Waging Nonviolence

This article The inside-outside strategy behind New York’s rent freeze was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This June, tenants in New York City notched a major victory: The city’s Rent Guidelines Board, or RGB, voted to freeze rents for all one- and two-year leases in rent-stabilized units. Quickly, local and national media trumpeted the decision as a victory, a proof of concept even, for NYC’s democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who had pledged to ensure such a freeze on the first day of his campaign. Because the mayor appoints RGB members, the story became one of Mamdani conjuring the victory through sheer force of will.

But the freeze also comes as a result of decades of targeted tenant organizing across the city as longstanding communities are priced out of their homes. One of the groups that has led the charge is CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, an organization of working-class Asian immigrants that launched the Chinatown Tenants Union, or CTU, in 2005. The group’s members have been showing up to RGB hearings for 20 years, testifying for freezes and staging actions to prevent expected hikes.

CAAAV Voice, CAAAV’s electoral arm, also holds the distinction of being one of the few groups that endorsed Mamdani on the first day of his campaign, thanks to his history of action — he was arrested at a June 2024 CAAAV protest — and his pledge to adopt the movement’s emerging demand that the next mayor freeze rents for the entire four-year mayoral term.

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On the heels of the rent freeze victory, I sat down with Julie Xu, a longtime organizer with CAAAV and chapter lead of CTU, to discuss how initiatives to combine base building with electoral politics helped create the conditions for the freeze, and how having a democratic socialist in the mayor’s office  allows the tenant movement to “revisit the strategies of the past.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Tell us about the origins of the rent freeze demand and how it is rooted in your organizing work.

So New York City’s rent stabilization system is the biggest in the United States, and one of the most important in the world when you’re talking about forms of rent control. 

As you zoom in on a neighborhood like Chinatown, it’s almost 50 percent of the housing stock and an incredibly important source of housing, especially for low-income immigrants. A lot of our members can only stay in a neighborhood like Chinatown that is in Manhattan because of rent stabilization. 

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Abolish rent. Yes, for real.

From the beginning, our work has always been about organizing tenants. One of our founders, Ms. Liang, who is a teacher in the neighborhood, talks about doorknocking [early in CAAAV’s history] and seeing conditions of neglect: a student wearing a full puffer jacket indoors in the winter because there was no heat, or children being bitten by rats and pests because of the neglect of the apartments in Chinatown. So at our core it’s been about how we correct that and make the neighborhood a dignified landing place for folks and also prevent the violence of eviction, the violence of gentrification. 

CAAAV tenant leaders began testifying [for a rent freeze] and showing up to the RGB in 2006, just a year after the founding of the Chinatown Tenants Union. The core demand has always been about who has say over our neighborhoods: real estate or the tenant majority. 

CAAAV members rally at the preliminary vote of the Rent Guidelines Board on May 7, 2026. (Cal Hsiao/courtesy of CAAAV)

We understand rent hikes as part of a wheelhouse of tactics that organized real estate wields to maintain housing as a system of profit. This is why our tenant leaders have called for a rent freeze and rent rollbacks over the decades.

Our tactics have shifted over time, but the Rent Guidelines Board fights have been a critical vehicle for politicizing newer members around shared conditions of rent hikes and disrepair, and creating a ladder for leadership development through testimony and actions.

Did a lot of the work from the beginning center around establishing consciousness about the conditions and giving people ways to talk about the things that they were experiencing?

It’s really central to how we understand our work as an organization. I think having a base and having that orientation toward outreach is a large part of what makes the organization so strategically sharp. 

In the moment when Trump was elected, everybody was saying Asian and Latino voters were moving to the right. The reason that was perceived as a rightward shift was because the Democratic establishment was not making a case to our people. A lot of the movements of the right are far better resourced than those of the left, so it was like a vacuum. So what we were experiencing and seeing was that it’s not just that our people are moving to the right, it’s actually that we’re not giving them a vision. We’re not giving them something that they can actually see themselves in. 

What was CAAAV’s relationship to electoral politics prior to Mamdani’s mayoral campaign? Is that something that’s only recently become more of a strategic focus?

CAAAV Voice was founded in 2021, and the electoral work it did really came as a result of some of the changing strategies we had for organizing. 

[Before that, CAAAV] went through many different phases. There was experimentation around community land trusts. There was a vision of having a building tenant association on every block in Chinatown. We experimented with community-led rezoning plans as places to try to impact the logic of real estate and the logic of capital that’s shaping all of housing. We undertook all these different types of organizational experiments, and the lesson for us was that it always felt like it got stopped at the mayoral level. 

Especially in Chinatown, trying to pass the Two Bridges Community Plan [a 2016 proposal intended to stop the development of a series of luxury apartment towers in the neighborhood] under [former Mayor Eric] Adams became the chokepoint in realizing we actually didn’t have enough power to have a say. Our long-term strategy is about breaking the bonds between real estate and the state, and in this fight against these four luxury towers, we were correctly identifying that these were some of the worst speculative actors. But then in trying to pass the Community Plan, we were getting stopped at the Department of Buildings and getting stopped at the mayoral level. 

That was a big lesson for us. Additionally, there have been existing coalitions that show up to the Rent Guidelines Board every year, and under Adams it did feel like theater because it was very clear that the folks that were on the RGB were not really listening. They were looking at their phones. Everybody was very frustrated, and then the results would come out, and it was just not clear what type of power we had on this institution or in the process at all.

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I think so often organizations actually separate base building and electoral politics completely, right? Or run them on separate tracks. What we have been trying to experiment with [since forming CAAAV Voice], and have made some advancements towards, is how do we not separate those so much? 

This election was an amazing opportunity to talk to people about something with real stakes. We canvassed in new neighborhoods in Brooklyn, like Sunset Park, to reach our base. Now, after the election, we’re going back to those neighborhoods to do deep outreach and build off of the election conversations to do long-term, neighborhood-centered base building. 

CAAAV Voice was one of only a handful of groups to endorse Mamdani on the first day he announced his campaign. What were some of the discussions that went into that decision, and was there any precedent within the organization for such an early endorsement?

This is where having a base and developed leaders was really essential to making an assessment of the moment. Our elders were very clear that we needed to have some demand during this election, especially because the mayor [appoints] the RGB. It was our youth who were hesitant about electoral politics. They don’t see how the government works well. They have a lot of doubts about elected officials making a lot of promises that they don’t keep or they won’t keep. So there was push and pull. 

It was at our annual CAAAV leadership assembly in 2024 that we were hashing these struggles out and getting clear on our annual goals for the organization. There, we made the decision to make the four-year rent freeze demand [for mayoral candidates] and committed to grow our organization to be able to actually have the power to enact that demand. 

We had also worked with Zohran in the past. We had worked with him in our Innovation QNS campaign [a successful 2022 effort to push for significantly more affordable housing within a proposal to build over 3,000 units in Astoria]. We had a trusting working relationship with him from that. He had also come to RGB and in 2024, Zohran was actually arrested at our action. So leaders had that memory of seeing him show up and seeing him being willing to put his body on the line for tenants. And internally our members were saying, “This is a moment for us to act.” All of those pieces coming together made our endorsement process very clear.

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At that leadership assembly, did it feel like the demand had reached a fever pitch in the aftermath of winning a version of a rent freeze repeatedly under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, and then having the Eric Adams administration so aggressively strip that away? Did it feel like that was part of the higher intensity of this demand?

[The Adams administration’s] 12 percent raise over four years was callous. Our members talk all the time about how shocking an experience it was when we actually went to where Adams was supposedly living in Brooklyn and were met by 30 to 40 police officers. This is just normal coordinated tenant action, and the amount of police repression was I think very impactful on them and how they experienced the Adams administration.

New York City has had a democratic socialist mayor for the last seven months, and the mayor got elected thanks in part to this promise for a four-year rent freeze. But until June, he hadn’t actually delivered on it yet. After Mamdani’s inauguration, how did CAAAV orient as an organization around making sure that this was a promise that was actually carried out?

One of the clearest pieces we could see from our study of history is that there needed to be a strong community labor coalition to make sure that this project is successful. 

We were one of the founding members of People’s Majority Alliance [a coalition to get out the vote for Mamdani in the November 2025 election that included organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America and unions like United Auto Workers]. All the organizations in People’s Majority have membership bases and were willing to take the risk and organize and act.

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And so through building that coalition, and seeing that the rent freeze [vote] is coming up, we worked really hard to bring in labor siblings that weren’t always a part of the Rent Guidelines Board campaign. We chose to bring in two organizations where renters made up a majority of the membership — New York Taxi Workers Alliance, [or NYTWSA], and PSC-CUNY [or the Professional Staff Congress at City University of New York]. So much of organizing is siloed in different sectors. There’s immigration, there’s housing, there’s labor. But the reality is that our youth members are going to CUNY, whose professors are also union members. They are also paying high rent and are trying to fight for a contract that can give them more wages and benefits, so they can pay this rent. 

In practice, there’s so much more overlap, and so we were able to bring in labor siblings to this fight. Members from both NYTWA and PSC-CUNY spoke at the preliminary vote and publicly amplified our rent freeze demand in press interviews and on social media. Because the rent board’s hearings are held on CUNY campuses, PSC-CUNY also led a number of town halls and participated in testifying in borough-based hearings. These alliances carry forward and we want to keep figuring out how we organize together. 

Now that a rent freeze has been won again, including the first-ever two-year rent freeze, what are the conversations like among your members and within the organization as a whole? On the heels of such a massive victory, where does the focus turn now and what kind of work needs to happen in order to keep your members, especially those who have been showing up to the RGB for so many years, activated and engaged in the fights to come?

That’s the big one. We’re seeing this as a real opportunity, this moment, and we want the campaign that we eventually take on to be one that is structurally reforming the systems, so that whoever the next mayor is, tenants have more power. I think there’s a lot of ideas for what it could look like. 

But we’re really willing to revisit strategies of the past. Building organizing was [historically] really difficult and individualized, but how can that look different in this new period? What needs to happen for it to look different? How does government need to relate differently, or how does even the housing movement need to change our practices to be more effective? 

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We’re really wanting to assess where we’re strong and where we’re weak, and build closely with aligned working class organizations. It’s also not useful to divide, so how are we creating new systems so that the cogovernance project that we’re all undertaking — making working class people the leaders of the city — is more possible?

We see our role very clearly as trying to build a tenant movement ecosystem, but how do we actually define what tenant unionism is in the city? There are real, interesting questions of structure that are coming up. What does a democratic union in a tenant structure look like, and how do we have that citywide? It’s always been a little bit of a wilderness, where there has been really great organizing that’s happening in this wilderness, but so much of it has been pockets where there are good organizers and the right conditions for it. 

Now it feels like the moment for us to actually be talking to each other or struggling with each other way more closely, because it’s such a golden opportunity.

This article The inside-outside strategy behind New York’s rent freeze was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

D.C.’s challenges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The GOTV machine kept running

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

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

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

Build a coalition where none existed

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

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

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

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

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

Train monitors

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

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

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

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

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

Free D.C. organizers host a “vote-in” on June 3, casting ballots during early voting ahead of the primary election. (Free DC)

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

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

Expand the circle

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

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

The day of the election 

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

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

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

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

The plans that didn’t happen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Children’s Corner during an evening of protest, Tirana, July 2026. (Trivet)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corporate aggression backfires

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

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

The real flamingos, enjoying the shallow lagoons of Vjosa-Narta. (PPNEA)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first protest by the fenced-off construction site at Vjosa-Narta in May. (PPNEA)

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

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

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

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

The flamingo group brings the prime minister a concrete birthday cake in Tirana in July. The sign on the top: “Long Prison Sentence For You!” (Trivet)

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

Building an anti-corruption revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

A flamingo parade moves through the crowd dispensing positive vibes in Tirana in July. (Trivet)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children in the Agadez refugee camp join their parents on the 571th day of protest. (Amir Abdulkrem / @RefugeesNiger)

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

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

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

The system that traps them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside the movement

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

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

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

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

Children make up at least 15 percent of the approximately 2,000 refugees held at the UN-run camp in Agadez, Niger. (Amir Abdulkrem / @RefugeesNiger)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Complicit, negligent or incompetent?

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

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

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

Protesters at Agadez refugee center are demanding resettlement, improved living conditions and freedom of movement. (Amir Abdulkrem / @RefugeesNiger)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The colonial continuum

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

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

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

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

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

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

Refugees at the UN camp in Agadez, Niger, on their 452nd day of protest. (Amir Abdulkrem / @RefugeesNiger)

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

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

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

The spread of containment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A movement that couldn’t be decapitated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two million children, one exam, 89 leaks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A satirical placard on the march to Parliament, demanding accountability from the education minister. (WNV/Shruthi Manjula Mohan)

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

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

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

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

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

They stopped waiting for television to notice them

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

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

A volunteer used art as a medium of dissent at Jantar Mantar. His stall became one of the site’s biggest draws, with visitors joining him to paint, sketch and draw in support of the CJP’s demands for accountability and reform of the examination system. (WNV/Shruthi Manjula Mohan)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now watch the demands get smaller

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

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

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

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

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

On the apology, the movement received nothing at all.

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

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

A committee to look into what the last committee said

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

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

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

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

When the street is the only place left to complain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On centering intergenerational impact and equity

Karen Bailón came to climate activism via feminism. 

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

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

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

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

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

Ecuadoran youth climate activist Karen Bailón attends the Convention on Biological Diversity as a delegate.

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

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

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

On resisting tokenism

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

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

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

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

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

But institutional harms, Alba noted, persist today.

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

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

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

Indigenous ecofeminist activist Daniela Alba (center) stands with leaders of the Nobel Women’s Initiative at the Rooted and Rising Convening in Nairobi.

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

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

On Indigenous knowledge for contemporary climate solutions

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

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

Hilary Lenantoiye (center) stands with Samburu participants in her climate action and empowerment organization, ICAN.

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

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

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

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

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For Lenantoiye, the same goes for Samburu youth. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Requirements

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

Preferred

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

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

How to apply

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

Who we are

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previous Coverage

The data center backlash that’s uniting America

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

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

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

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

The case of Zeewolde

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A global movement

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

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

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

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

An ad for Le Monde in Paris in July 2026 expresses a widely held anti-AI sentiment. (Blood in the Machine/Brian Merchant)

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

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

How to fight a data center

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

1. Find out what they haven’t told you

Almost every successful campaign begins with research.

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

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

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

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

2. Build the broadest coalition

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

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

3. Understand what winning looks like 

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

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

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

Resourcing the fight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the precipice of good strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

New York City tenants with organizations including Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence rallied outside of a Rent Guidelines Board hearing to demand a rent freeze. (Instagram/CAAAV)

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

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

Conflict for the sake of good strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Chinatown to Zohran

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

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

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

CAAAV tenants union members celebrate NYC Mayor Mamdani’s two-year rent freeze for stabilized apartments in June 2026 in Queens, New York. (Instagram/CAAAV)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Telling the truth

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

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

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

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