Last year, I read Hardy Merriman’s blog posts about civil resistance training and activists’ common questions about training, and so much rang true to me. I am a fan of learning theories around movement support work and in-field tools and practices used by coaches and activists. Hardy’s posts inspired me to gather in-field experiences of movement coaches and share them with larger audiences. I asked the coaches: How do we find trainers and resource persons? And, how do we decide what kind of content the training participants will need? […]

On this day last year, Poland’s high court declared unconstitutional a law that authorized abortions in the case of fetus malformations. The move sparked protests in cities and small towns across Poland, many of them sprinkled with creative, sarcastic and humorous signs, slogans and posters. Some Polish diaspora groups in major cities worldwide actively joined the protests. […]

On October 17th, local elections will be organized in North Macedonia. For the first time in the history of the state’s independence—obtained exactly 30 years ago to the day—several cities, including the capital Skopje, have lists with independent candidates. This is of immense importance for Macedonian society, because the government has frequently attempted to sabotage elections with ad hoc changes to election rules. Earlier this week, I interviewed Dragana Velkovska, long-time activist and founder of the movement Zelen Human Grad […]

Last November, Montenegrin politician Dritan Abazovic publicly commented that female politicians and women in general should stay out of negotiations to form a new government so that they are not overburdened with complicated political matters. The statement provoked major backlash in Montenegro, and two female activists, known as Jeka and Joka, using the pseudonym Ljeposava, decided it was time for women to take things into their own hands. […]

The history of nonviolent action is rich, diverse, and dates to ancient times. Yet despite its historical and at time revolutionary significance over centuries and across continents, the academy with its universities, the news media, institutes of diplomacy and international relations, and policy makers have neglected the study of the social power and dynamics of civil resistance. In many societies, including the United States, the history of their wars is emphasized, while the successes of their nonviolent struggles are not taught to schoolchildren. […]

Abdourahman s’est lancé dans l’auto-apprentissage de la stratégie de l’action non violente dans un contexte très répressif. Il sortait de quatre mois de prison pour avoir participé à une réunion de crise de la coalition d’opposition. Simplement en tapant le terme « comment vaincre une dictature sans violence » dans un moteur de recherche, il a découvert quelques livres clés sur la résistance non violente, traduits en français et mis à disposition gratuitement sur les sites de CANVAS, d’ICNC, et d’autres organisations engagées dans l’éducation sur ce sujet. […]

Abdourahman embarked on self-study of the strategy of nonviolent action in a repressive climate. He had just served four years in prison for participating in an opposition coalition meeting for which he was serving as secretary general at the time. Simply by typing “how to bring down a dictatorship without violence” into a search engine, he discovered some key texts on nonviolent resistance that had been translated into French and made available free of charge on the websites of CANVAS, ICNC, and other educational organizations. […]

Mon engagement dans la résistance nonviolente à l’oppression sociale et politique à laquelle j’ai été confronté dès ma naissance a commencé d’abord par le questionnement que j’adressais à mon environnement familial mais aussi à mes maitres d’école. Ces derniers lisaient d’ailleurs dans les questions que je leur posais une forme de rébellion en herbe ou de remise en cause des assertions sociales et religieuses. S’en est suivi l’activisme au sein de mouvements d’élèves et d’étudiants contestataires, et l’encadrement de communautés villageoises faisant face à l’arbitraire de suzerains religieux et des féodalités terriennes. […]

“I met Mariah Rafaela Silva in December 2019, at an EU Parliament conference on the trade agreements negotiated and signed between the EU and Mercosur. Mariah spoke passionately about the nonviolent struggles of indigenous and LGBTQI people to protect their human rights in her native Brazil. The stakes are high: the Bolsonaro administration itself verbally attacks and has adopted discriminatory policies against these communities, and indigenous land has been destroyed by fire or stolen by the government and its oligarchic allies. […]”