’s climate. 

In 2018, Rodríguez was one of 25 young plaintiffs in a groundbreaking lawsuit that led Colombia’s highest court to rule that the government must do more to curb deforestation. Over the next few years, she attended COP climate summits in Madrid, Glasgow and Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. She also became a trainer for If Not Us Then Who?, which seeks to elevate Indigenous voices in conversations about climate change.

“Sometimes protecting nature looks like resistance,” Rodríguez said. “It looks like communities confronting governments that want to exploit their land and forests.”

Rodríguez’s work brought her to the attention of Health In Harmony, an international non-governmental organization that supports community-focused efforts to protect rainforests in tropical countries. The organization was looking for ways to communicate the importance of this work while uplifting communities with ties to land.

“We realized community stories needed to be at the front of the climate narrative, because climate science just goes right over many people’s heads and governments are failing to make good on their commitments,” said Ashley Emerson, who oversees Health In Harmony’s international programs. 

Rodríguez got involved in Health In Harmony’s Community Thriving Narratives project, which sought to put technology and storytelling tools directly in the hands of communities in Panama. With support from the FSC Indigenous Foundation and Ulu Films, Rodríguez led multiple three-day trainings in Panama’s Darién province. Over 40 people attended, practicing skills like video and audio recording, smartphone filming and using editing software.

Central to this project was the idea that Indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups should have “narrative sovereignty,” telling their own stories without having to go through intermediaries. 

“Having an Indigenous person who’s experienced similar struggles lead the training is important,” Rodríguez said. “Being an Afro-Indigenous woman myself means I can help people feel safer, respected and seen.”

The original plan for the project in Darién Province was to document traditional practices like face painting, language preservation and water management. But then things took an unexpected turn.

In March, Panama’s government passed the controversial Law 462, which changes the country’s Social Security Fund, opening the door to privatization and putting thousands of pensions at risk. This directly affected communities with whom Rodríguez was working.

“At that point, they decided to document this current reality,” Rodríguez said.

That pivot toward focusing on an ongoing policy crisis reflects an important truth: Solutions to climate change involve not just regulating emissions, but protecting the well-being of communities whose roots to a place make them the best defenders of ecosystems.

Resisting threats 

“Sometimes protecting the forest means resisting the systems that are harming it,” Rodríguez said. This can entail fighting back against policies like Panama’s Law 462. 

In the spring, people in Darién Province and throughout Panama mobilized to protest the new law with marches, a teachers’ strike and nonviolent road blockades. National Police responded by firing pellets and tear gas at protesters and imprisoning community leaders. While Law 462 remains in place, community leaders remain determined to push for its repeal. 

Rodríguez worked with Darién residents to make short films documenting the violence and other challenges they face. The videos are available on YouTube, and their creators hope disseminating them on social media will help draw worldwide attention to the struggles in Darién Province. 

International organizations like Health In Harmony have also mobilized to support Panamanian activists. 

“We used our platforms to raise funds for areas that face food shortages from disruptions caused by the police violence,” Emerson said.

Indigenous leaders’ calls for climate justice at COP30 were similarly entwined with concerns about threats to their communities, both from resource extraction and violence against those who speak out. According to advocacy group Global Witness, 146 land defenders around the world were killed or disappeared last year alone. 

During one COP30 protest, members of Brazil’s Indigenous Munduruku Nation blockaded the main entrance to the part of the conference where official negotiations took place, to peacefully protest extractive activities on Munduruku lands. Despite such actions, COP30 concluded with no roadmap to phase out fossil fuel use or deforestation — but outside the main negotiations, countries announced some significant new programs. These include an international fund launched by Brazil to help developing countries protect tropical forests, which aims to raise $25 billion.

Fifteen governments also announced an Intergovernmental Land Tenure Commitment, part of a global effort to recognize and protect 160 million hectares of Indigenous and community-held lands by 2030. Questions remain about how national governments will make good on this promise. However, if they follow through, COP30 could represent a turning point toward greater recognition of Indigenous land rights. 

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Land defenders are prepared to hold governments accountable, in part by elevating the voices of those who stand up to extractive industries.

“We are working to build and strengthen a continental network of Indigenous and Afro-descendant storytellers,” said Rodríguez. 

As part of this effort, Health In Harmony and If Not Us Then Who? are looking to spread the Community Thriving Narratives model beyond Panama. Brazil, whose vibrant Indigenous and land-based movements helped set the tone at COP30, is one likely area for expansion.

“Our long-term vision is simple,” Rodríguez said. “Restore narrative sovereignty, amplify frontline voices, and shift global climate conversations toward justice and self-determination.”

This article After COP30, Indigenous narratives are more important than ever  was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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The 1970s was the decade that changed the television landscape forever dealing with issues of race, gender, sexuality to the war in Vietnam. No show broke the barriers of turning…

Over the past twenty years, one state after another has shuttered its youth prisons and stopped trying youth as adults, slashing the number of children locked in cages by a…

In Wallmapu, Chile, the situation of Mapuche youths Lientur Millacheo and Jaime Huenchuñir—the first individuals in Chile to be prosecuted under the country’s newly revised Anti-Terrorism Law—has worsened, according to their spokeswomen. Both young men are currently held in the Temuco Penitentiary, where their families report that they have been subjected to torture and what they describe as direct political persecution by the Chilean State.

This article Palestine solidarity in Ukraine is all about shared experiences was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

As Russian attacks were keeping Kyiv’s residents awake most nights this summer, a group of Ukrainians gathered outside the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide to protest Israel’s siege of Gaza and aid blockade. The Palestinian population was being systematically starved, and millions around the world took to the streets to protest. Both Ukrainians and Palestinians have been facing their own similar struggles with war, occupation and ethnic cleansing, which is motivating Ukrainian solidarity with Palestinians. 

The symbolism of the protest location was important. The museum in Kyiv is a place commemorating all those who died in Ukraine due to a man-made, Soviet-induced famine in the 1930s. 

Nataliya Gumenyuk, a war journalist and co-founder of the Public Interest Journalism Lab, said, “among Ukrainians there is a particular sensitivity regarding the use of starvation as a weapon against humans.” The Public Interest Journalism Lab was one of the media organizations participating in the global action to protect press freedom in Gaza, which demonstrated international outcry for all Palestinian journalists killed while reporting in Gaza. During the campaign, which was organized by Avaaz and Reporters Without Borders, journalists and media outlets from all over the world held vigils and joined protests for their fallen colleagues, calling for the protection of Palestinian journalists and an end to Israeli impunity for systematically targeting them. 

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When asked why it was important for her, as a Ukrainian, to protest what is happening to Gaza, Gumenyuk said that those who feel pain understand best those who feel the same. “I think the suffering doesn’t make you numb, but instead, it really lets you understand how horrible the situation is.” 

Gumenyuk explained that the solidarity actions outside the Holodomor Museum protested “the bombardment of the civic infrastructure, occupation, torture and arbitrary detention, which have become the reality of Palestinian women and men.” All of these realities Ukrainians also face. 

For Taras Bilous, an editor at Commons, a Ukrainian journal of social criticism, solidarity with the plight of Palestinians existed long before the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023. “I became interested in the Palestinian issue in 2020,” Bilous said. “One of my friends fled from Donetsk to Israel in 2014, where he made friends among the Palestinians. It was much easier for him to communicate with them; he understood their experience of occupation.” His friend couldn’t find similar common ground with Israelis about his experiences with war. 

Bilous facilitated coverage of Palestine on Commons, including interviews with Dana El Kurd, a professor of Palestinian and Arab politics, and Palestinian-Ukrainian humanitarian researcher Rita Adel Mohammed. In November 2023, Bilous and Gumenyuk were also signatories of the letter published in Al Jazeera, where 300 Ukrainian scholars, activists and artists expressed their solidarity with the people in Gaza.

As Russia’s war in Ukraine is about to enter its fourth year, Bilous said, “Our war has brought me closer to, and given me a better understanding of, the experiences and feelings of people going through other wars.” He explained the importance of building bridges with others facing similar injustices across the world. “For me, pro-Palestinian activism is simply part of the overall struggle for a just world and efforts to build international solidarity despite the geopolitical rifts that divide us.” 

Indeed, some Ukrainians have built bridges with Syrian activists, given their shared experiences of Russian militarism and the targeting of civilians. Ukrainians in the diaspora are able to organize actions with other activists who are also in exile due to war or persecution in their countries. For example, the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign joined the Syria Solidarity Campaign in the U.K. to protest against Russia’s and Assad’s attacks on civilians. 

Ukrainian journalists are no strangers to the perils of war reporting: At least 17 journalists and media workers reporting in Ukraine have been killed since Russia’s invasion. In Gaza, where Israel has denied the foreign press access, 270 Palestinian journalists have been killed, which constitutes the highest documented number in any recorded conflict.

This common experience has become a reason for making the connection between the two wars and occupations. Gumenyuk said, “we’re losing our colleagues in the Russian war against Ukraine but also, it’s painful to see how the journalists were killed in Gaza. Way more journalists.” 

Gumenyuk explained that Ukrainian journalists cannot work in the parts of Ukraine that are occupied by Russia. For example, Victoria Roshchyna, a Ukrainian journalist who dared to report from the Russian occupied territories was forcibly disappeared and killed in detention. Similarly, other Ukrainian journalists released from captivity, like Dmytro Khyliuk, speak of horrific torture. 

Gumenyuk explained that unlike Gaza, Ukrainian journalists are free to report in most of Ukraine. “We have political and civil freedoms. We can do whatever we want, and of course there is danger, but we feel secure,” she said. “In Gaza, this is not the case. Journalists are vulnerable to the bombs and attacks and are completely cut off from the world.” 

Despite the efforts of activists, there are still pro-Israeli sympathies among the Ukrainian population. “Unfortunately, some of Ukraine’s supporters are pro-Israel, and some of Palestine’s supporters are pro-Russia,” Bilous said. “We are trying to influence this as best we can. But this issue is not generally so acute in the Ukrainian public sphere because we have our own war.” 

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Bilous explained that he would like to see Ukrainians and Palestinians show “some grace for each other’s struggle for justice,” and make more connections between the solidarity movements around the world. 

For Gumenyuk, solidarity for Ukraine is dependent on others. “Ukraine is really asking for global solidarity, and I think it won’t be possible to ask for any solidarity unless we express ours to the Palestinians,” she said. “The case of Gaza shows our nightmare scenario.” 

Reflecting on the days she and her comrades stood outside of the Holodomor Museum, holding placards calling for the cessation of atrocities against the people of Gaza, Gumenyuk said, “Even if not a large action, it did happen, and even if it represents a small chunk of us, we still show up for these united actions.”

This article Palestine solidarity in Ukraine is all about shared experiences was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Via our Fiscally Sponsored Program, Instituto Resiliencia (Galicia) On the occasion of the publication of “Las verdades incómodas de la Transición Energética” (The Uncomfortable Truths of the Energy Transition), a group of Philosophy students from the Autonomous University of Madrid conducted this interview with the author, Manuel Casal Lodeiro, in the spring of 2025. Read […]

In a wide-ranging discussion w/ the eminent historian of Latin America Aviva Chomsky we laid out the motives and purposes of Trump’s aggression against the region currently ongoing. We began…

This article Holiday shoppers are flexing political power through big boycott campaigns  was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

For 38 weeks straight, racial justice protesters have been gathering outside a Target in Washington, D.C. to call out the company for suspending its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts, aligning itself with the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI. 

To put additional pressure on the company, those advocates have been calling for “Target fasts,” in which people completely abstain from purchasing anything from Target. 

The boycott began in February, following Target’s suspension of DEI efforts, and was initiated by Until Freedom, a nonprofit organization dedicated to community activism and rapid response. At first, Until Freedom co-founder Tamika Mallory often heard people say that they didn’t feel like they could give up shopping at Target. Now, she said, momentum has picked up — people are happy to be part of the movement and distance themselves from Target completely. 

As the holidays rapidly approach, the Target fasts are one of a number of boycotts in protest of ongoing attacks on marginalized communities. Led by coalitions that support Palestinian liberation, immigrant rights and racial justice, boycotts have reached millions via social media and exercised solidarity with other movements and coalitions to amplify their messages. Several are going beyond social media to put multipronged pressure on companies — through in-person actions like the Target protests or “buy-ins” in which protesters purchase and return items to clog up sales lines. Organizers are also getting more sophisticated in educating consumers to make boycotting easier.  

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“I think people are looking for ways that they can express their frustration and pain, and we believe that corporations should not get a pass [to] side with the bigotry coming out of the Trump administration or stay silent while communities are harmed,” Mallory said. “We know our economic power is something that we can use that is actually very influential in the marketplace.”

Black Friday and beyond

During the long weekend of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the bonanza shopping days after Thanksgiving, Until Freedom worked with a coalition of more than 300 social justice organizations to boycott corporations that have rolled back DEI policies or supported federal immigration raids. In addition to Target, that campaign, called “We Ain’t Buying It,” took aim at Home Depot — which advocates say has been complicit in the kidnappings of day laborers by federal immigration agents — and Amazon, which has funded Trump and his administration through donations and discounted government contracts (including with Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

“The campaign became an effort that has many different advocates engaged under one umbrella, and that umbrella was to ensure that we begin to flex that muscle of using our economic power as our voice,” Mallory said.

Separately, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement launched a holiday protest campaign on Black Friday. For BDS, the boycott is a familiar tactic: Since 2005, the movement has been calling upon people and organizations all over the world to sever ties with companies that support Israel, taking inspiration from how the international boycott movement against South Africa contributed to the end of apartheid in 1994.The BDS movement takes credit for getting corporations like G4S, Puma and Pillsbury to cut ties with Israel, and its efforts and impact have intensified since the genocide in Gaza began in October 2023. For example, the BDS movement began targeting McDonald’s last year when the fast food chain provided the Israeli occupation forces with meals during the genocide. Last February, McDonald’s CEO admitted the boycott was having a “meaningful business impact,” and the company’s stock subsequently dipped by $7 billion.

Protesters in the Netherlands support the BDS call to boycott McDonald’s. (Instagram/eindhoven4palestine)

This holiday season, the BDS movement is focusing on McDonald’s and 11 other priority targets who make giftable products and whose technology and services have enabled Israel’s ongoing genocide:

• Xbox, whose parent company Microsoft provides Israel with technology like artificial intelligence that has been used in the genocide and to uphold a regime of apartheid
• Amazon and HP, which provides computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence and other technology services to the Israeli government and the Israeli military. 
• Dell and Intel, which have invested in Israel
• Reebok, which sponsors the Israel Football Association
• ZARA, which opened stores in Israel during the genocide
• Disney+, which promotes actors like Shira Haas and Gal Gadot who have done PR campaigns to help burnish Israel’s image during the genocide
• Sodastream, which displaced Palestinians in the Naqab (Negev) region to build a factory.
• Carrefour, which has a partnership with Israeli start-ups on artificial intelligence and cybersecurity
• Coca-Cola, which operates a regional distribution center in the occupied West Bank during the genocide 

While the holiday boycott campaigns have reached millions on social media, neither the BDS movement nor Until Freedom could comment yet on how they impacted Black Friday sales. “We can sometimes hear about how a boycott campaign has impacted the profits of a corporation when they have quarterly earnings reports or annual shareholder meetings,” said Olivia Katbi, North America coordinator for the BDS movement. But boycotts are often a long game, she added. “Even if a specific day of action doesn’t directly or immediately impact profits, we see long-term effects through spreading awareness of a campaign and impacting the reputation of the corporation.”

BDS solidarity efforts

For Katbi, the holiday spirit is one of solidarity. “This holiday season, Palestinians are asking for meaningful solidarity as they endure Israel’s illegal occupation and Palestinians in Gaza face ongoing genocide despite the so-called ceasefire,” she said. “We must escalate pressure and peacefully disrupt all forms of complicity to contribute to ending Israel’s unspeakable genocide and to dismantling its regime of settler-colonial apartheid.”

Several groups have stepped up to join the BDS movement in that fight. Christians for a Free Palestine and the BDS movement called for protests during the Advent season leading up to Christmas, during which advocates will hold pickets at Chevron stations and engage in caroling “with a twist.” The book of carols includes “We wish you would boycott Chevron” (to the tune of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,”) with verses like:

Good tidings we bring
For Gaza we sing
Don’t profit from war crimes
So switch the franchise.

Chevron is the largest producer of natural gas for Israel and the largest multinational corporation with a significant stake in Israel’s energy sector. The campaign also includes petition deliveries, rallies, emailing or calling Chevron, signing and sharing pledges, and leaving comments about the boycott on Chevron’s social media accounts. 

Bay Area residents amplify the BDS call to boycott Chevron in July 2025. (Instagram/nofuel4apartheid)

Earlier this month, a group of game workers and activists joined the boycott of Xbox by launching a campaign called “No Games for Genocide.” One video game developer has already pulled its game from the Xbox Store, saying: “We call on others in our community to do whatever they can to fight this historic injustice.” 

When Ahmed Bashbash, a Palestinian from Gaza now living in Budapest, first started getting involved in boycotts, he would screenshot and save posts from the BDS movement so he could memorize which companies to abstain from. When his brother died in Gaza in October 2023, Bashbash wanted to do something more to honor his memory, so the following month he created an app called “No Thanks” to make it easier to figure out who to boycott. The app lets people scan an item to see if the company that made it is on the boycott list.

Bashbash originally intended for the app to be used among friends, but it went viral and has become a tool for the Palestinian solidarity movement worldwide, with 13 million downloads. At first, Bashbash did his own research to find companies to add, but now he has a team of volunteers to help him.

“The boycott is one of our tools as normal people around the world, because we are not governments, we are not people in power to be able to stop these things,” Bashbash said. “What we can participate in is to boycott the companies and products and governments behind this genocide and all of this occupation.”

ICE boycotts

Immigrant justice advocates are similarly grappling with how ordinary people can find ways to protect their vulnerable communities. In Southern California and elsewhere, one of the ways this has manifested is an ongoing Boycott Home Depot campaign. 

Since the summer, Home Depot has been a frequent site of federal immigration round-ups in which day laborers are targeted and kidnapped by masked agents. Palmira Figueroa of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, or NDLON, said it is important to put pressure on the company to actively oppose the raids.

Protesters rally outside a Home Depot in New York City in December 2025. (Instagram/New York Immigration Coalition)

“We’re calling the corporation to speak up about the abuses happening right outside the stores and sometimes inside, and to take a stand on saying that what is happening should not be happening because it puts everyone at risk, not only immigrants,” Figueroa said.

As part of the campaign, advocates protest outside of Home Depot stores, use social media and rallies to educate consumers about how the company is complicit in ICE raids and kidnappings, and engage in buy-ins to disrupt sales. 

In late November, outside of a Home Depot in Monrovia, California where a man was killed trying to escape an ICE raid, NDLON and other advocates held a buy-in: where more than a hundred people bought and returned ice scrapers from Home Depot to disrupt sales. After that, NDLON held a national call on which 800 people signed up to learn how to do buy-ins so they could replicate them in their own campaigns.

“It’s nonviolent escalation that comes from the pain and the separation of families and the hurt that our families are feeling,” Figueroa said.

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John Parker, coordinator at the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice and a member of the steering committee for the Boycott Home Depot campaign — a coalition of more than 80 organizations — said that some of the Home Depot protests have been successful in closing down stores for the day. The boycotts are spreading as people learn about them through videos on social media and passersby see the protests and take an interest in the campaigns, he said. He is seeing more people upset with the facism from the Trump administration and wanting to do something about it.

“It’s a good way to try to build empowerment for the working class,” Parker said. He hopes the boycotts will keep growing. Eventually he would like to see them turn into a movement to shut down ports in Los Angeles in solidarity with Palestine. 

“Our biggest, most powerful weapon is solidarity,” Parker said.

This article Holiday shoppers are flexing political power through big boycott campaigns  was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

While, maybe, in murky legal waters, Attorney General Pam Bondi is building out the infrastructure for greater spying, policing and prosecution of social movements, and anyone else deemed an enemy…

This article The American peace movement we need today was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Throughout U.S. history, broad citizen-led peace movements have played influential roles in generating political pressure, changing war-promoting policies and constraining militarism. These movements have helped elevate new solutions to security challenges, such as guiding the formation of the United Nations after World War II and sparking U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms control in the 1980s.

We surely need a bigger, bolder American peace movement today, with a broader agenda that includes support for democracy and the redesign of our country’s peacebuilding and development policy architecture. The new movement we envision will also unite in shaping how policymakers and the public approach a range of rising conflicts — from looming wars in the Caribbean and Pacific, to a new nuclear arms race, to domestic instability in American cities and towns. The time to (re)build that movement is now.

2025 has been a historically bad year for the peace community in the United States and beyond. U.S. military spending is fast approaching $1 trillion per year, while global funding for peace efforts — previously estimated at 0.5 percent of all military spending — is being slashed to even lower levels. The renamed U.S. Department of War increasingly talks about projecting more “lethality.” At the same time, key institutions like the U.S. Institute of Peace are being dismantled. And the U.N. system is increasingly sidelined or paralyzed in the face of raging wars and atrocities across the world.

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The United States now appears on the brink of a larger war with Venezuela; yet, the extent of Congressional and public debate and mobilization regarding such a war has been paltry, compared, say, with the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003. Globally, a new nuclear arms race is taking shape, and leaders are contemplating a resumption of dangerous weapons testing, ending a 30-year moratorium. And at home, the vast majority of Americans across the political spectrum are concerned about growing politically-motivated violence. 

U.S. peace organizations have mounted some important public responses, such as the growing “Call to Halt and Reverse the Nuclear Arms Race” petition. Peace activists have most certainly contributed to the broader protests against growing authoritarianism and deployments of military forces on U.S. streets. But for the most part, the American peace movement does not have the broad reach or message to mobilize action that can garner political attention and counter the march toward more militarism at home and abroad.

Building blocks exist for the future peace movement

It was not long ago that peace activists showed great ability to mobilize public action and debate. In early 2003, millions of people joined protests against the Iraq War in hundreds of cities around the world and in the United States. This included hundreds of thousands of people marching in New York City on Feb. 15, 2003. As one of us (Cortright) has documented, these protests exerted pressure on President George W. Bush in those early months of 2003 (including compelling more engagement with the U.N. Security Council), shaped longer-term policy shifts (including the eventual withdrawal of forces), and contributed to President Barack Obama’s election in 2008.

In parallel with activism, peace studies and practice grew significantly in recent decades. There are now over 200 peace and conflict studies programs at colleges and universities across the U.S. Peace research and training have become more sophisticated, with support from institutions like the U.S. Institute of Peace. With data and evidence, we developed a better understanding of the causes of violent conflict, ways to de-escalate and resolve conflicts, and the keys to build sustainable peace over time. Scores of civil society organizations have emerged to support this work, many of them now connected through the Alliance for Peacebuilding. 

As peace work has become more mainstream, though, it has become more professionalized and technocratic in nature. In some ways, this has led to silos and the creation of an “elite class” of peace professionals, disconnected from grassroots activism and political mobilization. That dynamic — and the need to change it — is becoming clearer to many of us in this moment of profound disruption. The many Americans who have studied, researched and engaged in enhancing peacebuilding work and related efforts on climate change, democracy and human rights can provide building blocks for a future American peace movement. To do so, they will need to better connect with traditional peace churches, associations and activist groups.

Building the movement we need

Based on the research on effective social movements, we see three keys for (re)building the American peace movement we need now.

1. Develop and promote a winning message. An effective peace movement for this moment needs a broad message that speaks to the militarization happening abroad and at home. It should also make the essential connection between sustainable peace and genuine democracy, and articulate the distinct value of making investments in peace at all levels of society. Movements need visionary goals, such as a world without nuclear weapons, but also practical, achievable policy objectives, such as halting the development of new nuclear weapons. And they need to frame that message in terms of values and choices with which individual supporters can connect. Notably, according to a recent poll, the vast majority of Americans — including MAGA supporters — would support investing in peacebuilding to help end the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Media communications, including savvy use of new technologies, will be key to framing and promoting that message when ready.

2. Unite a broad and more diverse coalition. As noted, there are significant building blocks for the peace movement if existing groups can break down silos and come together around a shared vision and agenda. Beyond that, there needs to be outreach and engagement with a wider swath of citizen organizations (think Rotary Clubs, with their tradition of promoting peace), religious communities and veterans groups who can be allies in this work. And, as we have learned more acutely over recent years, there needs to be greater engagement and cooperation with Black, brown and Indigenous communities who have traditionally been underrepresented in American power structures and have rich experience of driving political and social movements.

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3. Engage in institutional politics. The movement needs to utilize political systems to incentivize specific policies that can reverse militarism and enable investments in future peace. This work is most effective when it avoids partisanship and focuses on a specific policy agenda. The emerging campaign to prevent a new nuclear arms race can point to the strong bipartisan support that assured the success of the arms reduction agreements negotiated by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. The Global Fragility Act, which mandates increased U.S. support for conflict prevention and peacebuilding, was passed in 2019 with solid bipartisan backing, although its implementation has been hindered by bureaucratic and political challenges. 

We are aware of several promising ways in which peace groups are already grappling with the imperative of renewed activism and are contemplating action in cooperation with others to counter authoritarianism and protect U.S. democracy. One of us (Quaranto) is co-leading a new project with the Alliance for Peacebuilding to chart a vision and agenda for rebuilding the U.S. peace and security policy agenda. These broader initiatives could be combined with specific policy campaigns — such as avoiding armed conflict in the Caribbean and preventing the resumption of nuclear testing — as the basis for building the kind of inclusive American peace movement we need for today and tomorrow. 

This article The American peace movement we need today was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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This article Learning from Myles Horton’s legendary career in social movements was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Over a career that spanned more than 50 years and touched on some of the major American social movements of the 20th century, Myles Horton established himself as one of our country’s most renowned popular educators. 

Horton was a key founder of the Highlander Folk School, later reformed as the Highlander Research and Education Center after it was shut down by Jim Crow officials in Tennessee in 1961. The adult education program maintained deep ties to working people in the South and played an important role in the labor upheavals of the New Deal era in the 1930s. Furthermore, by the 1940s, it had emerged as one of the few integrated institutions in the region, a place where white activists and people of color could learn and strategize together for their common liberation. 

Rosa Parks famously attended Highlander before returning home and declining to give up her seat on a segregated bus. Among the other prominent names in the civil rights movement who walked its grounds were Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Septima  Poinsette Clark, Andrew Young, John Lewis and Dorothy Cotton. But Highlander’s impact is properly measured less by the luminaries it influenced than by the countless unheralded union shop stewards and local community leaders who were enriched by coming together to study and struggle with others who faced similar challenges in their lives, and who left inspired to make greater contributions to creating change. 

Septima Clark (right) and Rosa Parks (left) at the Highlander Folk School. (Library of Congress)

Sometimes referred to as a “hillbilly radical” or “hillbilly intellectual,” Horton is best known as a pioneer of progressive pedagogy. But as someone who spent his life navigating the ups and downs of social movements, he also developed important insights into the cycles of mass mobilization and patient preparation that often characterize organizing life. Horton at once built a lasting movement institution and grew skeptical of organizations that became overly bureaucratic and outlived their usefulness. Understanding how he balanced these tensions, and how he believed organizers could effectively intervene at different moments in a movement’s life cycle, remains valuable for those continuing the fight for social justice today. 

A people’s pedagogy

Myles Horton was born in 1905 in Savannah, Tennessee. His grandfather was illiterate but had a keen mind and a healthy disrespect for the habits of the area’s wealthy powerbrokers. Raised by schoolteacher parents, Horton grew up in a religious atmosphere of hard work and devotion. At age 15, he left home and supported himself by working to build crates in a tomato packing plant and taking on other odd jobs.

Always working in and among communities of people in Appalachia, he knew early on that education was a calling, and in 1924 he entered Cumberland University to pursue a degree, while continuing to spend his summers teaching Presbyterian Bible classes in the Tennessee mountains. Around 1929, Horton managed to get a spot at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City, a place that he would later claim greatly enlarged his perspective. Horton jokes that he was accepted not because he was academically prepared but as a kind of “token hillbilly” — one of the few students from the rural South. At Union he studied with renowned socialist and pacifist theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, with whom he began to wrestle with ideas of the social gospel, a Protestant movement that used Christian ideals to argue for a committed progressive assault on poverty and other social problems.

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Over time, Horton became more secular in his worldview, but these early lessons would remain. He would come to agree with Che Guevara’s famous statement: “Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love.” But for Horton, this idea was an outgrowth of his religious roots: “Love people, that’s right out of the Bible,” he explained. “You can’t be a revolutionary, you can’t want to change society if you don’t love people, there’s no point in it.”

Horton continued his education at the University of Chicago, where he studied with sociologist Robert E. Park and developed his earliest notions of forming a school. His greater influence, however, came from visiting Denmark in 1931, where he studied the country’s folk school movement. Launched in the mid-19th century by poet, philosopher and pastor N. F. S. Grundtvig, the Danish folk schools emphasized communal, experiential learning which integrated music and folk knowledge. On his last night in Denmark, Horton wrote: “I can’t sleep, but there are dreams. … You can go to school all your life, you’ll never figure it out because you are trying to get an answer that can only come from the people in the life situation.”

He left Denmark determined to start a similar school in the Southern Highlands of the United States, and he jotted a list of lessons he would bring with him:

“Students and teachers living together
Peer learning
Group singing
Freedom from state regulation
Nonvocational education
Freedom from examinations
Social interaction in nonformal setting
A highly motivating purpose
Clarity in what for and what against.”

When Highlander was founded in 1932, it would be for the training of “effective labor leadership and action” and for using “education as one of the instruments for bringing about a new social order.” This mission would soon bear fruit with the explosion of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, after 1935. Working with these unions, Highlander spearheaded a program for preparing shop stewards and labor educators. “Within two years Highlander became the official CIO educational training center for the entire south,” Horton wrote. In 1937, Horton himself helped to organize one of the first CIO locals of textile industry workers, including white and Black workers alike, in the region.

Horton, Clark and other civil rights organizers meeting at the Highlander Folk School. (Highlander Center)

In the 1950s, after the labor insurgency lost steam, Highlander became a key support system and training ground for the growing civil rights movement. Horton worked with local activists in South Carolina to develop programs that could prepare African Americans to pass literacy tests and vote. They then brought the lessons back to Highlander and, under the leadership of Septima Poinsette Clark and Bernice Robinson, developed them into a program for spreading Citizenship Schools across the South. These initiatives became a major mechanism for recruitment and personal development in the burgeoning movement, creating a base of volunteers for activist campaigns. Highlander also played a pivotal role in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, having served as the location of early meetings for student leaders who organized sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. Moreover, singers at Highlander were instrumental in adapting and popularizing “We Shall Overcome,” which became a central movement anthem.

Officially, Horton retired in the early 1970s, handing off the management of Highlander to younger colleagues. Yet he remained an active participant in the center’s programs, and he was an important voice in international discussions about popular education until his death in 1990.

Living through movement cycles

Many social movement theorists and practitioners — Sidney Tarrow and Bill Moyer notable among them — have written on how movements progress through up-and-down cycles. What is distinctive about Myles Horton is how he lived through several major movement cycles during his long career, worked to adapt Highlander’s role amidst them and later reflected thoughtfully on his experience.

“Highlander’s always been in the mountainous part of the United States,” the educator once stated, “and our history at Highlander has been an up and down history, peaks and valleys and hills and hollers.” Horton believed that the course of social movements mirrored this hilly topography. And he used the metaphor of peaks and valleys to describe these different movement periods. 

At the peak were what Horton called “movement times,” or periods of intensive social movement mobilization. He contrasted these with the valleys in between, slower and less dynamic times which he called “organizational periods.” Knowing which type of time period they are living through helps social movement participants determine what avenues for productive activity are open to them. 

Horton wrote, “The best educational work at Highlander has always taken place when there is social movement. We’ve guessed right on two social movements — the labor movement in the 1930s and 1940s, and the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. During movement times, the people involved have the same problems and can go from one community to the next, start a conversation in one place and finish it in another.”

These periods do not last forever, though. After the disbanding of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, which amassed in Washington, D.C. for several months in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Horton saw Highlander as primarily working in valleys. He wrote in the late 1980s about how this was distinct from a movement peak: “Now we’re in what I call an organizational period, which has limited objectives, doesn’t spread very rapidly and has a lot of paid people and bureaucracy. It’s completely different from what takes place when there is a social movement.”

Martin Luther King Jr. speaks at the Highlander Folk School. (Highlander Center)

Horton did not believe you could do much to spark a new movement upsurge. But you could try to prepare for them. “During organization times you try to anticipate a social movement, and if it turns out that you’ve guessed right, then you’ll be on the inside of a movement helping with the mobilization and strategies, instead of on the outside jumping on the bandwagon and never being an important part of it,” he argued. The essence of this work is preparing “the groundwork for a larger movement. That way, you’re built into it when the momentum begins.”

Although he did not elaborate extensively on his vision for the “spadework” — as Ella Baker called it — necessary in organizational periods, he suggested that these slower times were critical for developing the consciousness and capabilities of movement participants. “The valley periods can be used just to kill time and survive, or they can be used to lay the groundwork of being inside when a movement occurs,” he said. “That’s what makes it possible for us to have peak periods.”

The unique properties of peak mobilizations

For those of us who study movement cycles, and particularly those who have worked to map dynamics of peak mobilizations, a number of interesting observations by Horton stand out.

Periods of intensive movement activity — what my brother Paul and I describe in our book “This Is an Uprising” as “moments of the whirlwind” — are often unpredictable and generally poorly understood. Many people tend to downplay their significance, including political observers outside of movements, who regard outbreaks of mass protest as fluke occurrences. But it includes many organizers as well, who see whirlwinds as unreliable and therefore unimportant. 

Myles Horton did not downplay peak periods. Instead, he highlighted a variety of their distinctive characteristics.

First, he identified how mass mobilizations promote autonomous action among movement participants and members of the public. Horton saw movement times as unique periods in which ideas spread quickly and participation expands rapidly. He wrote, “It’s only in a movement that an idea is often made simple enough and direct enough that it can spread rapidly. Then your leadership multiplies very rapidly, because there’s something explosive going on.”

Horton told the story of an older community member in a Southern town who told him about creating her own Citizenship School, teaching people to read as a means of preparing them to vote and increasing their political engagement. She was not aware that an extensive network of such schools had been developed by movement groups including Highlander and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC. Horton speculated that “She’d probably been to a conference where somebody was talking about Citizenship Schools,” and the concept was intuitive enough that “she could pick it up and make it her own.” Far from being an isolated example, it is common in mass mobilizations that tactical repertoires disseminate rapidly and are reproduced organically.

Acts of courage become contagious. “People see that other people not so different from themselves do things that they thought could never be done,” Horton explained. “They’re emboldened and challenged by that to step into the water, and once they get in the water, it’s as if they’ve never not been there.”

Second, Horton notes that, by their nature, movements are polarizing. They elicit mass participation not by creating great unity in society, but rather by highlighting controversies potent enough that people are motivated to throw down. “A large social movement forces people to take a stand for or against it, so that there are no longer any neutrals,” he wrote. “You’ve got to be on one side or the other.” 

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While polarization can provide powerful benefits to movements, it also has downsides. “It’s true that it forces some people to be worse than they would be, more violent than they would be,” Horton noted, “but it also forces some people to get behind the cause and work for it and even die for it.” 

We have argued elsewhere that this balance of polarization’s positive and negative potentials must be carefully managed. That said, the conflictual nature of movement challenges is not an unfortunate development that can be avoided through better social dialogue. Instead, it is an inherent part of the process of change. As Frederick Douglass stated long ago, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground.”

Horton echoed this sentiment, writing: “People have to understand that you can’t make progress without pain, because you can’t make progress without provoking violent opposition. If enough people want change and others stand in their way, they’re going to force them out of the way.” 

Third, Horton observed that movement surges rely on a type of momentum that is not generated by ordinary organizational activity. During organizational periods, “which is most of the time,” he stated, groups will work to achieve limited short-term goals. But this does not propel significant participation by the general public, even if many groups are working toward common aims. Organization, in this way, does not make a movement moment. But once a whirlwind period starts, members of existing groups respond to the polarizing call of mass mobilizations, and the leaders of these groups can choose to feed into the energy. 

Horton wrote that: “During the civil rights movement, for instance, people came out of the labor movement, the Black churches, the pacifist movement; people came who wanted social equality, and once the movement got under way, people who wanted to be where the excitement was were in it, people who wanted to get rid of their guilt were in it — it was so big that there was room for everybody.” 

Among mass protest trainers we work with in the U.S., there is a saying that: “Alignment does not create momentum. Momentum creates alignment.” As much as we might like it to be, putting together a perfect coalition of groups that agree on a common set of demands is not a recipe for revolt. Instead, it tends to produce a lowest-common-denominator form of unity. On the other hand, a movement in motion has a way of joining a wide range of forces in pursuit of a common vision, often one more ambitious than many would have selected themselves.

The problem of bureaucracy

In Highlander, Horton helped establish an organization that has endured for generations. He titled his memoir “The Long Haul,” upholding the value of persistent struggle. And yet he also voiced a critique of the bureaucratizing tendencies of institutions — even progressive ones. This combination made him a very interesting observer of organizational life.

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Because their prescriptions fly in the face of much common organizing practice, some of the leading theorists of disruptive mobilization, such as Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, have been accused of being “anti-organization” or of skewing anarchistic in their analysis of the role of institutions in creating progressive change. Horton recognized the importance of organizations. Without them, people acting merely as individuals would be limited in their effectiveness. At the same time, he was skeptical of how institutions had a tendency to ossify and lose their vitality over time. 

In “The Long Haul” Horton wrote, “I came to realize that things had to be done through organizations. I knew that people as individuals would remain powerless, but if they could get together in organizations, they could have power, provided they used their organizations instead of being used by them.” He added, “I once wrote something about organizations, saying that they end up in structures and structures become permanent and most of them outlive their usefulness.” 

Having witnessed the labor movement go from a disempowered low in the early 1930s to becoming part of the American Cold War political establishment by the end of the 1950s, Horton developed a critique shared by much of the New Left, which looked skeptically on the new power brokers: “I came to the conclusion that the bureaucratic system is an inevitable disease that afflicts all organizations and governments,” he wrote. “Often it is spread by good people who are made to do bad things — or less than good things — because of their separation from the people who were the original source of their power.” 

Wary of such bureaucratic institutionalization, Highlander remained an outsider group. Horton contended that “Highlander’s chief interest is in starting up programs.” The school looked to intervene in drives for change by finding needs that others were not meeting and remaining experimental. “We avoided implementing programs that other less cutting-edge organizations or institutions were doing,” Horton wrote, “[and] tried to find ways of working that did not duplicate what was already being done. To be true to our vision, it was necessary to stay small and not get involved in mass education or in activities that required large amounts of money (which would make it tempting to do the kinds of programs that money was available for).”

Horton considered Highlander to be an incubator of new social movement projects, which he was willing to spin off and pass on to others once they were established. When the center’s interventions were developed enough to scale, they would hand them off to other institutions. “We solved the problem of staying small by spinning off programs that were already established and were willingly taken over by organizations less interested in creating new programs,” he explained. 

The Highlander Folk School welcome sign marks the original Tennessee location. (Wikimedia/Bryan MacKinnon)

Highlander carried out this process in the 1940s by allowing the CIO to take over its programs for training labor education directors and shop stewards. Later, in the 1960s, it handed off its program to create Citizenship Schools to the SCLC. “The Citizenship School project eventually became too big for us; in fact, it became bigger than all the rest of Highlander put together,” Horton argued. “When it gets to that stage, other people can take it over and operate it.” 

“These spin-offs enabled Highlander to concentrate on cutting-edge programs that no one else in the region was undertaking,” he later added.

“One battle, many fronts”

The lens of social movement ecology helps us to understand how Horton settled into a particular niche within progressive movements in the 20th century. This framework contends that distinct organizing approaches and theories of change can each play valuable roles in movement drives. Mass protest, structure-based organizing, inside-game politics, alternative institutions, and programs of personal transformation all make important contributions — although their relative importance can rise or fall at different moments in the cycle of change. 

Viewed through this lens, it becomes clear that Horton primarily operated from the place of building an alternative institution and promoting education as a means of personal transformation. While he supported mass protest and structure building, he saw his main role as something different, and he tended to avoid insider politics altogether.

Late in his life, Horton undertook a series of fascinating dialogues with Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” and other writings have become cornerstone texts for many progressive teachers. Their discussions revealed some interesting differences between the two thinkers. Two prominent differences relate to how Horton situated himself within the movement ecosystem. 

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Freire had at times been appointed to important educational roles in different levels of Brazilian government. He explained that he favored taking on the system from “two fronts,” developing independent projects from the outside while also burrowing into state institutions. This process might be described today as “contentious co-governance,” and it has been pursued by Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, as it has worked to get its ambitious programs of rural, adult education adopted as state-sanctioned programs. 

Horton, on the other hand, believed in operating as an outsider. He eschewed the mechanisms of the state and expressed wariness of unions, nonprofits or membership organizations if they grew too bureaucratic or professionalized. This pushed him away from inside-game interventions or structure building, and it kept him primarily rooted in alternatives.

Another difference is that Horton insisted on a difference between education and organizing. The purpose of education, he believed, was to develop people as independent thinkers, able to analyze society and make decisions for themselves about how to change it. Organizing, in contrast, is about bringing people together around a specific goal. “[E]ducation makes possible organization, but there is a different interest, different emphasis,” Horton stated. In contrast, Freire saw education as “a permanent process” that takes place prior to organizing but also afterwards. “[U]ndoubtedly there is a different kind of education in mobilization before taking power, and there is also the continuity of that,” even after movements make gains, he believed. 

Once again, Horton’s stance reinforced the idea that his contribution to social movements might be complementary to structure-based organizing, but would remain distinct from it.

In his important 1984 study, “The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement,” sociologist Aldon Morris characterized Highlander as a “movement halfway house,” or “an established group or organization that is only partially integrated into the larger society because its participants are actively involved in efforts to bring about a desired change in society.”

“What is distinctive about movement halfway houses is their relative isolation from the larger society and the absence of a mass base,” Morris wrote. This isolation means that halfway houses, by themselves, can not effectively leverage change or garner widespread support in the public. But, as alternative spaces, they can cultivate a variety of resources that become very valuable to movements. Among these, Morris lists “skilled activists, tactical knowledge, media contacts, workshops, knowledge of past movements, and a vision of a future society.”

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Serving as a halfway house, Highlander did not seek to directly intervene to reform dominant bodies in the way that a political campaign or a protest movement making demands on specific politicians or business leaders might. But, like other alternative institutions, the school modeled alternate ways of being in the world. And it increased the capacity of groups in other segments of the ecology to function effectively. As Horton explained: “I’ve always taken the position that Highlander was not in the business of organizing, or even of training organizers, but in education for action, and in helping to develop social leadership.”

A slogan that Horton adopted from a well-known folksinger might be seen as his articulation of a movement ecology perspective: “A few years ago the singer and activist ‘Utah’ Phillips gave me a little pin that says, ‘One Battle, Many Fronts,’” Horton wrote. “The one battle is to rebuild this country, but there are many fronts for dealing with revolutionary change.”

Ultimately, Highlander became an influential institution during Horton’s lifetime, and it continues to do valuable training and support for movements, particularly in the South. But it did not scale in the way he had initially envisioned: “When we established Highlander, [co-founder] Don West and I were sure there would be Highlanders in every state. A dozen or more attempts to start Highlanders were made in this country, but none succeeded.” 

In spite of this, Horton’s work offers a compelling model of how popular education can contribute to progressive change, fostering critical thinking in slow times and accelerating the spread of radical ideas during movement peaks. “The nature of my visions are to keep on growing beyond my conception,” he explained near the end of his autobiography. “I think there always needs to be a struggle … because there ought to be growth. You die when you stop growing.”

Research assistance provided by Celeste Pepitone-Nahas

This article Learning from Myles Horton’s legendary career in social movements was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article How memes and humor are fueling Gen Z’s global uprisings was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Over the course of 2024 and 2025, Gen Z has shaken the globe. Organizing large-scale anti-authoritarian protests — and in the cases of Nepal, Madagascar, Bangladesh and Peru, ousting heads of state — Gen Z-ers showed that they are anything but the disenchanted, anemic age group Boomers have dismissed as apathetic about “real-world” problems.

Aside from the extraordinary bouts of youth mass mobilization across seven countries and counting, one element uniting these movements has been the sharing of memes and playful images. 

On their surface, these elements may appear to be nothing more than this generation’s expressive medium, or perhaps another potential marker of a lack of seriousness. But humor is, in fact, a large part of how young people have always engaged in moral and systemic critique. Like generations before them who used satire and jokes to speak out when formal political channels were closed, Gen Z uses music, dance, playful facial and bodily expressions, and images of funny encounters with police and other authoritative bodies to defy systems of power. 

For example, a common trope of the recent Gen Z 212 movement in Morocco was seeing young people passively defiant during arrest — raising peace signs or smiling for the camera while being detained.

A group of young Moroccan protesters pose for a selfie in the back of a police van after being taken into custody during a protest. (Instagram/_laughbdarija_)

Not to be confused with attempts to signal peaceful protest, such gestures convey youth rebelliousness. They infuse tightly controlled public spaces with disobedience, sarcasm and fun — values authoritarian governments often seek to suppress as incompatible with their tight-fisted rule. 

Last year, during Kenya’s Gen Z protests against proposed tax hikes, videos circulated showing young Kenyans dancing in front of armed riot police. In one, a young boy shakes his bottom in the face of soldiers walking toward him with guns. In another a young woman dances and twerks in front of two officers who are standing with rifles, seemingly unsure of how to handle the situation. 

These images are strikingly parallel to those of German youth during the Third Reich who participated in swing dancing as a rejection of fascist military-style discipline. By flaunting and moving their bodies in ways that went against the regime’s “clean” image of Nazi youth, young people ridiculed attempts to indoctrinate them.

Dancing, smiling and having fun shakes the cloak of authoritarianism by revealing the misplaced priorities of state leaders and the limits of their control. As the guerrilla theater activist Reverend Billy once said, “Once we understand we are controlled by clowns, you can be a clown yourself.” 

Humor as resistance

Scholars of resistance have long shown the importance of sarcasm and satire for nourishing defiance in oppressed communities. Backhanded comments, subversive attire, subtle jabs and jokes act as “weapons of the weak” against the elite to express opinions otherwise suppressed in public. Authoritarian power in particular rests on totalizing control. Therefore, humorous songs, stunts, parodies, cartoons and posters can be covert forms of resistance, making it acceptable to discuss taboo topics in civic spaces.

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In many cases, these civic-comedic interplays precede or emerge alongside mass movements. For example, from 1998 to 2000, participants in the Serbian movement Otpor used performative tactics, such as donating blood to hospitals to symbolically beat bloodthirsty leaders to the punch and sarcastically “give them” what sustained their rule. The protests eventually led to the downfall of President Slobodan Milosevic’s authoritarian regime.

During recent anti-corruption uprisings in Peru and the Philippines, social media users shared pictures of state leaders and their cabals flaunting expensive jewelry, luxury vehicles and lavish properties. Such images are frequently set alongside images of the majority of the population living in dire socio-economic conditions — and, in the Philippines, of ordinary Filipinos dealing with dangerous flood conditions, which the country’s leaders have failed to address in recent years.

Juxtaposing people’s everyday realities with the unattainable lifestyles of the rich and the famous is facilitating what scholar Majken Jul Sørensen calls a “culture of resistance.” In the Philippines, this nascent culture overcame political apathy to mobilize street protests calling out corrupt politicians for their mismanagement of public funds. In Peru, such images similarly fueled mass critique and protests that prompted former President Dina Boluarte to step down.

Who are the weak and what are their weapons?

The Philippines and Peru are glaring examples of the paradox many members of Gen Z find themselves in. They are told that they are at the height of economic progress, innovation and global wealth, however they don’t feel the positive impacts. 

There are more millionaires now than at any other time in the past. Artificial intelligence is opening a trove of new opportunities that can be leveraged to maximize human capacity. Compared to past generations, young people have more access to education, work and leisure. The only thing supposedly setting the “have-nots” apart from the “haves” is the effort they put in to take advantage of such opportunities.

A young woman dances in a TikTok video captioned in Spanish: “The government says Mexicans have savings to deal with a recession, hahahahaha if only they knew that I have to borrow money just to buy my coke and Cheetos when my paycheck runs out and they think I have savings.” (TikTok/paulinaperez073)

But as the last year of protests has certainly shown, the reality on the ground is much different. Stagnant job markets and a constant state of economic precarity, even for those with advanced degrees, runs counter to such faulty narratives of “progress.” The global impacts of climate change, racial capitalism and endless conflicts are felt more in the day-to-day experience of those who have least contributed to them, while these same people are denied the benefits of technological innovation. If anything, technology has only strengthened authoritarianism as young people witness social media and messaging apps aiding the erosion of democratic rights and the expansion of police states. 

Gen Z uses humor to point out such inconsistencies. For example, in social media content leading up to last month’s Gen Z-led protests in Mexico, young people sarcastically compared their economic reality to that of past generations, mocking their own lack of stability and long-term job prospects.

Such videos reject the ideals of progress, development and innovation which, for years, have justified squeezing the workforce in pursuit of corporate profits. They contrast such capitalist ideals with the lived experiences of young people, drawing on a longtime practice in Mexican culture of using humor as a platform for political participation.

Playfulness as political critique 

Such content also makes protest and social change seem fun and inviting. Politics becomes about pleasure and play. One TikTok video from the Gen Z uprising in Nepal shows protesters taking a break to play UNO as a crowd around them laughs and cheers. In other videos, young Nepalese protesters dance in front of government buildings, drive tractors or play instruments against the backdrop of Taylor Swift’s, “Shake It Off,” in stark contrast to the chants and marches that define traditional protest. 

Images center on leisure and its centrality to a normal quality of life — one that has been chipped away by the exploitative capitalist practices driving young people to protest in the first place. They envision an alternative system inclusive of joy and fun as values to aspire to.

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What some dismiss as this generation’s attempts at driving the attention economy on social media has real social and political weight. Like generations before them, Gen Z wields humor to engage in social and political debate. They use sly digital content to demonstrate the limits of state power, denounce exploitative capitalist practices and imagine an alternative system conducive to a meaningful life.

The use of humor and sarcasm is a moral and systemic critique of all that’s failed them. But it is also an exercise in learning from those failures to replace them with something better, or at least more fun.

This article How memes and humor are fueling Gen Z’s global uprisings was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.