Waging Nonviolence

This article Inside the resistance to Spain’s crackdown on migrants in Ceuta was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On July 30, images streamed across TVs, social media feeds and newspapers of thousands of people approaching a fence along the beach, in boats and by foot. Migrants, including children and families, were attempting to cross into Ceuta, a Spanish enclave bordered by Morocco. Facing violent border guards and the threat of drowning, over 70,000 people made it to Ceuta, with hopes of eventually reaching the Spanish mainland. Officials in Ceuta said that 100 people died in the crossing — either by drowning or being crushed — and sources on the ground believe the number was higher. 

“I lost my phone, my money, my ID card, everything I had,” one Moroccan teenager recalled. “At one point I got pulled to the bottom, so far down that my feet touched the sand. When I looked around me, I saw women and babies who had drowned.”

“There was no proper humanitarian response from the local authorities — whether it is basic hygiene, food or shelter,” said Ric Fernández, coordinator and spokesperson for humanitarian and migrant advocacy group No Name Kitchen, or NNK, about the first days after the mass crossing. “Instead, there was an institutional response of pressuring people to ‘voluntarily’ return to Morocco. … There was repression, violence against people on the move in every form — legal, administrative and physical, and the forced expulsion of people.”   

Facing intense pressure and violence from both the Spanish police and military, within 96 hours most people returned to Morocco. Estimates about how many migrants remain are in flux, but the Spanish government said in late September that up to 10,000 people are still in Ceuta.

While the global mainstream media quickly moved on from this story, the situation in Ceuta has remained tense over the last three months, with increased violent harassment by the police, evictions and collective expulsions. In recent weeks, “voluntary returns” and evictions from makeshift camps on the beach have ramped up.

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Irene Estébanez Gutiérrez, a family and community doctor in Madrid, spent two weeks in Ceuta as a volunteer. “An information campaign has been waged that portrays people on the move as invaders, violent and dangerous,” she said. The media coverage, she believes, has failed to adequately address “the resulting humanitarian crisis, the systematic violation of rights, the lack of protection for minors, and the systematic violence and discrimination to which people are being subjected to, particularly by the military.”

Those who remain include Moroccan men and women, alongside Sudanese, Syrians, Palestinians, Malians and Nigerians. According to NNK, a significant number are minors. They are still stranded; the majority of them have slept in the street or in makeshift tents since they crossed into Ceuta over two months ago. 

Kora, who uses a pseudonym as an activist to protect her identity, arrived in Ceuta to volunteer in early August and found the violence and the lack of access to basic necessities particularly angering. The authorities were “not letting them access the supermarkets to get food or water,” she said. “They turned off the publicly and freely accessible water [to shower or drink] on the beaches and beat them or scare them in the middle of the night … to purposefully making their lives more miserable.” 

Organizing solidarity, facing criminalization

This violence, however, did not prevent activists and migrants from developing forms of organizing and resistance. Hundreds of migrants staged a protest on a popular beach in Ceuta in August to demand asylum. On Sept. 21, Migreurop, a Euro-African network of organizations, activists and researchers that monitors European migration policies, noted in a joint statement with over 100 organizations: “We have witnessed forms of resistance in everyday survival practices.” They mentioned the sharing of information, food and medicine, as well as safety and protection practices. 

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Besides migrants’ self-led efforts, civil society has stepped up to help, with the Spanish Red Cross distributing food at Trampolín Beach, the site of one makeshift camp. Other local charities like Luna Blanca, have been providing between 2,700 and 3,500 meals a day in five locations with initial funding from the Spanish government. NNK, a group started by Serbian activists in 2017 that supports migrants along the Balkan and Mediterranean routes to the EU, has been working in Ceuta since 2021. It has grown from a fixed team of four to more than 21 volunteers, after a call for help in early August through social media and Signal groups with other grassroots organizations providing aid to migrants in EU borders. Operations have shifted in the three months since the migrants arrived, and NNK is now cooking and serving over 1,200 meals a day in a new industrial-size kitchen. 

Fernández shared how the group has adapted its work on the ground to keep up with a crisis situation. “For more than a month [after July 30], we were not able to do proper legal accompaniment, because the system was broken and we were just trying to register people,” he said. “We tried to divide our work into four different teams: legal, health, cooking, awareness.” To keep things coordinated, aid groups in Ceuta hold a weekly meeting to share information and needs. The most pressing needs are for immediate humanitarian assistance, including clothes distribution, housing for vulnerable groups and phone charging. 

Volunteers arrive from Spain and mostly other European countries, contributing what they can based on their experience. “I provided direct basic health care because of the barriers to accessing medical care and the huge health needs due to violence and living conditions,” said Irene, the doctor who volunteered with NNK. She said she assessed dozens of cases involving wounds or injuries resulting from assaults, mostly perpetrated by the Spanish military. 

The hostility of authorities toward migrants has also extended to volunteers, who carry out their daily work under intense police monitoring. Police constantly ask for identification documents and conduct searches, including of food containers meant for distribution. Reprisals against volunteers and grassroots groups have taken multiple forms, from administrative fines to criminal charges of “trafficking.” A volunteer who had previously spent time in Ukraine and Syria reported that the seven-square mile enclave of Ceuta felt considerably more militarized than either of those countries.

Lessons learned and the way ahead 

Spain’s response to the people who crossed into Ceuta has been shocking to many observers, especially for a country that has been considered among the more progressive in the European Union on migration. This comes at a time when states are slowly beginning to implement the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, a new and comprehensive reform to migration management which includes a focus on external borders. Legal advocates argue that this pact, coupled with the use of emergency laws, could suspend migration and human rights law in the EU during mass border crossings like the one in Ceuta. 

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Solidarity groups have also come under attack and are looking for ways to move forward in this new atmosphere. Greece is among the first countries to implement the pact and one that has led the way in criminalizing humanitarian efforts to support migrants. This increasing criminalization is happening “through the misuse of the criminal justice system to target and persecute activists and people in solidarity for their work, as well as through administrative law, such as harsher requirements for the registration of civil society organizations,” said Eleni Sirri from the Border Violence Monitoring Network, a network of NGOs, associations and collectives that monitors human rights violations at and within European borders. 

Anna Gruber is the advocacy manager from Collective Aid, an NGO working with migrants in the borderlands of Serbia, Bosnia and Greece. She shared how Collective Aid also had to reorganize and strategize about the way ahead, given the increase in crackdowns on humanitarian work, as well as the anticipated changes because of the EU pact. “We are now focusing more on capturing conditions in detention, [and] mapping deaths and disappearances on the borders,” she said. “While these are hard to trace, bringing all the scattered evidence we can find together helps showcase the EU’s focus on detention camps and the containment of migration that is at heart of the new pact.” 

Like other groups navigating the criminalization of migration and anticipated changes under the new pact, NNK feels it is important for grassroots groups across the EU and beyond to come together around migrant rights. Fernández believes putting energy into growing networks and collectives of grassroots groups is the way forward. “The far-right in Europe and instrumentalization of migration will continue to grow,” he said. “We need to prepare for that and learn from each other to be stronger.” 

Kirsten Dimovitz, the advocacy coordinator for the Border Violence Monitoring Network and a volunteer in Ceuta, contributed additional reporting to the story.

This article Inside the resistance to Spain’s crackdown on migrants in Ceuta was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Beating burnout in social movements requires strategy was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

I recently showed up to a protest for the first time in months, looked around, and thought: “Who the hell are all these people?” 

Friends I could once rely on running into at protests when I was younger were missing. 

The fact that I hadn’t been to a protest in months was unusual. I’d had a hard season of exhaustion and cynicism, and I felt I was falling out of the loop. In the last few years, I turned 30 and moved back to my hometown, and the once-intense focus on social movements that I had in my 20s was now jostling for attention with work and family. 

The absence of my comrades at that protest seemed to signal that others, too, had burned or faded out of organizing.

It’s a trend that Chris Dixon describes in his new book, which is about sticking around for the long haul in the fight for a better world: “In radical activist scenes especially,” he writes, “people tend to age out by their 30s, if not before.” 

When the manuscript of Dixon’s book came my way, it spoke to my fear of burning or fading out of the movements that have given my life meaning and momentum. (I sit on the editorial collective of Between The Lines Books, and helped select the book for publication; it was released in September 2026.) 

After a few recent boom-and-bust cycles of uprisings — 2020’s Black liberation uprising, the Palestine solidarity protests that kicked off in 2023 — it’s a timely and thoughtful book about building movements with care and commitment.

Dixon (who unfortunately shares a name with a far more famous American crypto bro) is an anti-authoritarian activist and a scholar of social movements. “For the Long Haul: How to Stay in the Fight for a Better World” is the latest effort in his lifelong project to understand how social movements are built and sustained.

Dixon grew up in Alaska, and the book opens by describing his decades-long friendship with Ruth Sheridan, an anarchist who was in her 70s when she first came to talk to his eighth grade labor history class. That early curiosity — about how left-wing social movements are built and sustained and the unsung activists who make it happen — showed up in his 2014 book “Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements,” in which he shared lessons from almost a decade spent interviewing organizers across the U.S. and Canada. 

Now, Dixon has reached back into this same conversational archive to write “For the Long Haul.” 

We meet Bill Stivers, an elder communist Dixon befriended as a teen; Rachel Herzing, the co-founder of prison abolitionist group Critical Resistance; the political prisoner David Gilbert with whom he exchanged letters from jail, and many more. 

These lifelong leftists share their observations about what leads to burnout, the many-headed monster that has long stalked social movements. During this time of totalizing neoliberalism and weakened movement infrastructure, it’s grown especially powerful. These movement veterans counsel us to be patient, open-minded and to “practice being nobody special.” 

Dixon tells the story of Stivers who, at the age of 76, travelled from Anchorage, Alaska to the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico to attend the Zapatistas’ Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism. It was just a couple years after the militant group’s armed uprising and a young Dixon, more swayed by a European left tradition at that time, looked on with skepticism. But Stivers ended up having the more clear-eyed assessment of this new approach to anti-capitalist struggle. Stivers had cultivated the long view, which helped him avoid cynicism and dogmatism, and encouraged him to keep learning and stay open to new developments.  

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What I found most helpful about the book was Dixon’s formulation of burnout: he sees it not just as a type of overwork or exhaustion, but as a feeling of defeat that becomes more common because of a lack of strategy. Dixon introduces this idea by sharing a conversation he had with Kim Marks, a direct-action environmentalist and Indigenous solidarity organizer in Oregon: “So much of burnout is about not being effective,” she said, “and so much ineffectiveness comes from not having a plan.” 

Dixon traces the ways that people often burn out of activist groups back to this underlying lack of strategy. When a group promises sweeping change but never decides how to take the first step; when a group gets mired in discussions about internal structure or politics and stops taking outward action; when a few veteran members shoulder a huge amount of work while new ones struggle to find meaningful ways to pitch in; when a group is hastily cobbled together to address a crisis then falls apart just as quickly after an unsuccessful campaign — all of these are instances in which a lack of strategy leaves people feeling defeated, ineffective and worn-out. 

A good plan can pull groups out of these exhausting spirals. This involves mapping the current political landscape, articulating our goals, making agreements about what to do and how to support each other in doing it, and then evaluating our success and learning from our mistakes.  

Dixon writes about the importance of imbuing this strategy-setting with care and intentionality, to “help people to talk frankly about workload, make reasonable estimates of what they can do, and look out for one another’s well-being.”

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You can find many of these same encouragements — for rest, care and intentionality — in the pages of any self-help book. But the goal of capitalist self-help literature is to create an individual who is independent, sane and productive enough to keep cranking the handle of profit-making machines. 

Dixon’s help is different: it’s not for the individual, but for the collective. At the end of the day, “sustained involvement in movements is fundamentally a collective activity, not an individual one,” he writes. No amount of advice given to or followed by the individual can stop the pattern of burnout and disengagement that’s become endemic in leftist spaces. 

As a result, Dixon focuses on collective care rather than self-care. This can look like preparing food for the picket line, planning for childcare and legal support at the direct action, or tending to hurt feelings after the meeting. He calls care work “a crucial — and too often overlooked — foundation for the long haul.”

For Dixon, care is not just a way to make organizing more pleasant for the people doing it, or a moral imperative if the left wants to keep claiming the high ground. Instead, he sees care as a strategic imperative. When we make our political commitments with care in mind, Dixon writes, it forces us to ask ourselves and each other if what we’re committing to is reasonable and tactical. And when it is, we become more likely to stick around for the long run, and also more likely to win.

Not one of Dixon’s ideas stands without a quote from an organizer, an example from a movement or a reference to a movement scholar’s work. One of the book’s main contributions is its vast bibliography — a full third of the pages are suggested reading and endnotes. 

Dixon’s form of activist research is highly attentive to insights that are gleaned from a person’s own experiences. Like this observation by anti-authoritarian activist Helen Hudson, who draws on decades of organizing with prisoners to form her analysis of how the state uses prison to weaken movements: “Prison isolates the prisoners from support,” she told Dixon, “but also deprives younger generations of radicals from the experience of revolutionaries who have much to teach us.”  

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Dixon encourages younger readers like me to find these people in our own lives — older activists like Stivers and Sheridan who show us that it is possible and lovely to live an ordinary life of unflagging commitment to the left. 

This is not an organizing manual (though Dixon does recommend a few of those in his suggested readings). Instead, what he gives us is a deep study of left-wing dynamics and some broad strokes toward sustainability. The people likely to get the most from this book are those of us who have already gone through many cycles of boom-and-bust social movement activity, and who are looking for fuel that burns longer and cleaner. 

And it’s by paying attention to Dixon’s rigorous practices of listening and sharing that readers will get the most out of this book — leaving not just with a handful of advice, but with an initiation into a practice. 

This article Beating burnout in social movements requires strategy was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article How Vermont shut down ICE was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

After Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration moved to rein in the Bovino-style spectacle with its made-for-TV arrests. In an attempt to avoid another public outcry, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has quietly settled into a new rhythm.

Arrests have still increased month after month, reaching a record high of roughly 51,000 people taken into ICE custody in August. This is part of a new surge — carried out in hospitals, courthouses and airports — with an intent to stay off the nightly news. As The New York Times reported, this phase is “captured mostly by grainy security camera footage, through cracked blinds and from behind closed doors.” 

This phase is also backed by a dragnet of data. At airports, ICE has been running name matches with TSA to detain people at check-in counters and gates. It has found a backdoor into the country’s license-plate cameras: Records show local and state police ran more than 4,000 immigration-related searches on Flock’s camera network in a single year. (Yet another reason Flock cameras should not exist.)

Perhaps surprisingly, much of the tech infrastructure driving ICE’s new surge is headquartered in … Vermont. The town of Williston, outside Burlington, is home to both ICE’s Law Enforcement Support Center, which houses the agency’s national tip line, and ICE’s National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center, or NCATC, its social-media surveillance hub. 

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As ICE tries a new approach, this new phase of resisting ICE requires moving to more offense — and the people of Vermont are offering us some clear lessons. 

Vermont resistance

Resistance started with the fight over flights. Early in Trump’s second term, activists documented ICE moving detainees onto commercial flights out of Burlington’s airport — more than 450 people as of mid-July 2025, by their count. They showed up in airports as witnesses and disruptors, sometimes aided by empowered flight attendants. They forced an ICE retreat: organizers say ICE hasn’t moved detainees through the airport in more than a year.

More recently they’ve gone after the hard infrastructure. Sit-ins at the White Cap Business Park in Williston, where the NCATC facility is located, have led to arrests for allegedly blocking the entrance to the ICE offices, including 11 people in February and 13 in July.

After those arrests came some unusual twists, which speak volumes about the courage it takes to refuse unjust orders and to continue protesting in the face of repression.

Complicity and noncooperation

Responses to authoritarianism are as old as a time — many of the same dynamics from Vermont show up in the ancient story of Pharaoh and Moses.

Undeniably the most powerful person in his land, Pharaoh was the ultimate authoritarian. His big trick was taking beautiful work and turning it evil. Take the work of midwives, whose job is to usher life into the world — he turned that work into ugliness by ordering the Hebrew midwives to kill every newborn boy. 

But we all have a choice. And famously, several of the midwives refused. Their act of noncooperation with an unjust order is the reason Moses lived.

We are living through a moment when institution after institution is being turned toward evil. Some, like the Department of Justice, were already a mixed bag. But now it is being turned against the very logic of due process it claims to serve, as we’ve seen recently with the criminal indictment of whistleblower Cassidy Hutchinson. Other institutions, like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are being perverted, with great resistance from insiders who cling to the key values that these agencies were founded on.

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In Vermont, the local prosecutor, Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George, faced her own choice. When asked to bring charges against the protesters who held the sit-ins, she repeatedly declined, citing limited resources. That makes sense: No one was harmed, and the protesters have a strong necessity defense — the argument that they were preventing an even greater harm. Every minute that ICE isn’t taking part in abducting people is good for the country.

Then came a bizarre turn of events. The state’s public safety commissioner directed state police to send the cases to Vermont’s Attorney General Charity Clark, bypassing normal procedure and upending the traditional role of the attorney general. Clark, a Democrat, decided to charge the protesters with trespassing.

In an op-ed, she said her hands were tied: “Justice must be blind or our system will fail.” Back to Pharaoh: This is a bit like a midwife in the next town over raising her hand to say, “I’d like to kill Moses, because that’s what the law dictates.”

Protesters recently unearthed relevant Vermont history — a model of state-level noncooperation. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which ordered cooperation with slave catchers, Vermont passed a state statute known as the Habeas Corpus Law. It effectively nullified the federal law, and went so far as to require state attorneys to defend anyone accused of being a slave, with full representation before a judge and a jury. The entire practice of nullification was deemed highly escalatory — so much so the federal government threatened military invasion — but due to the state’s resistance, throughout Vermont there was effectively no participation in the Fugitive Slave Act.

As in that case, the pressure from the federal government has continued. One week before a planned week of direct action, the federal government suddenly charged five people from the earlier protests with obstructing access to a federal facility (punishable by up to 30 days in prison or a $5,000 fine), likely hoping to deter further escalation.

We all have a choice: complicity with Pharoah or noncooperation. Despite the threats and new legal challenges, the protesters in Vermont chose the riskier, more liberatory path.

A funeral, a guerrilla garden and a sit-in

The week of direct action went on as planned, beginning with a funeral. On Oct. 5, more than 30 clergy led a procession of a hundred or so mourners who walked behind a hearse to the White Cap Business Park, singing “Amazing Grace.” They carried 95 paver stones, each representing a life taken by ICE — directly or from complications while detained — and placed them one by one in a handmade coffin of Vermont pine. The action echoed the Stolen Neighbors Quilt created in Minnesota, which remembers people who were deported. Here, names of those killed by ICE were read out. Then, in front of the doors of the spy center, the coffin was nailed shut. 

A crowd gathers in Williston, Vermont on Oct. 5, behind a coffin filled with paver stones representing lives lost to ICE. (Shut Down ICE VT)

Rev. Marybeth Redmond said at the vigil, “I have walked alongside Vermonters struggling to survive, and I have never seen our immigrant neighbors so hunted, so afraid and so alone.”

In the end, it was a symbolic act. Security scattered the stones, and the property manager and others were seen taking crowbars to the coffin. But it was only the beginning of the week.

The next action was a garden. Because what would you expect from Vermont? Rather than using just their bodies to get in the way, about 40 protesters arrived at sunrise with pots, planters and bags of soil. 

They affixed the boxes to the pavement with construction adhesive, painted and chalked them with flowers, insects and slogans, flew a rainbow kite, and by mid-morning, had gotten a full dance party going. The action blocked the road to 188 Harvest Lane, which houses ICE’s national tip line.

They were also highlighting the environmental violence of ICE’s data intensive operation. Gardener Isaac Petersen said, “ICE’s surveillance technology is extremely energy-intensive, much of it powered by AI and data centers. It harms our communities directly by targeting our neighbors.”

State and local police moved some barriers, but largely left the garden alone, which blocked the road for most of the day. ICE’s parking lots were nearly empty all day, and the rumor was that ICE was told to avoid coming into the office.

Protestors hang handwritten “tips” outside the ICE office housing the agency’s national tip line. (Shut Down ICE VT)

Each day escalated from the day before. By Thursday, protesters went right up to the front entrance of the Harvest Lane facility. Dozens had arrived before 8 a.m. to deliver handwritten note cards with “tips” encouraging ICE employees to find other jobs. The protesters started by taping those messages to the windows and doors. Then they hauled out a rug, a couch, a coffee table and a fold-up mattress — a makeshift living room — and sat down, singing and playing music, effectively shutting the place down. 

Much of this has been intergenerational. Vermont protesters have ranged from people in their early 20s to an 83-year-old from Bethel and 85-year-old from Sharon.

Some of those sitting at the entrance this week had taken part in earlier acts of civil disobedience, and several now face charges brought by Clark. 

Organizers say the ICE facility was effectively shut for much of that week, its parking lots empty. Police interference was minimal: At one point, officers came over only to remove the items protesters had used to block a surveillance camera, then returned to their cars. As the organizers said in their press release, “ICE employees went home rather than face Vermont’s week of bold, decisive action.”

What you can do 

The week of action was only one moment, and organizers hope others will organize their own — aimed at different pieces of ICE infrastructure. There are other flash points around the country this month, too, in Austin, Minneapolis and Arizona.

As for Shut Down ICE VT, the group behind the week of action, they plan to keep going. One simple way to support them: Call the tip line that ICE runs out of Williston to encourage neighbors to turn each other in. To disrupt its activity, the group is encouraging people to call 866-347-2423 and tell whoever picks up all the different ways ICE could be making a better world. According to organizers, this tactic has been so successful the lines are clogged — one person was on hold for 2 hours and 18 minutes until her phone died. (This tactic was used in the early DOGE days.) Instead of doing Pharaoh’s bidding: What are the beautiful things you could be doing with your life? It can be a bit of a daily ritual.

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Because here, in the end, is Pharaoh’s trick: He changed the meaning of what was legal. He didn’t simply say, “You must obey me.” He said that if you refused, you were the one breaking the law.

But we should remember whose side the law has so often taken. The law stood against enslaved people seeking freedom. It stood against women having control of their own bodies. It stood against trans people claiming full autonomy. The law, by itself, is no defense against injustice — and must not be turned into an instrument of oppression.

Sarah George declined to prosecute protesters for a reason. By stepping in to take up the case, Charity Clark has signaled a willingness to participate in the repression. The people shutting down ICE in Vermont are on the right side of history. Let’s find ways to join them.

This article How Vermont shut down ICE was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Why we need to think outside the box this election was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This election is not like any other. You’ve heard that before, and so have I. But after decades of “this presidential election is the most important election in your lifetime,” I have finally conceded that this midterm election may be the most important election in my lifetime — because it will be the ultimate test of whether Trump and MAGA have succeeded in their authoritarian consolidation of power. 

And so it’s appropriate that many groups are trying new things ahead of this election — because the old playbook alone won’t get us there.

No Kings. On Oct. 17, No Kings is going to try something it hasn’t tried before. Instead of another mass march, the coalition is holding No Kings: Vote Early, a nonpartisan day of action in which communities will host block parties, BBQs and local protests to make a voting plan together and vote early where local rules allow. Organizers say it’s “not purely a protest,” but rather a nonpartisan action to encourage voter participation. The idea is to treat voting not as something we do alone, but as something we do together. I’m not old enough to remember it, but people used to go to the polls with their neighbors and make an event of it. This is bringing back that collective spirit.

(It’s easy to host. Go here for all the info you need by Thursday Oct. 15.)

Election Holiday. Another experiment is popping up for the Nov. 3 election — Election Day: Our Civic Holiday. This group (which I’m a part of) rests on a simple idea: treating Election Day as a day for showing love for democracy by doing our civic duty. Vote, help someone else vote, become a poll worker or observer, or find another way to participate in civic life. The idea is to translate that into a cultural vibe, like Valentine’s Day, but for a different form of love — love for democracy and our neighbors.

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These are two experiments among many in how we protect elections in new ways under new circumstances. (I’ll be writing more about possible post-election actions later.) Neither solves the problem on its own, but both actions build on the understanding that stealing an election gets much harder when there’s a large blowout. Hungary is the reminder. As I wrote in April, Orbán’s defeat was so decisive that he conceded before all the votes were counted, with turnout near 80 percent, the highest since their transition to democracy. As Micah Sifry put it, it was “too big to rig.”

New tactics aren’t easy — and it’s worth reminding ourselves of that.

The trap of the winning tactic

Until now, No Kings has been known for one thing: enormous marches, each bigger than the last. Organizers put the first at five million, the second at seven million, and the third, in March, at more than eight million. When a tactic works like that, the pressure to keep repeating it is immense.

I’ve seen this up close. After Greta Thunberg began her Friday walkouts, Fridays for Future grew and grew. I was working with 350.org — a global environmental organization — at the time and we provided a lot of the backend technical support to help it grow. That growth created tremendous pressure and helped drive movement at the United Nations and in many countries. (You can certainly argue it contributed to the Inflation Reduction Act, which — despite significant cuts — has some parts that are still very active.)

But every tactic eventually peaks. As Saul Alinsky put it, “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Suddenly an organization named for leaving school on Fridays needs to improvise — and that’s hard.

Student protesters asked me to write the Climate Resistance Handbook to try to assist Fridays for Future (and others) to break out of their tactical doldrums.

Occupy Wall Street hit the same wall. In Philadelphia, where we had an encampment outside of City Hall, my ears still ring with painful, shouted debates over whether we could do anything other than occupy. The argument largely won out that occupying is the thing that held us together — and like most occupations around the country (but not all!), we never tactically transitioned.

That’s the pull: The familiar tactic feels like the glue. The drive to stay the course is strong. And it takes a strong decision-making process to break out.

Many of us know this tactical challenge: endless weekly vigils and letter-writing with no changes. Worried about this dynamic in my anti-casino organizing group, I once made us promise we would only use the same tactic once — resulting in new tactics like citizen’s search warrants, Philly’s Ballot Box or the public filibuster. 

So No Kings deserves congratulations for breaking the mold. Yes, many would love to see something more escalated that increases the level of risk-taking — but it’s worth just underlining how difficult it is to change course at all. So greeting this pivot with encouragement makes all pivots more possible.

The strategic logic

Why put so much energy into the election? 

I’ve regularly argued there is so much more than elections. And Trump’s attempt at consolidation is happening in places where elections alone won’t save us. Take the military, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth plans to purge 20 percent of the military’s top leaders. He’s already blocked and purged many women and Black leaders. Many view his attempts as a long-term purge to keep control of the military. (The military is hardly defensive and has its own ways of pushing back — including the extensive leaking about the eight sailors in the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group who attempted suicide.)

But the elections remain critical both as a narrative (exposing Trump’s unpopularity!) and also because Congress (for all its faults) remains a key pillar in allowing the theft of congressional money, putting in radical judges, co-signing his corruption and so much more.

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What D.C.’s election defense under occupation can teach us

Trump knows this, which is why it is such important contested territory for him. In September, Trump led the crowd at the Republican National Convention in a pledge to “cheat like hell” (Newsweek claimed he was joking — but I’d say the intent is hard to dismiss). The Callais decision echoes widely as the single largest loss of Black political power in recent memory. 

Trump hopes terror can keep us from voting. In March he signed an executive order restricting mail-in voting, and while courts have kept the restrictions from taking effect this year, the fear it stoked is already having an impact. Trump is adding more fuel by making up stories of noncitizen voting. Why? So he can actually steal the election. I lay out 18 ways the regime might take our votes away in this scenario guide.

If nothing else, remember that a 2028 election becomes far easier to steal with a willing Congress. You don’t need a strong imagination to picture a Trump-led Jan. 6 insurrection under current Republican leadership ending in a fully effective coup backed by Congress and the Supreme Court. That becomes much harder with a hostile Congress.

All of this brings us back to why the midterms matter and the context of why collectively voting early and supporting each other on Election Day matters.

Why turnout is protection

Mass participation can overwhelm a system and make the likely accomplices of would-be election thieves less willing to go along. Trump can try to control the narrative, but the mechanics of theft require a chain of accomplices: election deniers in the certification process, state actors, and behind them businesses and supporters who quietly approve. That’s why folks at May Day Strong launched the Business for Democracy Pledge. By signing on, businesses commit to oppose obstacles to voting and, if results aren’t honored, to close ranks in defense of the election. It pulls potential accomplices back before they cross the line.

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Then there are the efforts to recruit more voters, like the Oct. 17 Vote Early Day coming up soon — a chance to mix large-scale decentralized actions for an electoral good. Or the Election Day: Our Civic Holiday effort where we’re not asking for a federal policy change. We’re asking people to treat the day differently. Vote if you haven’t. Help someone else vote. Make it visible.

We’re trying to feed into the energy by reminding everyone to stay active on Election Day, Nov. 3, by:

• making sure you’ve voted, and that the people around you have too
• becoming a poll worker or nonpartisan observer
• joining Singing Resistance, Souls to the Polls, or Joy to the Polls, and meeting any interference with positivity
• connecting with rapid-deployment teams or people already at polling sites, not to confront ICE, but to redirect and escort voters so everyone eligible gets to vote.

You can share the word at election.holiday. Businesses can support the campaign by pledging to give their employees time off to do their civic duty through Time to Vote, the coalition founded by Patagonia. And if you’re still looking for roles to support the election, find them at We are Ground Control.

All of this is part of the pre-election plan: Get large numbers of people voting against an awful regime. There’s an abundant range of opportunities to help protect our election. I hope you find your role.

This article Why we need to think outside the box this election was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Inside the successful campaign against illegal Chinese mining in Africa was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

When the shrill of heavy earthmoving machinery crept towards Elias Mlambo’s riverside banana plantations in February, the sudden brownish color of the river alarmed him. 

The water was laced with used machinery oil, disfiguring the once crystal-clear, wild water of the Haroni River. The river not only sustains the Ndau tribal people of the Chimanimani district in southeast Zimbabwe but also acts as Zimbabwe’s eastern border with Mozambique. By December of last year, excavators operated by a Chinese mining syndicate were at work along a stretch of the riverbeds — tearing up centuries of riparian ecology in a hunt for alluvial gold deposits.

“They appeared without notice, without our permission, claiming to have a government license to dig for gold on our land, but never showing the actual permit,” said Mlambo, a banana farmer and local tribal elder in Rusitu, one of the largest villages in the district. 

He said he confronted a man who claimed to be the manager of the Chinese miners — but the man gave his name only as “Xai Samson” and flatly refused to give out the company’s name. He acted as though he did not understand English — a deliberate tactic some dubious Chinese mining syndicates adopt in Zimbabwe when confronted by aggrieved locals, Mlambo said. 

“He just waffled a few sentences in Chinese — gestured to the excavators and piles of fresh soil,” he explained. “We figured out that our river, fruit plantations and ancestral graves were collateral to the invaders.” 

Ignored at first

For the next three months, Mlambo made complaints to the Chimanimani municipal authorities, a lawmaker and Zimbabwe’s mines ministry — and was ignored. Just one ministry bureaucrat responded to Mlambo and other tribal elders by telephone, only to say that his hands were tied, citing how high-level state partnerships and national economic priorities trump tribal land rights. It’s a familiar cold response from Zimbabwe’s government that human rights leaders say has given dozens of Chinese prospectors carte blanche to excavate hills and river streams, and encroach onto tribal farming and grazing lands in pursuit of precious metals like platinum, lithium or gold.

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“There’s a cozy, transactional relationship between state decision-makers and Chinese minerals prospectors,” said Nsama Musonda, the executive director of Care for Nature Zambia, a regional ecology monitoring nonprofit. “This gifts Chinese businesspeople a carefree right to dig for precious minerals — without consent — on tribal people’s lands in Zimbabwe and nearby countries like Zambia.” 

Knowing the script that has played out elsewhere across Zimbabwe, Mlambo and fellow villagers refused to retreat. Instead, they looked across the international boundary to Mozambique — a stone’s throw across the Haroni River. On the other side, in Mozambique’s Sussundenga district, villager Manuel Pinto was watching his community’s primary fish stocks float belly-up to the surface.

Fish in the community ponds that line the Mozambique side of the Haroni riverbed were suffocating from the sludge coming from the spoiled headwaters on the Zimbabwe side, he said. But Pinto feared something worse: Mozambique’s community health nurses warned that children could develop chemical rashes if they encountered contaminated waters. 

“The river doesn’t need a passport to flow and nourish both countries, Zimbabwe and Mozambique,” he said, speaking the same Ndau vernacular language that hundreds of thousands of tribal people on the Zimbabwe side of the river border speak, too. “We realized that if authorities in Zimbabwe would not enforce environmental law, the Ndau people on both sides of the border would act to protect their right to safe livelihoods.”

The border alliance 

Pinto says he knew routine complaints would be easily ignored by state decision-makers. So Mlambo and Pinto conjured up a community alliance rooted in their shared Ndau lineage. Tribal identity, older than colonial state borders, drove their determination to defend their environment against the encroachment of heavily polluting Chinese miners. 

In daylight, the Ndau communities on the Zimbabwe side confronted the Chinese miners: spraying graffiti on the worksite and the machinery, and singing, chanting and banging pots, drowning them in noise. Since the area is remote geographically, located far from city markets, they also successfully convinced local food shops to refuse to sell soap, beverages, bread, meat, tea, essential groceries and cellphone top-up cards to the Chinese miners and their local mining employers. Taxis and buses refused them service. These actions constantly reminded the miners and their workers that they were trespassing on tribal lands. 

“We made life uncomfortable for them,” Mlambo said. “Their workers were often hungry because we instructed local shops not to sell food or beer to the invaders, which they liked a lot. They would drive 50 kilometers just to replenish the food pantry with essentials like salt and cigarettes. Their workers began to quarrel with their bosses.”

Locals also shared their displeasure to social media networks followed by thousands of Zimbabweans. 

At the same time, the Ndau communities on the Mozambique side of the river filled out urgent cross-border environmental petitions with provincial authorities in Mozambique’s Manica province. They walked into the offices of the governor and lawmakers and demanded urgent meetings, asking them to directly press the Zimbabwean government to take action under specified timelines. If the decision-makers didn’t follow through, the Ndau activists threatened not to pay taxes because the sludge from Zimbabwe’s polluted river was beginning to spoil their corn and fruit farming plots. 

A Chinese mining excavator digs a hillside for gold in Chimanimani district, Zimbabwe. (Centre for Natural Resource Governance)

The Zimbabwe government is known for being “tone deaf” to citizens’ grassroots petitions against irregular mining, said Pedrito Martinho Campira, chief of the Sussunhega district. But he added that the deliberate aggressive petitioning of the regional government in Manica, which borders Chimanimani, has created a diplomatic headache for Zimbabwe’s stubborn authorities, whom locals suspect were shielding the Chinese syndicate.

“At night our people would cross the river, cover the Chinese mining site with paper petitions and spray graffiti, warning the Chinese miners that they are messing with the waters flowing into Mozambique,” Campira recalled of the intense cross-border pushback that overwhelmed the Chinese prospectors. 

“Illegal riverbed mining is an affront to our two shared lands and cultures,” he said. “We are one Ndau people separated by a colonial fence; we have blood family ties across the river.”

Faced with nightly protests, daily confrontation with locals on the Zimbabwe side of operations, cross-border diplomatic pressure and vocal warnings from Mozambique border guards, who were dismayed by the contaminated water flowing from the Zimbabwe side, the unidentified Chinese miners finally retreated in June. They abandoned heavy machinery and fled the mining site — leaving locals to rehabilitate spoiled riverbeds, banana plantations and damaged forest cover. 

“We won,” Mlambo said. The Chinese mining syndicates operating without consent across rural Zimbabwe are used to facing only local complaints and enjoying the shield of compromised government bureaucrats, he added. “This time they faced something unfamiliar — a cross-border, bi-national grassroots pushback, and they were clueless on how to respond.” 

Xiao Samson, the manager of the Chinese syndicate that attempted to excavate for gold in Haroni River, refused to give a full interview. He only said in a short phone call, in broken English, that, “we are no lawless people. We have a permit. We will [be] back in Haroni River to do our gold with law.” 

Mutoko pushback

The victory in Chimanimani is not an isolated event; it marks an uptick of grassroots defiance forming in rural Zimbabwe in areas where precious minerals are being discovered. In the granite-rich hills of Mutoko, 250 miles north of Chimanimani, a similar crisis boiled over in June. Mutoko has long been the center of friction over complaints that Chinese miner-exporters are blasting and digging up lucrative black granite and gold without consent — leaving in their wake damaged homes, polluted riverways, desecrated grazing and farming lands, and deformed hills. For example, Shanghai Haoying Mining Investments has been frequently cited by locals for continuing mining activities without obtaining community consultation or environmental approvals, and for threatening to evict locals. 

In June, the community finally drew a line in the sand with a different band of Chinese miners, who, like the miners in Chimanimani, refused to give out their identity. 

“My house has been shaken to the core — its roof and walls cracking from relentless blasting by nearby Chinese miners who are going for gold,” said Urai Godo, a mother of three whose home stands at the slopes of a contested hill. One day in early August, the building frustration finally boiled over when locals saw a crew at a Chinese gold prospecting site setting up wires and detonators. Locals feared that the hill was going to be destroyed by dynamite while kids were doing homework in houses nearby. Word filtered around the village in minutes and residents carrying pots and wooden sticks stormed the blasting site without warning, Godo said. A Chinese mining boss who called himself “Hei Chu” felt the pressure and gave orders for his workers to stop blasting preparations. 

“We encircled the miners — chanting, singing, blocking their work progress. The rattled miners dropped their detonators, unwound the blasting wires, hopped into their cars, abandoned the site and never returned,” Godo recalled. 

“Hei Chu” was not reachable for comment on why the miners had attempted to work on communal land in Mutoko because the number he gave the village head repeatedly went to voicemail and no longer seemed to be working. 

Compromised governance and impunity

Though still small, this growing pushback by rural residents against mining impunity is a damning example of how the state in Zimbabwe is now captive to foreign extractive corporations, said Ancelimo Magaya, an outspoken cleric based in Harare, Zimbabwe. 

“Rural Zimbabweans are seeing this shady encroachment onto tribal lands without consent,” he said. “Rather than simply relying on hiring expensive lawyers to litigate or lodge complaints with the same tone-deaf government agencies, they are taking the miners head-on through peaceful grassroots protests.”  

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The Environmental Management Agency of Zimbabwe doesn’t do much against these foreign mining syndicates, Magaya says. They often issue small, token fines. Some officials could themselves be compromised by the same mining syndicates. This has not escaped the attention of rural residents in Zimbabwe, and they are determined to mount active, peaceful grassroots resistance rather than wait for regulatory protection, which is often absent. 

The spokesperson for the Environmental Management Agency did not respond to emailed questions about why mining in Chimanimani began without first obtaining community consent, an environmental impact assessment certificate, and all the necessary paperwork. However, speaking on anonymity, a senior bureaucrat denied such characterization.

“We are in a tricky situation,” he said. “We would like to do our jobs properly defending communities against ecological destruction. But we can’t match the money, tools and vehicles that these mining syndicates have — and the political influence they carry.” 

Back in Chimanimani, Mlambo surveyed the banks of the Haroni River. The water is beginning to run cleaner, but the marks of devastation on the land remain. Some youths are replanting fruit and Indigenous trees to rehabilitate disturbed riverbanks. The scars on the land will take years to heal.

“We reasoned that the government in Zimbabwe won’t tackle these Chinese miners,” Mlambo said. “As Ndau people on both sides of the border, we resolve to be united and proactive in defending our ecosystems. It worked, and this is a model of how grassroots communities can defend their lands against corporate extractivism.” 

The Chinese in Zimbabwe had never met this kind of bi-national grassroots community resistance to unaccountable mining, he says proudly. “We shocked them – they froze and we learnt lessons to refine our resistance next time should they try to mine on our lands again.”  

This article Inside the successful campaign against illegal Chinese mining in Africa was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article After October 7, I learned that movements need grief spaces was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Since the massacres on Oct. 7, now three years ago, the news has brought a steady stream of horror and broken promises. The ceasefire in Gaza has been broken thousands of times; the ceasefire with Iran only holds until the next strike. Many of us have responded by going numb or turning away. Over these three years, I’ve come to believe that collective mourning can help movements build sturdier organizing infrastructure, move through paralysis and numbness, and get back to the long-term work of creating systemic change.

I’ve spent nearly two decades living and working as a human rights defender, mostly in Palestine and Israel. For years, I responded to atrocities the way much of the dominant organizing culture did at the time: strategically. I prepared statements, launched campaigns and mobilized our base. I worked through several wars and the ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide. Even though my colleagues and I were often physically together, we rarely had the opportunity to collectively mourn. In fact, mourning was often seen as something only the privileged could afford. As organizers and solidarity activists, we were the ones who needed to push past the pain and keep mobilizing.

And then, after each war, large swaths of colleagues and organizers would burn out, and our movement would suffer a setback. Movement researchers Paul Gorski and Cher Chen, studying U.S. human rights and social justice activists, found that an estimated 50 to 60 percent of organizers eventually walk away from movement work and never return, burned out by a culture that treats overwork and self-sacrifice as necessary. That culture also leaves no room to mourn and process the secondary trauma that accumulates, hastening burnout. These kinds of cycles make it especially hard for movements seeking systemic change to sustain themselves.

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When Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023 and I was waiting in anticipation of the retaliation against Gaza, I knew I couldn’t respond with the same kind of organizing strategy that we usually use: preparation of advocacy statements, social media campaigns and fundraising appeals. I knew that while some people should and would continue that work, there also needed to be spaces for organizers and our base to mourn. And so, on Oct. 8, I opened a space for collective mourning online, sharing it in the many community, political and religious groups I was a part of, for anyone who needed somewhere to process what they were witnessing and feeling. Dozens of people joined: primarily my Jewish community at first, and then people from many faiths and chapters of my life, from Palestine to Palo Alto. 

As the assault on Gaza and the genocide continued, the room stayed open. More colleagues, including community organizers, artists, chaplains and psychologists, joined me in facilitating, and we held space for hundreds of people from across our communities to mourn together. We formed a collective called the Social Change Sanctuary and developed a format that included facilitation and participation from attendees. Over time, we were invited to hold spaces for other communities in mourning. We’ve held spaces to grieve the ongoing genocide; climate catastrophes like the fires in Los Angeles; ICE raids, arrests and murders; and the war on Iran.

The Social Change Sanctuary hosts an Interdependence Day circle in 2025. (Alison Avigayil Ramer)

Participants repeatedly shared the difference it made in their lives to know they had a consistent space to mourn.

“In daily life, when something hurts, I turn away, I distract myself,” one participant told us. “But the collective mourning practice helped me move through the frozenness that constant news induced — helped me stop doomscrolling — and I’m able to return to my work.”

That participant went on to organize her community and raised $20,000 for refugees in Gaza. 

Another participant returned to their role as a chaplain, and extended her work to include “movement chaplaincy” holding one-on-one spaces for people doing solidarity work. 

Many participants also shared how witnessing the news with others enabled them to feel the emotions provoked by the headlines, leaving them feeling less isolated and more connected. That is co-regulation happening at the communal level, increasing people’s capacity. People who could barely stay in the room during the earliest, rawest sessions after Oct. 7 can now sit with the news longer, witness without shutting down and understand what is theirs to carry and what is not.

A historical movement of mourners

While many of the collective mourning groups that have come together in recent years are new, they’re built on generations of organizing that already knew how to fold community care and grief into the work itself.

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Preserving a people’s history through quilts

During the civil rights movement, Southern organizers mourned the murdered publicly and loudly, treating funerals as organizing events rather than sites of private grief to be managed quietly. Decades later, AIDS activists advocating for government support built the NAMES Project Quilt, which memorialized the dead one quilt square at a time. And ACT UP’s “political funerals,” where activists carried the actual ashes of the dead to the White House lawn, were a vigil and a protest at the same time.

For years, Black Lives Matter’s Los Angeles chapter has opened its meetings and protests with a mourning ritual in which members stand in a circle and speak aloud the names of people killed by police, while one person at the center pours out water for each name and the group answers “ashe” after every pour. 

Over the past three years, IfNotNow, a Jewish organization that mobilized thousands to oppose the genocide in Gaza, has built something they call ceasefire circles: small, ongoing groups organized around what researchers studying the practice term “solidaristic grief,” designed less as a single vigil than as a longer-term way of holding people inside the movement over time.

In February, as ICE violence escalated, a coalition that included the NDN Collective, the Brave Heart Society, the Indigenous Protector Movement, the American Indian Movement, Sunrise Movement and Project South circulated a public toolkit for grieving those killed by federal agents, built explicitly so that any group, anywhere, could hold its own public mourning.

How mourning helps us keep going 

In an environment dominated by negative news, many of us are starting to turn away, rather than experiencing a kind of secondary, media-induced trauma that can leave us anxious, depressed or numb.

Both avoidance and numbness are the nervous system’s way of protecting us — an involuntary, evolutionarily produced reaction. They are also what makes the news cycle so useful to the people who want to immobilize us and our movements. Steve Bannon named the strategy “flood the zone.” Scholars of authoritarianism describe this as a deliberate exploitation of the public’s limited attention, engineered to produce fatigue and an inadequate or absent response. The aim is to overwhelm and exhaust the opposition. 

We do not need to feel guilty for having this response, but we do need a way through it. So we ran an experiment: Could listening to the news become an opportunity for co-regulation instead of dysregulation?

Collage of grief practices from Minneapolis after federal agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January 2026. (Art: Alison Avigayil Ramer / Photo: Lorie Shaull)

We called the practice Good Mourning. We held the 30-minute practice once a week for 40 weeks with six to 10 people. For 15 minutes, we listened to the day’s news together, usually “Democracy Now!,” mixed with music. People wrote, drew, danced or sat still while they listened. Then, for the other half of the session, we turned to each other and shared what moved through us, without offering to fix or resolve anything.

Why listen to the news at all? It may seem like a counterintuitive ask of people who are already overwhelmed by news. But tuning out isn’t a neutral act for organizers. If we numb ourselves to avoid the pain, we also lose contact with the reality we’re trying to change. We lose sight of the people being harmed, the urgency and the stakes. Scrolling by yourself doesn’t help either; it keeps the nervous system braced without ever letting it process. 

But practices like Good Mourning offer a third option: Take in the news deliberately, in a bounded container, alongside others, with room for the body to respond. This helps us stay informed and connected to what’s happening without being flooded by it, and that connection is what fuels action.

“I started Good Mourning because I wanted to hold myself accountable to listening to the news, instead of giving in to the temptation to block it out completely,” Eva Orbuch, a community organizer and one of the founders of Good Mourning, told me recently. “It became so much more — a community, a creative practice, a way to take in the news mindfully, a place to recommit to what supports my own resilience and makes things a little better in the world.”

Talking about the news activates the same analytical mind that has been narrating the news to us all week. But moving the body or creating something, even just doodling, helps us use another part of the brain to process it. That’s the basic premise of expressive arts therapy: Grief and trauma often live below language, stored in the body as tension or bracing, and adding expressive arts to the practice of listening to the news helps us move through it.

Listening together also creates an opportunity to co-regulate communally. Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory describes how nervous systems calibrate against each other: Being near someone else in a state of relative safety can shift your own breathing and stress response toward theirs. A structured, repeated practice gives that calibration somewhere to happen, week after week.

“The practice helps me to compost whatever I’m holding, and to move through all the grief,” one participant said.

Making your own Good Mourning practice

This year, several of my friends contacted me before Oct. 7. “What could we possibly do this year? I’m tired of organizing events,” an organizer who has held dozens of peace vigils in the past year told me. 

“Why don’t we create our own space for collective mourning?” I offered. We can look at some of the stories, news and art from the day together. Make something of our own? 

She agreed. 

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Perhaps this is also a practice that can accompany you. Creating your own space for collective mourning doesn’t require much. Ideally, form a small group and commit to 30 minutes. Read the news to each other, or play it aloud, mixed with music, or anything that isn’t just more thinking. Invite people to pair the listening with something for the body, like movement, drawing or dancing. Then turn to each other and share your grief, without trying to resolve it, fix it or offer advice. At the end, share one way you will nourish yourself and others in this hard time, and wish each other well.

This simple act of witnessing your community in grief has been powerful for so many. Perhaps it can be a way for you and your community to move through mourning and keep on mobilizing.

This article After October 7, I learned that movements need grief spaces was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Iran’s teachers movement perseveres against all odds was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Sunlight filtered through the trees separating the headquarters of the Plan and Budget Organization in Tehran as 300 teachers gathered outside to protest on Sept. 6. Their demands were simple: salaries that keep pace with inflation, fair pay scales and improved health and welfare services.

They knew they were taking an enormous risk. 

For years, educators across Iran have taken to the streets to demand fair wages, better working conditions, the release of detained teachers, the constitutionally guaranteed rights to free education for all children and to peaceful assembly and association. For years, they have faced arrests, enforced disappearances, prosecutions on national security charges, dismissals, imprisonment and solitary confinement. 

Teachers and teachers’ union activists played a prominent role in the January 2026 uprising, when people across the country called for freedom and an end to the Islamic Republic system of government. In response, they were heavily targeted. By July, at least 60 had been arrested, prosecuted or imprisoned. At least 14 have been killed. Still, against all odds, Iranian teachers have kept their movement alive.

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The Iranian teachers’ movement is not organized through a single union. Local and provincial teachers’ associations operate across the country, while an umbrella network called the Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations, or CCITTA, links many of them. The structure allows teachers to organize locally while coordinating actions across the country.

Some of these actions, like protests and public statements, are impossible to miss. Others are less confrontational and more relational: debating movement priorities, supporting imprisoned colleagues and their families, building solidarity with other social movements, or simply getting together to hike or read or watch a film. Together, they knit together a movement that has proven resilient against virtually every form of repression, from internet shutdowns to detentions and killings, while continuing to press its demands.

‘A continuation of my responsibility as a teacher’

Mohammad Habibi became a teacher in 2003. For him, it was never just a job; it felt like a social responsibility. But he soon realized that quality education for students could not be fully achieved without protecting teachers’ rights. So he joined the Iranian Teachers’ Trade Association and later took on several roles within the CCITTA. He is currently its spokesperson. 

“My trade union activism wasn’t separate from teaching,” he said. “I saw it as a continuation of my responsibility as a teacher. Teachers have a duty that goes beyond teaching textbooks. They must defend the right to education, student dignity, educational justice and freedom of thought.”

Like Habibi, the nine teachers interviewed for this story described demands that encompass both their own rights and those of their students. They want salaries and pensions that reflect the real cost of living, job security, meaningful participation in education policy, freedom of expression and association, and the release of their imprisoned colleagues.

But they’re also calling for free, high-quality and equitable public education for all children, regardless of ethnicity or gender, while opposing the privatization and commercialization of education.

For Esmaeil Abdi, the former general secretary of the Tehran Teachers’ Trade Association, who spent nearly nine years in prison for his activism, the fight against privatization is inseparable from the fight for equality. “If education becomes a commodity whose quality depends on a family’s economic ability, social inequality is reproduced from one generation to the next,” he said.

Teachers also advocate for every child’s right to receive education in their mother tongue alongside Persian, arguing that Iran’s linguistic and cultural diversity should be reflected in its schools.

Over the years, the movement has won concessions on some of these demands, like pension increases, the implementation of the Teacher Ranking Law (specifying pay tiers) and corresponding salary increases, and a voice in the management of their retirement fund. However, even when policies change, implementation may be incomplete. 

“But the significance of this experience lies not only in the material results of these demands,” said Eskandar “Soran” Lotfi, a Kurdish teachers’ union activist and former CCITTA spokesperson. “It also shows that sustained and organized protests by teachers have succeeded in bringing issues that the government initially refused to accept into the sphere of public policymaking and decision-making.” 

Abdi shared a similar view: “Despite repression, the teachers’ movement has succeeded in keeping issues such as free public education, teachers’ rights and educational inequality at the center of public debate.”

While maintaining its organizational independence, the movement has built solidarity with workers, students and women’s rights activists. This has happened despite what Laeya Mohammadi, a teacher activist using a pseudonym for fear of reprisal, describes as the “government’s attempts to divide teachers from other movements, including by claiming teachers hold a higher social status than [other groups], like workers.” 

Much as they would later take part in the January 2026 protests, teachers participated in the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, in which hundreds of thousands protested the repressive government after the morality police killed 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. Four years later, that struggle still shapes the aspirations of teachers like Habibi, who hopes for a future in which female teachers and students are no longer compelled to obey the country’s veiling law and instead have full autonomy over choices as personal as what they wear.

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‘Only democracy can solve this problem’ — a conversation with Iranian Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi

Teachers’ broader social commitments have also surfaced when their students are at risk. Beginning in late 2022, girls across Iran began reporting illnesses after suspected poisonings at schools, with cases eventually spreading across many cities and provinces. As the incidents continued amid conflicting official explanations and growing concern over students’ safety, the CCITTA called nationwide protests in March 2023. Teachers and parents demonstrated across the country. In some locations, security forces teargassed and arrested protesters.

Shadi Taban, a teacher who spoke under a pseudonym, was among those who participated. For her, the issue reflected a principle reaching well beyond teachers’ own working conditions.

“Our red line is the students,” she said.

That red line was crossed during the January 2026 uprisings when the government killed more than 200 schoolchildren. Teachers took it upon themselves to protest their students’ deaths and honor their memories through the “Empty Desks” campaign. Despite widespread internet shutdowns and the difficulty of accessing information, Iranian teachers were able to collect and share the names, photographs and stories of around 240 children who had lost their lives. 

Abdi believes that this record-building could one day help establish truth, accountability and redress for the state-committed abuses. “We see this as an important part of a future process of transitional justice,” he said. 

After the U.S. military struck a school in Minab in February 2026, killing 150 people, including 120 children, teachers launched another documentation campaign. Titled “Abandoned Backpacks,” it symbolized the children who never returned to school. 

But the significance of the campaigns transcends symbolism. “For us, these were also efforts aimed at seeking justice, preserving collective memory and defending children’s right to life and education,” Lotfi said. 

Social organizing and consensus-building 

One of the movement’s most fundamental structural challenges is that independent trade unions lack legal recognition in Iran. According to Lotfi, this creates obstacles before organizing even begins. Teachers cannot openly and formally recruit members or build a stable financial structure through membership dues to support research, education and organizing. Meetings and assemblies often occur only in private spaces.

The movement is therefore forced into a permanent contradiction: Much of its organizational work must happen informally, even as its demands are voiced publicly.

When those demands do become public, their spread encounters another barrier.

Pirouz Nami, who established the Teachers’ Trade Association of Khuzestan in 2012, said state-affiliated media often suppress teachers’ actual demands while portraying their activism as the product of foreign manipulation or hostile forces. “Within Iran, if any newspaper attempts to report the truth, it faces closure or prosecution,” Mohammadi explained. International coverage, Nami added, can create a different problem: sporadic attention that captures individual protests or arrests but misses the movement’s longer-term structures, relationships and organizing work.

In the face of such expansive challenges, teachers have developed an equally expansive repertoire of strategies. But those strategies remain peaceful, despite the repression and violence they are met with.  

“One cannot seek freedom, justice and human dignity through methods that violate those very values,” said Habibi, who has himself been arrested and beaten for protesting.

“Teachers have a duty that goes beyond teaching textbooks,” says Mohammad Habibi, teacher and Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations spokesperson. (Education International)

Teachers organize strikes, demonstrations, sit-ins and letter-writing campaigns; issue joint statements; document rights violations; and use social media to raise public awareness. One teacher, who requested anonymity for safety reasons, recalled more theatrical actions he had participated in. In one, teachers collectively burned payslips; in another, they built a coffin for the education system and carried it through the streets in a mock funeral procession.

The decision to take action at all is one that’s shaped collectively before anyone takes to the streets.

Several teachers described decision-making within the CCITTA as a democratic process built around discussion, consensus and majority voting. Lotfi said consensus is woven into organizing from the earliest stage. Before a demand becomes a slogan, teachers discuss, analyze and write about it. Workshops and longer discussion sessions may follow, with supporters and opponents debating the idea.

“This transforms a demand from a simple slogan into an issue that teachers … can collectively defend,” Lotfi said.

Opposition to the privatization and commodification of education, for example, was not always universally shared. But as Iran’s once all-public education system gradually shifted toward greater private-sector involvement, a small group of teacher activists began arguing that privatization was undermining the constitutional guarantee of free public education. They discussed the consequences of this trend through written materials, meetings and debate. Over time, the idea gained broader support. Today, opposition to privatization, as well as advocacy for free, public and equitable education, have become some of the movement’s central priorities. In fact, according to Habibi, “It is because of teachers’ protests that the privatization of public education has proceeded much more slowly than successive governments would have liked.” 

Alongside the demonstrations and strikes visible to the public and the state, teachers continually work to strengthen relationships within the movement. “Even activities that don’t seem directly related to our demands form a part of social organizing,” Lotfi said. Teachers meet online and in person. They organize hiking groups, walking groups, cultural programs and social gatherings. That work, Abdi said, helps build a movement that “doesn’t depend on one individual and preserves and reproduces its capacity to act, even under pressure.”

The trust created through those relationships can become crucial when repression strikes.

Solidarity with detained teachers

In May 2022, Lotfi was arrested when returning to his hometown, Marivan, ahead of a planned Teachers’ Day protest there.

“My tenant had informed my family beforehand about what was happening,” he recalled. “The security forces had surrounded my home. But I went back anyway because I had spent years working to create joint action, and didn’t want to miss that moment. I was arrested almost immediately after entering the city.”

State television later portrayed him negatively, including allegations that he had ties to “hostile countries,” which he says are unfounded. Authorities pointed to a friendly meeting between Lotfi and two French teacher trade unionists as evidence of those supposed connections.

His detention activated the networks he had spent years building.

Dozens of teachers demonstrated outside education offices and other government institutions. Teachers circulated statements and written appeals demanding his release. When Lotfi began a hunger strike to protest his detention and pressure to confess to ties with the French citizens, dozens of teachers began solidarity hunger strikes of their own. He was finally released on bail in August 2022, but was rearrested in October, during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests. 

The wave of support he received was not unique to him.

Several teachers described a similar response whenever a colleague is detained or imprisoned: Associations issue public statements, raise awareness through social media and news outlets, and organize gatherings outside education offices and courthouses to pressure authorities for their colleagues’ release. Teachers also provide financial and emotional assistance to detainees’ families and try to secure legal support. The movement does not act alone. Habibi said volunteer lawyers, journalists and civil society activists have repeatedly stood alongside teachers, despite the consequences that solidarity can carry.

At the same time, teachers aligned with state authorities participate in what Lotfi described as mechanisms of control and repression. “They might spread rumors about activists, like portraying them as affiliated with foreign governments,” he said. The result can be fear and mistrust, discouraging even sympathetic teachers from publicly supporting detained colleagues.

For detained teachers, repression spills into the lives of their loved ones, who are left to absorb its emotional and material costs.

A teacher who requested anonymity because he is out on bail pending trial, described his wife being arrested alongside him this past spring, amid a broader crackdown on teachers’ union activists.

“Both my wife and I were beaten,” he said. “They blindfolded and handcuffed me and put me in a vehicle.”

During the two months he spent in detention, he said, a judicial officer threatened to reopen what he called “Glass Room No. 100.” The teacher described it as a place where protesters were raped with glass bottles — a form of sexual torture Amnesty International has independently documented against other detainees in Iran.

Like the other teachers interviewed, Nami endured years of threatening phone calls, surveillance at work and in the classroom, pay cuts, arrests, torture, solitary confinement and ultimately job dismissal. Watching his family endure the consequences alongside him, he said, doubled the weight. During Nami’s detentions, his wife had to manage the household and care for their eldest son, who has a severe physical disability, entirely on her own, while also living with rheumatism and diabetes.

Mohammadi testified about her detention experience to the women’s committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran. She told them that when the Ministry of Intelligence summoned her, she went without informing her family. Security agents nevertheless tracked her children through her phone, causing them severe distress. After her arrest, authorities threatened her family against reporting her imprisonment to the media. 

“But on a social level, going to prison under this regime no longer carries a social stigma,” she said. “On the contrary, people wear it as a badge of honor, proud to have stood up against the state.”

Building strength under wartime conditions

Challenges intensify during internet shutdowns and periods of war, like Iran is experiencing now. Habibi said teachers struggle to communicate, share information and coordinate activities; even maintaining contact with the families of imprisoned colleagues becomes difficult.

The danger extends to communication devices themselves. Lotfi said authorities sometimes seize activists’ phones and computers during arrests and searches and later use information stored on them in judicial proceedings, making secure communication a constant concern.

Even under these conditions, public action has not disappeared entirely. 

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The Sept. 6 protest was one of the movement’s most recent public demonstrations, unfolding amid a broader wave of protests across the country that included actions by railway workers, nurses, unemployed youth and retirees over grievances like unpaid wages and the mishandling of pension funds.

But wartime conditions, intense repression and the imprisonment of many active organizers have forced teachers to retreat from frequent street demonstrations.

“We are trying to preserve our relationships and collective spirit through lower-risk activities happening across the country, such as group walks, hiking trips, film screenings, book discussions, and educational and cultural gatherings,” Habibi said. 

One such lower-risk activity is a screening of “When We Fight” (a documentary about the 2019 Los Angeles teachers’ strike), planned for World Teachers’ Day on Oct. 5, possibly followed by a virtual conversation between Iranian teachers and American educators featured in the film about organizing strategies and shared experiences.

The CCITTA continues to provide financial support to imprisoned teachers, who currently number 15 by Habibi’s count, although resources have been strained by the uptick in arrests since January 2026 and payments have become smaller. The fund cannot take international donations, due to the government’s sensitivity to connections outside the country, so it is financed by voluntary donations from teachers, who risk having their bank accounts frozen in retaliation. “Still, each time this happens, a new account is created, and teachers begin making donations again,” Habibi said.

The CCITTA is also continuing its Empty Desks project. And as schools reopen, teachers, including Taban, are campaigning for the reinstatement of colleagues who were dismissed for their protest activity. In late September, teachers, parents and civil society activists launched a petition demanding the reinstatement of all dismissed teachers, rallying in particular around Kurdish teacher-activists Majid Karimi and Ghias Nemati. The two had briefly returned to their classrooms after a higher administrative body overturned earlier decisions barring them from service, only for education authorities to impose new penalties that again removed them from teaching. 

“Although our methods might change because of the circumstances, our commitment to defending teachers’ rights, public education and civil society remains unchanged,” Habibi said.

This article Iran’s teachers movement perseveres against all odds was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article How the war in Sudan is teaching society to govern without the state was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

What if one of the most consequential political effects of Sudan’s war is not simply that the state collapsed, but that millions of people were forced to discover what society could organize without it?

In Sudan, that discovery did not begin with a political declaration. In many places, it began with food.

Khalid, a young man who had been involved in Sudan’s resistance committees during the revolution, was among those who remained in his city after many residents fled. Some of those who left already knew him and the other young people who stayed. They had organized things together before the war. Years of working together had created a kind of trust that would become critical once the institutions around them disappeared.

The displaced suggested that they start a community kitchen, or takiyya (a Sudanese community kitchen where volunteers prepare and distribute free meals), to feed those who remained.

The first donations came through WhatsApp groups. Sudanese living outside the city transferred money through Bankak (a mobile banking service that allows users to transfer money and make payments electronically). Khalid bought sacks of broad beans, oil and charcoal. He went to mosques to recruit volunteers, while others used Facebook and WhatsApp to invite young people to join.

They cooked and distributed food every day. Then the work expanded.

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Some families could not safely leave their homes. Women and girls faced particular risks moving through the streets, while elderly people often could not walk to the kitchen. Khalid and other volunteers began collecting their requests, buying what they needed and delivering it to their homes.

Relatives abroad would transfer money into the volunteers’ accounts. The volunteers would withdraw it as cash and deliver it to the families.

No institution had appointed Khalid to do any of this. There was no formal organizational chart, no contracts defining responsibilities, no salaries and no legal agreement governing the network.

But that did not mean there was no organization. People knew who could do what.

Responsibilities were distributed according to professional skills, geographic proximity, availability and urgency. Older volunteers carried particular authority because they had accumulated experience; younger volunteers learned from them.

The arrangement was informal. But it was not unorganized.

Emergency Response Rooms (locally organized civilian networks that coordinate emergency food, health care, evacuation and other essential services) and other civilian networks in Sudan are often described in humanitarian language: communities feeding communities, transporting medicine, evacuating the wounded and filling gaps left by the collapse of public services and the difficulty of international organizations reaching people.

That description is accurate, but it does not tell the whole story.

The more consequential question is: What did people learn while doing all of this?

They learned how to mobilize resources without an institution behind them. How to decide which needs were most urgent. How to match people to tasks. How to negotiate movement through territories controlled by different armed actors. How to manage disagreements without allowing them to destroy the network. How to move money and information across front lines. And how to transfer knowledge to someone else before the person who possessed it was killed, arrested or forced to flee.

Survival became a school of organization. But this school did not begin from nothing.

Before the war

Sudan already had traditions of collective action, including nafeer (a Sudanese tradition of collective voluntary labor in which people mobilize together around a shared need). The resistance committees (decentralized, neighborhood-based civilian groups that became a major force in Sudan’s 2018–19 revolution) that emerged during the revolution also developed forms of neighborhood-level organization based on trust, horizontal coordination and collective action.

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After the revolution, parts of this infrastructure evolved into Change and Services Committees (local community bodies that organized basic services and neighborhood affairs), which in different areas organized aspects of everyday life, from bakeries and cooking gas to other local services. These were organized bodies. In some places, they had defined responsibilities, documents and official stamps. Their members accumulated practical knowledge about managing the affairs of their communities.

So when war came, civilians did not begin from zero.

There was already an infrastructure that had learned how to turn political trust into everyday administration.

The experience of Gezira State reveals something even more striking.

When the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, a powerful paramilitary force that the U.N. and U.S. found has committed acts of genocide, took control of Gezira on Dec. 18, 2023, local government effectively disappeared from areas under their control. Less than a month later, on Jan. 16, 2024, the governor of Gezira issued Decision No. 1 of 2024, dissolving all Change and Services Committees in villages, neighborhoods, rural settlements, markets and industrial areas.

The decision did more than dissolve them. It instructed local executive officials to inventory and take possession of the committees’ fixed and movable assets, documents, property and official stamps, and to freeze their bank accounts until new caretaker committees could be formed.

There was something revealing about that detail: Even the stamps were part of the authority the state wanted to reclaim.

But the committees that the governor had ordered dissolved were still on the ground, while the authority issuing the order was absent.

The committees’ response, in essence, was a simple question: If you have dissolved us, come into the state you left and take the stamps from us.

Six days later, on Jan. 22, the Fifth Infantry Division command of the Rapid Support Forces issued its own decision, stating that it was “renewing confidence” in the Change and Services Committees and instructing them to continue performing their duties toward citizens across the state’s localities, neighborhoods and villages.

The contradiction could hardly have been clearer.

The state, absent from the territory, ordered the civilian bodies operating there to disappear. The armed force that controlled the territory found itself facing an existing civilian infrastructure performing functions that military control alone could not perform.

An armed force can enter a city and declare control within hours. It does not automatically know who needs medicine, who has the key to the bakery, who can operate a water station, which families need assistance, or who can safely move between neighborhoods.

Here it becomes apparent that controlling territory militarily is not the same as possessing the knowledge required to govern life within it.

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The Change and Services Committees were not just a humanitarian response that emerged when the war began. Before the war, they had already accumulated experience organizing everyday services. What looked during the war like the sudden emergence of civilian networks was, in many places, a shift from one function to another: from organizing bread, gas and local services during the revolutionary period to organizing food, water, medicine and evacuation during war.

The infrastructure did not disappear when the state did. The mission changed.

The experience of a group of water engineers led by a man named Bakri illustrates the difference.

At the beginning of the war, the group tried to keep existing water stations operating. But as the fighting continued, fuel and spare parts became harder to obtain, while insecurity made maintaining centralized infrastructure increasingly difficult. So they improvised.

They organized ways to bring water directly from the Nile, sometimes using donkey carts carrying large barrels. They located wells that had been abandoned for years and organized their reopening. When some families could not collect water themselves, volunteers delivered it to them.

Teachers did something similar. A group led by Saif began operating schools at limited capacity after the war dragged on and children’s behavior became increasingly aggressive and distressed.

They were not trying to restore a normal academic year or guarantee promotion from one grade to another.

They were creating child-friendly spaces where children could learn, play and recover some sense of routine, while reducing the educational and psychological damage of prolonged war.

The same pattern appeared in medicine, evacuation and information.

Volunteers who had never received formal emergency-response training learned how to respond to airstrikes and artillery fire, how to protect women and children, how to organize safe departures, and how to move patients whose required treatment was unavailable in conflict areas.

Some became known to armed groups because their work required repeated negotiation with them. Sometimes that familiarity helped them pass checkpoints or move patients with fewer risks.

When neutrality becomes suspicion

But that knowledge created another danger. The more successfully civilian networks kept life going, the harder it became for armed actors to regard them as non-political.

In one town in Gezira, a group of young women working in medicine faced precisely this dilemma after the RSF took control and the hospital closed. They managed to enter the hospital and remove laboratory equipment, medicines and other essential supplies. They then began treating patients in secret.

They feared being forced to treat RSF fighters. But they also feared what would happen if the army returned and interpreted that treatment as evidence of collaboration with the RSF.

They continued working secretly for months. Eventually they were discovered and arrested, before being released after it became clear that they did not represent a political or military threat.

Their experience reveals a central contradiction of civilian life during war: You can decide to serve everyone. You cannot decide how an armed actor will interpret that service.

A surgeon I interviewed in Gezira lived through the same contradiction in a more brutal form. She was trying to keep medical care available to civilians. She treated everyone, including wounded RSF fighters.

According to her account to me, RSF members assaulted her inside the hospital after one of the fighters she had operated on died. Her 13-year-old daughter was then sexually assaulted.

She did not tell me what happened simply as a personal story. She was warning me to leave.

I was in Gezira myself during this period. I was among those working to keep hospitals functioning and civilian services going. I saw how quickly humanitarian work could be viewed as politically motivated.

Volunteers gather for the opening of a mental health hospital in the RSF-controlled capital city of Gezira State. (Eglal Hamid Abdulgadir)

This is where the language of humanitarian neutrality reaches its limits. In a war in which each side seeks not only to control territory but also to define the meaning of every action within it, even neutrality can acquire political meaning.

The problem is deeper than civilians being trapped between two armed forces. The war itself can appropriate the meaning of civilian action.

A doctor treats a wounded person because the person is sick. A fighter sees assistance to the enemy.

A network moves a family because the family is in danger. An armed actor sees suspicious movement.

The space between humanitarian action and political action becomes so narrow that separating the two can become almost impossible.

Knowledge that survives

And yet the networks continued to grow.

New volunteers joined. Donations from Sudanese abroad continued. International organizations provided limited support in some areas. In parts of Gezira, volunteers running medical facilities sometimes coordinated with Médecins Sans Frontières.

But the most important development was less visible. The networks began reproducing knowledge. The older generation knew they might not survive. Volunteers were being killed, arrested and displaced. So those with experience began teaching younger people what they knew.

This was more than training. It was a relationship of respect, mentorship and apprenticeship. And the reason was practical and brutal: If one person died, their knowledge should not die with them.

This changed the nature of the networks. A volunteer who distributes food to a neighborhood is practicing mutual aid.

But a network that can replace that volunteer, transfer the knowledge required to continue the work and survive the disappearance of its original organizers is demonstrating something closer to institutional capacity.

It is not an institution. But it is a capacity.

That distinction matters because we usually recognize institutions through their visible forms: offices, regulations, budgets, job titles, salaries and chains of command.

But perhaps institutions begin before all of those things. They begin when knowledge becomes transferable. When responsibilities can be redistributed. When a collective practice can survive the disappearance of the person who started it. When people know what to do without waiting for someone to tell them.

This is also why it is difficult to describe these networks simply as temporary substitutes filling a vacuum until the state returns.

The vacuum itself changed the society inside it.

People who entered the war knowing how to organize a neighborhood learned how to manage networks stretched across displacement, fear and military control.

The volunteer who began by distributing food learned, over time, how to manage money, information, risk and relationships with armed actors.

The doctor who opened a hospital door had to think about security, neutrality and evacuation, not only medicine.

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Even disagreements within networks became part of the learning: how to disagree without breaking the network, and how to place people’s immediate safety above personal conflict.

The war was not building institutions in the conventional sense. It was building people who knew how to create organization under pressure.

The limits of resilience

But the answer cannot be romantic. These networks cannot replace the state.

They can distribute food and medicine, restore access to water, organize emergency medical care and create educational spaces. They cannot indefinitely operate a national electricity grid, maintain complex pharmaceutical supply chains or guarantee public safety.

Nor are they equal.

Some neighborhoods have doctors, engineers and strong diaspora networks. Others have far fewer resources. Funding can run out. Volunteers can burn out. International support can bring bureaucratic requirements that alter the character of informal work.

These networks are therefore not proof that the state is unnecessary. They are proof that state capacity and social capacity are not the same thing. And that distinction becomes even more important when military control changes.

In areas retaken by the army, some volunteers fled. Others were arrested or killed after being accused of collaborating with the RSF. Sometimes the basis for suspicion was simply that they had continued providing services while the RSF controlled the area.

The same act that had once been an act of survival could acquire an entirely different political meaning when the person at the checkpoint changed.

Yet the practices themselves did not necessarily disappear.

The takiyyas continued, often under different people. The faces changed because the people who had built the networks had been killed, imprisoned or displaced. But the practice survived.

This may be the most politically revealing fact about Sudan’s civilian networks during the war.

The war did not simply create a vacuum where the state had been. It forced people to learn what could be organized inside that vacuum.

They learned from those they trusted. They learned how to distribute scarce resources. They learned how to negotiate with armed actors without becoming armed themselves. They learned how to make collective decisions without formal authority. They learned how to teach someone else before they disappeared.

And perhaps they learned something more important than any service they provided: The capacity to organize collective life does not always come from the center.

For decades, the state was treated as the basic infrastructure that made public life possible.

The war shattered that assumption in places where the state could no longer provide food, water, health care, education or security.

People did not respond because they had decided to build an alternative political system. They responded because someone had to cook. Someone had to find water. Someone had to treat the wounded. Someone had to get children off the streets. Someone had to negotiate passage.

But repeated acts of necessity accumulated into something larger than necessity. They accumulated political knowledge.

And this is why rebuilding Sudan after the war cannot simply mean restoring the institutions that stopped working.

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Sudan will need public institutions capable of functioning. No volunteer network can replace the state indefinitely, and asking it to do so would only turn another form of resilience into another form of abandonment.

But rebuilding the state without recognizing what society learned in its absence would be another kind of failure.

The question is not whether takiyyas should become ministries, or whether Emergency Response Rooms should become permanent government agencies.

The question is whether the people who learned to organize life without formal authority will be treated merely as beneficiaries of reconstruction — or as people who acquired something the postwar state urgently needs.

Because the most important legacy of these networks may not be the meals they served, the wells they reopened or the patients they treated. It may be the knowledge that accumulated among them: That authority can be exercised without office. That responsibility can be distributed without bureaucracy. That trust can function as infrastructure. That institutions can disappear without the capacity of society to act disappearing with them.

The people who built these networks were not trying to design a new political system. They were trying to survive.

But wars can produce political knowledge without anyone intending to produce it.

And perhaps the central question facing Sudan after the war is not simply whether the state can return to the places from which it disappeared.

It is whether it can return without pretending that the society waiting for it is the same society that existed before it left.

Perhaps the task after the war is not to return society to the state that existed before the war, but to rebuild the state around the knowledge that society was forced to produce when the state was gone.

This article How the war in Sudan is teaching society to govern without the state was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.