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. […]”

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. […]”

“Between 2004 and 2018, I covered Russia’s war and the aftermath in Chechnya. On the way to and from Grozny, my childhood friends often called me a killjoy at their parties in Moscow, when I shared the stories from the field and said that the Russian war machine was using Chechnya as a training ground to then expand beyond the borders. I wish I had been wrong. But when I heard the first reports of the Bucha massacre in 2022, it vividly reminded me of my nightmares based on testimonies collected in Chechnya. But now my uncle Samuil and other family members were part of these nightmares. […]”

Facing seemingly insurmountable obstacles, I find it truly courageous that the Ukrainian art world is taking bold actions to preserve their country’s immense cultural heritage, both in-country and from afar. After all, as Olga aptly puts it, “This war is a war of cultures”. Putin’s only language is violence; Ukrainians have been fluent in the language of nonviolent resistance for decades. By putting culture in a key position of the anti-occupation struggle, Ukrainians can and are nudging the conflict to where they can have a battlefield advantage.. […]

I met Olga Sagaidak last May at the Ukrainian Cultural Center here in Paris, France. In the large drawing room where I conducted our interview, the walls were lined floor-to-ceiling with jaw-dropping photography of war destruction and street art protesting Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. My stomach knotted when, leaning forward for a closer glimpse of one anti-war drawing, I realized it had in fact been sketched by the hand of a Ukrainian child. […]