2019 resultó ser un año muy movido para las sociedades del mundo que decidieron escribir nuevas páginas de resistencia civil. Las acciones no violentas en demanda de derechos, justicia y libertad fueron increíblemente diversas, enérgicas e inspiradoras en América Latina, donde el despertar popular sacudió regímenes y cambió gobiernos capturando la atención mundial.

The opinions about property damage during protests are all over the map. Please entertain mine for a minute, as I’ve been thinking a lot about this since the 1960s, when my friends destroyed Selective Service files to interfere with the draft for the preposterous Vietnam war. I thought about property destruction harder when some of my mentors hammered on nuclear weapons in symbolic disarmament. I followed their footsteps and reflected on it while incarcerated for these sorts of acts. […]

Such a long period of lockdown, dominated by social distancing, fear of the virus spreading, and the omnipresence of state leaders in mainstream media all certainly represent challenges for movements. Holding demonstrations would present health risks and/or are outlawed, and alternative forms of protest do not draw as much media and public attention. Have movements disappeared? […]

You are not imagining things if you think recent anti-COVID-19-shutdown protests captured the news media’s attention with speed, regularity and intensity that many civil resistance campaigns can only envy. Several scholars and co-founders of a website that tracks news accounts of U.S. protests compared coverage of the anti-shutdown protests with that given to bona fide civil resistance actions such as last September’s nationwide climate strikes. As the researchers reported on Vox last week, the difference is stark. […]

“People worldwide are alert to the ramifications of COVID-19, and many are already organized and taking action to seize this crisis for the better. What remains to be seen is whether these fragmented efforts coalesce into collective power. Our ability to harness this power will determine whether we are able to leverage this pandemic in a way that transforms oppressive social, economic, and political systems. […]”

Governments worldwide are using the pandemic to tighten control and clamp down on dissent. Is this virus going to strengthen the autocrats’ grip on power? And what can we do now and in the future? Although I don’t have experience with epidemics (the smallpox outbreak, the last epidemic in Yugoslavia, happened a year before I was born), I do see some similarities between the current moment and the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, which came when our movement Otpor was just a few months old. […]

In Ecuador and Bolivia, the countries’ presidents were unable to complete their terms because of growing waves of civil resistance, but also one decisive factor in particular: military defections. This blog post analyzes military defections in a way that hopefully other civil resistance movements worldwide may distill some insights. […]

“Choosing to repurpose one’s movement toward community needs in times of crisis has short- and long-term strategic value. In this article I share a few thoughts about how movements can build power by serving their local communities—immunizing their movements from losing momentum with a “vaccine” of constructive programs and obstructive strategies. […]”

In this article I offer a big-picture framework for how the Covid-19 crisis is impacting activism, organizing, and civil resistance movements. I hope this article, which defines four main phases I’ve observed, is helpful as movements make sense of this moment, analyze where they want to go from here, and begin planning a transition to the post-Covid-19 period. […]