Minds of the Movement

Since 2022, Russia’s war of aggression has unleashed overlapping crises—attacks on civilians, destruction of infrastructure, mass displacement, and economic downturn. Many assume such emergencies demand strict central control. Ukraine’s experience shows the opposite: resilience has come from polycentric governance—state and non-state actors working together, drawing on local knowledge, pooling resources, and strengthening social cohesion. […]

The transformation of contemporary conflicts reflects the profound crisis of the international order. The intensification of hybrid warfare—characterized by the combined use of non-military tactics, technological tools, and multidimensional strategies operating in the so-called “grey zone”—challenges traditional security frameworks and constrains state responses. Instruments such as disinformation, cyber warfare, and economic coercion do not operate in isolation; they aim to destabilize from within, eroding social cohesion and paralyzing institutional responses. […]

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. […]”