In a world marked by renewed invasion, democratic backsliding, coups, and hybrid warfare, governments are pouring vast resources into military deterrence. Yet one of the most powerful–and underdeveloped–tools of national defense remains largely absent from security policy: civilian-based defense. This is surprising, in light of the increasingly recognized role the Ukrainian people have played in resisting invasion and other forms of Russian aggression. […]

Two decades before the US scholar Gene Sharp impulsed strategic nonviolent conflict into an academic discipline, American literary figure John Steinbeck penned a human-sized fable about dignity and the collective power which derives from people’s desire to remain free. From a reading of his book 84 years later we can distill many hard lessons for everyone: from the defense establishment to pacificists and humanitarian actors. […]

Long before civil resistance was formalized as a field of research and political strategy, Vercors’s Silence of the Sea and John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down offered a remarkable literary intuition.

Published in 1942, Silence of the Sea and The Moon is Down are situated within this historical moment when military occupation seemed permanent, armed victory unattainable, and the question of possible forms of civil resistance, without weapons, was acutely posed. […]

“Ukraine’s resistance in 2022 was not built in 2022. It was built through the painful lessons of 2014, through volunteer mobilization, and through years of institutional reform. Civil society worked by not only filling immediate capability gaps through mobilization and solidarity, but by building long-term institutional capacity through law, oversight, compliance, and governance reform. That is the quiet frontline. And it is one of the reasons Ukraine still stands. […]”

Les dictatures adoptent une discipline rigoureuse lorsqu’elles exercent – ​​ou aspirent à exercer – un contrôle durable sur leurs sociétés. En réponse, les mouvements doivent s’efforcer de perfectionner et maitriser leur propre discipline. Etre plus disciplinés que leurs adversaires donne aux mouvements un avantage pour l’emporter.

Votre comportement lorsque vous êtes en service lors d’une manifestation peut influencer les personnes qui vous entourent. En restant calme et en ne vous montrant pas menaçant, vous pouvez apaiser les tensions. Si vous discutez avec les manifestants et que vous riez de leurs pitreries, vous pouvez montrer l’exemple aux autres soldats. Le simple fait de faire des commentaires légers à vos collègues, tels que « Attendez une seconde, je crois que j’aperçois mon dentiste dans la foule, ne tirez pas », peut les inciter à réfléchir à deux fois avant d’adopter un comportement potentiellement brutal à l’égard de manifestants pacifiques. […]

Vous êtes un soldat ou un officier de police à qui l’on a demandé de contrôler et éventuellement de disperser une manifestation publique. On vous a dit que les manifestants menaçaient l’ordre public et la sécurité nationale. Cependant, lorsque vous les rencontrez, les choses ne sont pas si claires. Il y a des centaines, voire des milliers de personnes, et elles ne sont pas violentes. Elles disent se mobiliser pour défendre les valeurs de votre pays […]

Despite our invisibility, I still believe that our European neighbors have as much to learn from Ukraine’s unarmed defenders as they do from our armed ones. In any case, we are inseparable due to our shared humanity. Many Ukrainian NGOs help our armed forces with supplies, donations, and support, because they need our help too. Civil-military relations are difficult for some outsiders to understand, particularly those driven by pacifist ideology. Simply put, war is awful, and everything about war is controversial–what is essential is doing your part and staying human. […]

“My generation thought that the Soviet Union collapsed bloodlessly and were really proud of it. So were the politicians in Europe and the U.S. In fact, the Soviet Union is only collapsing now, and this collapse is very bloody. And this blood already starts to spill into Europe. Thanks to Ukraine, it has not yet been flooded—but a war an Interrail trip away is a war at your doorstep. My role as a European, French, Slav, who bears the heritage of the perpetrator and the victim at the same time, is to reclaim what my Russian grandmother tried to erase from my family: the Ukrainian part of myself. […]”