Waging Nonviolence

This article How to combat fear at the polls this November was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

The ophthalmologist said he was going to touch my eyeball, then tilted my exam chair back in the darkness. I felt my body brace as movie torture scenes flashed through my mind. I noticed that I wasn’t breathing, so I practiced inhaling through my nose, and exhaling as steadily as I could for the rest of the exam.

Noticing our bodies and breathing intentionally may sound simple, but they are two of the practices that can keep us grounded when we are navigating scary or upsetting situations. As we approach a midterm election marred by threats of violence, I am practicing these skills as often as possible, not to suppress my feelings, but to be aware of how they are affecting me, so I can make conscious choices. 

Why staying grounded matters

The forces of authoritarianism want us to feel knocked off center by the many ways they are trying to keep people from voting. Trump administration officials continue to suggest that ICE, FBI or other federal agents could be sent to polling places. It’s important that election volunteers and voters stay grounded to avoid playing into their hands. One danger is that fearful voters will just stay home, whether or not the administration carries out their threats. Another danger is that we resist any government interference in ways that increase the chaos, which Trump would use to bolster his narrative that the left is the real threat.

Many national and local groups are hosting trainings to prepare people to protect our vote calmly and nonviolently. A widely used tool is the “Election Defense Scenarios” guide, which sketches out 18 possible threats and what people can do about them. Author Daniel Hunter writes, “One of the clearest lessons from every scenario in this guide — and from democratic movements around the world — is this: Illegal and unjust orders only work if people comply with them.” He notes that a more subtle theme of the guide is handling fear. For example, those volunteering at the polls should make sure we do not become “vectors of fear” by spreading unfounded rumors.

Sign up for the latest updates. /* Add your own Mailchimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */ (function($) {window.fnames = new Array(); window.ftypes = new Array();fnames[0]='EMAIL';ftypes[0]='email';}(jQuery));var $mcj = jQuery.noConflict(true); Support Us

I learned the danger of rumors in 2020. Weeks before the presidential election, my friend Ingrid Lakey heard that the neo-fascist Proud Boys were coming to a park near her home in Philadelphia. Despite growing up as George Lakey’s daughter, and years of training for nonviolent direct action with Earth Quaker Action Team, or EQAT, Ingrid did not feel prepared to de-escalate armed militants if they wanted to stir up trouble. Neither did I, though given the times, we both wanted to increase our ability to handle scary situations. With two other friends from EQAT, we decided to show up, not to intervene, but to see what we could learn. 

We met early for a few minutes of silent Quaker worship and named our intention to observe what happened, including inside ourselves. We walked to the park early and watched hundreds of people arrive, none wearing MAGA hats. When the crowd’s energy became frenzied, we asked people nearby what was happening and were told there was a Proud Boy with a bat. Later we heard it was a hockey stick, or maybe a gun. 

The four EQAT members helped each other to assess what was actually happening rather than get caught up in the fearful energy. In the end, the Proud Boys never actually showed up, but the rumor of their presence led a small crowd to chase a man into his car. Within a few days, a video of his window being smashed got millions of views on conservative social media.

If a similar video emerges this election season, there is no doubt that Trump and the media that support him would use it to claim that leftists are the true threat to the vote, distracting from his many efforts to stop people from voting. Even if armed agents do show up near polling places, managing our fear will help us choose responses that will aid us both in court and in the court of public opinion. 

If Election Day turns out to be relatively uneventful — if our fear was the point, and the armed men never show — preparing ourselves for the worst-case scenarios will build nonviolence skills and relationships between organizations. Both will be important in the work ahead, no matter who wins the midterms.    

We have more experience than we realize

The good news is that many more Americans have learned the value of nonviolent discipline in recent years. Even before people were moved by the successful nonviolent resistance in Minnesota in January, Trump’s second term motivated newly activated people to undergo training in both resistance strategies and de-escalation tactics to help large marches stay grounded and on message. 

EQAT has played a role in the Philadelphia area serving as peacekeepers (also known as marshals or a safety team, depending on the group) and training more people to take that role. Knowing that “stay calm” is the first step in any situation, our trainings always include grounding practices, such as breathing, humming or singing together. In-person roleplays enable people to practice holding their center in ways that online trainings can’t replicate.

Previous Coverage

Timely lessons for keeping people safe in the streets 

I’ve seen this training pay off. At a Philadelphia No Kings march, one of our peacekeepers saw a marcher knock the red hat off of a Trump supporter who was trying to film himself arguing with the crowd. Our peacekeeper stationed himself by the provocateur and told protesters walking by, “Don’t take the bait.” The Trump supporter continued to try to draw a reaction, but other peacekeepers joined the first one, preventing the clickbait confrontation he clearly wanted.

While people this year are most worried about encountering armed agents at the polls, it’s important to remember that it’s not always outsiders who need de-escalation. An argument broke out at the front of a different No Kings march just before it was due to begin. A local march leader was angry at a man with a very large Palestinian flag that was flapping in the wind and hitting some participants in the face. A nearby marshal physically separated the two men, then spoke to each individually, calming them down so a solution could be found. The Palestinian flag remained visible near the front, but positioned so it wasn’t in anyone’s face. Incidentally, the marshal was the mother of two teenagers, and her day job is teaching neurodivergent children.

I find it helpful to remind people that they probably have skills from work or family life that are useful in dealing with conflict. This builds confidence, which also reduces fear. In the nonviolence trainings I’ve been offering, I often ask participants to get in small groups and share a time when they navigated a scary situation and kept their cool, paying attention to what helped them. Together we create a “fear toolbox” on newsprint to help us remember what works for us in a pinch.

Sometimes hard experiences teach us the most. When I was lead marshal for a march in early 2017, a man with a long robe, long hair and a beard inserted himself in front of local justice leaders holding the lead banner, just before the march was about to start. First, I calmly asked him to move behind the banner. He repeatedly refused. When I learned that “Philly Jesus,” as he’s known, had a history of this sort of thing, I asked other marshals to help, to no avail. The march started anyway, and our attempt to encircle the interloper so the marchers could pass him only escalated the conflict. Some marchers yelled that we should physically remove Philly Jesus, while others criticized us for surrounding a mentally ill person who was holding a thick walking stick, which in hindsight was not a smart choice.

The turning point came when I realized how dysregulated I was, stressed to a degree that was making me ineffective. First, I took a deep breath. That simple step allowed me to acknowledge that I needed to call in the action lead, a well-known pastor whom I had worked with before. I explained the situation to Rev. Gregory Holston, and he strode to the front of the march. After reassuring those most upset by Philly Jesus’ presence, the tall reverend began walking beside the robed figure, transforming the scene. Suddenly it looked like Jesus was accompanying the pastor instead of stealing the show.

When the march was over, I was still feeling unsettled, so I asked Ingrid Lakey, who had been at the back of the march, to lead a debrief for the marshals. She invited us to get in touch with how we were feeling, then led a discussion about what had happened, including what had eventually worked. That debrief cemented three learnings that I have recalled many times since: Remember to breathe; don’t be afraid to ask for help; and always debrief with friends to name what you learned.

Assessing and reducing risk

There is a difference between anxious energy, which makes it hard to think straight, and fear that is a response to real risk. Staying grounded can help us assess which is which and choose a response that feels appropriate for the situation.

Not long ago, I supported a nonviolent direct action where participants briefly trespassed on federal property, which has become more risky during the second Trump administration. After the protesters finished their action and crossed the street, a Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, vehicle sped around the corner and spun around like a stunt driver in an action movie. The agent jumped out to face the protesters with aggressive body language and an accusatory tone of voice. 

I’d seen DHS respond to protesters with excessive physical force under the Obama and Biden administrations. Knowing the Trump administration’s tolerance for state violence only increased my concern about the agent’s aggressive signals. Although I was the police liaison and had planned to immediately introduce myself to any law enforcement, I trusted my intuition that I should not approach the agent until he calmed down.

If armed government agents do appear at or near the polls this election — or armed militia, for that matter — there are ways to respond that reduce the risk of a confrontation. 

In the midterm election in Arizona in 2022, when right-wing Oath Keepers tried to intimidate voters by photographing them and their license plates, it took a while to get a judge to ban their behavior. In the meantime, ordinary people countered their intimidation by creating a welcoming atmosphere for voters, creating a protective perimeter around the polls, and handing out water and snacks. 

In Washington, D.C.’s primary this year, when National Guard troops entered the polls, volunteers confronted them and insisted they had no legal right to be there, while filming the encounters. As Daniel Hunter reported in Waging Nonviolence, “After forceful haranguing, the troops left without further incident.” 

#support-block_5ede86897a50a01ba13967e3d014ce8f { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

Understanding which government department we are dealing with can help our assessment of risk. While any armed agents at the polls constitutes illegal voter intimidation, the National Guard is generally better trained than ICE, which is particularly prone to violent lawbreaking. Identifying who we are dealing with will also help us pass on accurate information to lawyers who will petition for an injunction.

Showing up to potentially chaotic situations is not going to be everyone’s role. Our bodies have different experiences of trauma, vulnerability to police violence and physical stamina. As individuals, we need to assess how much risk we are willing to take. At the same time, we know from movement history that in times of crisis, more people become willing to risk their own safety to protect their communities. Speaking honestly about the various factors that impact our individual and group risk — race, citizenship, gender identity and health, to name a few — can help people identify their own limits before they are in a dangerous situation, or know when to leave if one escalates.

In the meantime, train and practice 

No matter how much training we have, none of us know for sure how we will react if we are pepper-sprayed or witness other people being hurt. That’s why the civil rights movement put so much emphasis on preparation, which greatly reduces the risk that we will lash out. That is why I’m offering nonviolence trainings in partnership with the LGBTQ Connection PAC, which is augmenting its usual deep canvass work with this kind of preparation. 

Freedom Trainers, a decentralized network that teaches strategic noncooperation, is offering two-day trainings and a host of resources for the specific ways authoritarians may try to stop people from voting. The Election Safeguards Response Network, or ESRN, is a nonpartisan coalition connecting national, state and local organizations in election defense. Indivisible has a series of online trainings that are drawing thousands and which include guidance on how to talk about this election. 

If all you can find is online training, take it, and then find a local group to plug into, especially if you already have de-escalation skills. If you can’t find a local group, recruit a few friends and commit to some grounding practices before you go to the polls. Maybe sing or pray or touch the grass together. Or read aloud Daniel Hunter’s reminder in the Election Defense Scenarios: “This regime desperately wants you afraid. … Don’t comply. Because here is the other truth: They fear you. They fear activated voters who are engaged. They fear a free people who show up, stay loud, and refuse to be turned away. Go be that.”

By showing up grounded and together this election, we are building the movement we need for the long haul.

A portion of this article was previously published by Friends General Conference.

This article How to combat fear at the polls this November was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Being a dissident is a capacity, not a calling was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article was originally published on The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook.

We tend to imagine the dissident as a particular kind of person, one who’s born unafraid, temperamentally a rebel, built from some sterner material than the rest of us. It’s a comforting story, and it’s comforting in a way that quietly lets us off the hook. If dissidents are simply made differently, then their courage is admirable but not instructive. We can applaud it, but we are excused from it.

The great gift of Gal Beckerman’s “How to Be a Dissident” is that it dismantles that story, gently and completely. Beckerman — a staff writer at The Atlantic who has spent a career studying how change actually begins — went looking for what dissidents across history and around the globe have in common. What he found is not a personality type. It’s a set of practices. Dissidence, in his telling, is not a calling reserved for the few. It’s a human capacity, and capacities can be cultivated.

The book is organized as 10 imperatives — among them Be Pessimistic, Be Funny, Be Reckless, and Be Immortal — and under each, Beckerman gathers figures who could not seem more unlike one another: Socrates and Ai Weiwei, thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Iris Murdoch, the famous and the nearly forgotten. It is part intellectual history, part biography, part field manual. Its through-line is a journey every reader can recognize: the solitary moment of seeing a truth clearly, the frightening decision to say it out loud, and the long question of what that act leaves behind.

Some of the imperatives are bracing precisely because they cut against what we expect. “Be Pessimistic,” as I read it, is no counsel of despair — it’s the insistence that the dissident does not need optimism’s permission to act. You don’t have to believe you’ll win in order to refuse to comply. “Be Funny” recovers humor as a serious instrument, the thing that punctures the false solemnity on which authoritarian power depends. These are not slogans. They are, genuinely, instructions.

But the book’s most empowering move is subtler than any single chapter. It’s Beckerman’s steady attention to the fact that most of the people in these pages were, for most of their lives, conformists. They were not waiting for the barricades. They held jobs, kept their heads down, made the small daily accommodations everyone makes. And then something — a death, a lie too large to swallow, a knock on a neighbor’s door — moved them across a line they hadn’t planned to cross. Dissidence, Beckerman shows, usually begins not with heroism but with a refusal: a single moment when a person decides that they will not, this time, betray what they know to be true.

That reframing matters, because it relocates courage. Courage is no longer the possession of the extraordinary. It’s a decision available, in principle, to anyone, including the version of each of us who has spent years being reasonable, being careful, being quiet.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the book’s account of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo — the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo — and it is, for me, the heart of the book.

They weren’t activists. They were ordinary Argentine women whose children had been “disappeared” by the military junta in the late 1970s — seized, tortured, killed and erased, while a terrified country was instructed to notice nothing. Public assembly was forbidden. So the mothers did something almost absurdly modest: they went to the plaza in front of the presidential palace, and because the police told them they couldn’t stand still there, they walked. They walked in a slow circle, week after week, wearing white headscarves made from their children’s cloth diapers, some embroidered with a missing child’s name.

That was the whole of it, at first — a handful of women walking in a circle. It looked like nothing. It was, in fact, one of the bravest acts in the modern history of the hemisphere. The junta could disappear individuals in the dark; it could not so easily explain away mothers grieving in broad daylight, in the most public square in the country, refusing to leave. The Madres made the regime’s central lie — that nothing was happening — impossible to sustain. Their persistence drew the eyes of the world. And their small circling walk became one of the moral forces that stripped the dictatorship of its legitimacy and, in time, helped bring it down.

The mothers paid for it. Some of the Madres were themselves disappeared, including one of the women who founded them. Beckerman doesn’t soften that. But the lesson he draws is the one this moment most needs to hear: the walk worked. The simplest, most repeatable act of public refusal, performed by people with no power and no plan, became a movement that outlasted the men with all the guns.

If I have a criticism, offered in friendship to a book I admire, it is this. “How to Be a Dissident” is magnificent on the individual’s journey to the threshold of refusal, and somewhat thinner on what happens once the threshold is crossed. Beckerman is, by his own framing, writing about conscience — the inner voice, the personal act. But a dictatorship is not brought down by an aggregate of brave individuals each refusing alone. It falls when those refusals become organized, sustained and collective.

And here the Madres themselves gently correct the book that celebrates them. Their power was not only moral courage, though it was certainly that. It was also infrastructure. They found one another. They built a practice — the same plaza, the same day, the same circle — that others could see, and join, and repeat. They turned private grief into a public and durable thing. The leap from the lone dissident to the movement is the leap that determines whether authoritarianism actually falls, and it is a leap of organization as much as of conscience. Beckerman gets us, brilliantly, to the edge of that leap. The crossing is work he mostly leaves to us.

#support-block_ae65b931822420e3b71d7d7ad74aa53d { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Become a monthly donor today!

Monthly donations sustain our vital movement journalism. Please donate today!

Donate

I don’t hold it against the book. A book that tried to do everything would do nothing well. But a reader should know that “How to Be a Dissident” is the beginning of the syllabus, not the whole of it.

Still, and this is what I most want to say, read this book, and read it now. We’re living through a season engineered to make people feel small: to make conscience feel naive, refusal feel futile, and the safe move always the quiet one. Beckerman’s answer to all of that is patient and devastating. The dissident is not a different kind of human being. The dissident is an ordinary person who, at some specific and frightening moment, decided not to betray what they knew.

That moment is not reserved for the heroic. It’s not behind us, in history, or above us, in greatness. It stands in front of nearly every one of us, and probably sooner than we would like. “How to Be a Dissident” will not make the moment easier. What it will do — and this is no small thing — is make sure that when the moment arrives, you recognize it, and you remember that ordinary people, walking in a circle, have faced down far worse and won.

This article Being a dissident is a capacity, not a calling was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article In danger of statelessness, Bhutanese refugees build power against deportation was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

When Robin Gurung was 3 years old, his family was forced out of Bhutan. Today, as a 37-year-old organizer and co-founder of Asian Refugees United, or ARU, the reality of that exile remains carved into the landscape. On a recent trip to India’s border with Bhutan, just 20 miles from his family’s former home, Gurung encountered a sign reading, “Please do not cross the borderline.” In a photograph he took, the blue-tinted mountains of Bhutan rise in the distance behind the sign. Yet Gurung still could not cross that border line. 

The photograph captured the strange closeness of a place that had shaped his life from a distance: the country that forced his family out. He spent nearly two decades in a U.N. refugee camp in Nepal before coming to the United States in January 2012 to rebuild his life.  Now, he helps lead a community-wide effort to defend former Bhutanese refugees who are suddenly facing detention and deportation in the country they have come to call home.

Gurung kept his exact location private. “I am not scared, but I am very cautious,” he said when I asked whether he feared retaliation for his advocacy work. During our interview, he joined me from a dimly lit room during a power outage. We first connected on Facebook Messenger, but a weak connection forced us to switch to WhatsApp. From there, he spoke about the advocacy and organizing work he and his colleagues at ARU have led to protect the rights and future of the resettled Bhutanese community.

The border was close, but so was the history it represented. Gurung knew what it meant to lose a home because his family had lived through it. He also knew what it meant to rebuild after displacement. That history now informs his response as members of the same refugee community face a new threat of displacement in the U.S.

As of the filing of this report, upward of 75 former Bhutanese refugees have been deported to Bhutan, only to be taken to the Indo-Nepal border and left stateless once again.

#newsletter-block_d669842feade61d634a4ac5d6e776468 { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_d669842feade61d634a4ac5d6e776468 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our Newsletter

We’ll send you a weekly email with the latest articles.

A primary motivation for Gurung’s advocacy work stems from his own history and his acute awareness of how his grandfather, alongside thousands of others, had endured severe injustice at the hands of the Bhutanese regime. “It is actually a privilege to advocate on behalf of the community.”

Gurung’s family was among 100,000 Lhotshampa, a Nepali-speaking ethnic minority in southern Bhutan, who were driven from their homes during a campaign of discriminatory citizenship policies, arrests, torture and forced evictions.

In the early 1990s, Gurung’s grandfather endured 18 months of imprisonment and severe torture that broke his jaw and left him so badly injured that others assumed he had died. After his release, he spent time in a hospital, where his injuries had changed him so much that his own son barely recognized him. The family fled Bhutan in early 1992. Gurung remembers fragments of their escape: leaving behind their dog, Bittu, and riding on a truck as they crossed out of the country. His grandfather never fully recovered from the torture and later died at a regional hospital in Morang, Nepal.

After years in refugee camps in Nepal, Gurung and thousands of others eventually found a new home through a third-country resettlement program. Beginning in 2008, countries, including the U.S., resettled more than 90,000 Bhutanese refugees. For many, resettlement offered the possibility of finally leaving displacement behind.

That sense of security shattered in March 2025, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, began detaining former Bhutanese refugees in the U.S. For people who had already lost citizenship and spent years in refugee camps, deportation carries a deeper threat. It raises the possibility of returning to the statelessness that began with their expulsion from Bhutan.

But fear has not defined the community’s response. Across the diaspora, ARU has worked to turn individual emergencies into collective action.

When ICE came knocking

ARU formed to build community power and intergenerational leadership among Asian refugee communities. Before the deportation campaign began, the organization worked on political engagement through a partnership with civil rights group Asian Law Caucus, and as a coalition member of the Asian American Leaders Table, a grassroots network uniting local groups to build collective political power. 

That organizing infrastructure became critical when the detention began.

In the second week of March 2025, while launching a youth program and media studio, Gurung learned that ICE had detained community members. Days later, as he drove to the United Nations to renew his annual pass, Bhutanese community activist Bishwa Chhetri sat in the passenger seat calling community leaders and members across Pennsylvania and Ohio, where many of those detained lived, to find out more about the detentions.

The calls revealed the scale of the crisis, but they also exposed a problem: The community had no national system for coordinating information, legal support or immediate assistance to families.

Chhetri said that there was a severe lack of organized mechanisms to track factual information on ICE detentions. In addition, “finding legal representation was a bit of trouble,” he noted, emphasizing that a vast majority of the detainees had no legal representation at all. Recognizing the overwhelming scale of the situation, he and his peers quickly concluded that a single organization could not manage the emergency on its own. Although some community groups in Pennsylvania and Ohio got involved during the early phase, ARU eventually became the sole organization within the community dedicated to carrying out this specialized advocacy work.

What began as an emergency response soon became an organizing project. After returning home from New York, Gurung reached out to the Asian Law Caucus and launched a rapid response partnership. Regarding this collaboration, Aisa Villarosa, manager of the Asian American Leaders Table at Asian Law Caucus, said, “Without community organizers like ARU, the law and lawyers alone cannot provide the holistic support, empowerment, education and creativity to explore every possible avenue for justice.” Rather than simply referring cases to lawyers, ARU built a community-based system around the legal response. Organizers reached families quickly, explained developments in familiar languages and helped people navigate an unfamiliar system.

Previous Coverage

Atlanta offers a model for building sanctuary

The approach reflected a central principle of ARU’s work: People most affected by state violence should have a leading role in fighting it.

“I was exercising these freedoms because of the movement leaders from the generation before me, so I feel a sense of responsibility and gratitude to continue doing the same,” Gurung said. “If we don’t fight back, those in power will continue to suppress others — power has to be checked and balanced because we need to create a system of accountability.”

Young community members in their 20s stepped into organizing roles. They translated for elders, tracked detentions, communicated with relatives, arranged transportation and accompanied people to court. What started as an improvised response gradually became a network capable of mobilizing when another person was detained.

Building a community defense network

ARU granted me access to an August 14 virtual staff meeting, offering a direct look at the day-to-day logistics of this rapidly expanding defense network. On screen, seven young organizers, including Gurung, sat before webcams, coordinating cases across regional hubs in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Their conversation moved fluidly between Nepali and English, blending the language of home with the cold shorthand of the legal system: “FOIA,” “public defender.” At one point, a team member used the word “habeas,” prompting another organizer to ask what it meant. The first organizer paused to explain it in plain language, even though he had no legal training himself.

The exchange captured something essential about the group: They were learning the language of a system they had not been formally trained to navigate, teaching one another as they went. Between key clicks and routine case updates, the stakes came into sharp focus: A juvenile in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania was being tried as an adult and facing up to five years; families were reaching out in panic; green card holders were confronting the possibility of an eventual deportation. 

As this rapid response effort grew, ARU faced another lingering challenge. Fear and confusion were spreading just as fast through the community as the detentions themselves.

To counter this, the organization held virtual mass meetings, organized Know Your Rights sessions and conducted outreach in ways that reflected the linguistic and cultural realities of former Bhutanese refugees. Volunteers also became a bridge between families and legal organizations.

“We had to be alert 24/7 to be available for the families of deportees,” Gurung recalled. “In the meantime, media visibility was imperative.”

The intensity came with a personal cost. “It was mentally too much pressure, but we had no choice,” Gurung said. Having struggled with his own mental health issues since 2024, Gurung experienced a severe mental health crisis during the height of the organizing campaign in 2025, even as new cases continued to emerge. 

His experience points to a broader reality of grassroots defense work. The people creating safety for their communities often do so without the institutional resources available to larger organizations.

The partnership with the Asian Law Caucus helped address some of that gap. Attorneys provided legal expertise while community organizers reached families, built trust and helped connect legal strategies to the realities people faced.

For ARU, the distinction between legal defense and community organizing remained fluid. A family facing deportation might need an attorney, but it might also need someone to translate, arrange transportation or accompany a relative through court.

Mohan Karki’s case illustrates that reality. ICE detained Karki in mid-2025 and separated him from his pregnant wife. She decided to fight the removal order. ARU organizers, including Gurung, traveled to Ohio to pick her up and drove her to federal court proceedings in Michigan. While Karki remained in custody, she gave birth to their baby in June 2025 and continued attending court hearings through December.

“When I first met her, I was very much inspired,” Gurung said. “She had to give birth while her husband was in custody.”

For organizers, cases like Karki’s show why community defense cannot stop at the courtroom door. Families need sustained support as they navigate a system that can reshape their lives overnight.

From individual cases to a broader movement

Those experiences have also pushed ARU beyond individual deportation cases. The organization has built relationships with groups working on statelessness, including United Stateless, connecting the experiences of former Bhutanese refugees to a broader movement of people who lack recognized citizenship or face the threat of statelessness. 

For Gurung, that connection is personal.

“This was very personal in terms of knowing what it means to become stateless, what it means to become a refugee,” Gurung said. “We came to this country after being well-vetted. The idea of deportation to Bhutan was not safe for community members — that idea was very wrong.”

Robin Gurung pictured at the India-Bhutan border with Bhutanese mountains in the background. (Robin Gurung)

The campaign, Gurung said, is about more than protecting individual families. It is also about preventing one generation’s displacement from becoming another generation’s future. Highlighting the systemic barriers that worsen this crisis, Villarosa points out that the U.S. immigration laws and courts lack a uniform, comprehensive definition of statelessness.

“If we don’t fight back, we are giving license to those in power to decide our fate,” he said.

That belief has pushed ARU toward broader coalition building while keeping the Bhutanese community at the center of its work. The organization is strengthening relationships with groups confronting related forms of state violence and working to ensure that the experiences of former Bhutanese refugees inform wider organizing around statelessness and immigrant rights.

That work now shapes ARU’s next phase.

What comes next?

More than a year after the first detentions, ARU continues its rapid response work while building longer-term community power. Gurung said ARU continues to respond to developments affecting former Bhutanese refugees while coordinating a coalition effort to bring Bhutanese organizations together around a joint response.

Community education has also become a central priority. ARU is working to educate and organize community members so they have the knowledge and collective capacity to respond when new challenges arise.

The organization is also pursuing legal and international advocacy. A Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, lawsuit by the Asian Law Caucus remains underway, seeking government records, policies and communications from ICE and the Department of State regarding the sudden detention and deportation of Bhutanese-American refugees. Alongside this domestic legal pressure, representatives from ARU recently met with U.N. Refugee Agency officials from Geneva, Washington, D.C., and the Asia branch to address the ongoing crisis and statelessness risks facing former Bhutanese refugees. 

Locally, ARU is participating in a collective effort to pass a Welcoming County resolution in central Pennsylvania’s Dauphin County that would prevent cooperation with ICE.

These efforts show how a rapid response campaign can grow into a broader organizing strategy. ARU is combining community education, coalition building, legal action, international advocacy and local policy work to challenge the conditions that leave families vulnerable.

Still, the community has built something that did not exist when the first detention calls arrived. Organizers have established rapid response channels, trained community members, accompanied families through court and connected the Bhutanese struggle to broader movements addressing statelessness.

For Gurung, that work remains rooted in the freedoms he gained after nearly two decades in a refugee camp.

“It is a rollercoaster ride,” Gurung said, describing the challenges and complexities of ARU’s ongoing advocacy work.

Reflecting on why he continues organizing, he returns to the experience of people whose freedoms were denied for years, much like his own.

“Having spent close to two decades in refugee camps in Nepal without rights, I finally gained my freedom,” he said. “When a fellow community member faces deportation, it motivates me to keep fighting for their rights as well.”

#support-block_32f26a48e00ef9c9e3d1546f7d822789 { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

Those freedoms came after decades of displacement. Now, community members who understand the cost of losing them are fighting to protect them. ARU’s response continues to evolve, but its central strategy remains clear: build collective power so families facing state violence do not have to face it alone.

Standing just 20 miles from the home he lost, Gurung was reminded of how easily a line on a map can divide a life. Today, as ICE attempts to redraw those same boundaries of exile in the U.S., ARU is drawing a line of its own. By transforming personal trauma into collective defense, they are making one thing absolute: their community will not be forced backward, and no one will ever face statelessness alone.

This article In danger of statelessness, Bhutanese refugees build power against deportation was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article A popular movement in Kashmir defies severe repression was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

When activist Shahzaib Habib was killed by unidentified men on the night of June 6 in Rawalakot, Pakistan, protesters took custody of his body from the combined military hospital and staged a sit-in outside the hospital, demanding that an investigation be opened into his murder. Habib was a close associate of the leadership of the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee, or JAAC, a coalition of local traders, civil society members and political activists who spent the past three years organizing demonstrations across Pakistan-administered Kashmir. 

According to JAAC, security forces opened fire on the vehicle Habib was traveling in. Police say they intercepted a “suspicious vehicle” whose armed occupants fired first.

Habib’s killing came in a week when a crackdown on the JAAC was intensifying day by day. Two days earlier, on June 5, Pakistan’s government had banned JAAC, declaring the nonviolent coalition — which came together around electricity bills and wheat prices — a proscribed organization under the 2014 anti-terrorism act. In the days that followed, a curfew was imposed on Rawalakot, phone and internet were cut across the region of Azaad Jammu and Kashmir, and the government deployed the Pakistan Rangers, a paramilitary force. Protests were met with violence, leaving 11 dead. 

Previous Coverage

Kashmiri human rights defenders continue to fight injustices amid growing repression

Since the June 5 declaration, dozens of protesters have been arrested and many have reportedly been killed. But putting a precise number on either remains difficult. Media access to the region has been tightly restricted since the crackdown began, with phone and internet remaining suspended across much of the region.

Among those killed was one of the main student organizers: Usama Jamil, a PhD student at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad who was deputy secretary general of the Jammu Kashmir National Students Federation, or JKNSF. On July 27, according to student groups and civil society organizations, he was marching in Rawalakot, chanting for people’s rights, when he was shot and killed by security forces. 

The crackdown was not confined to Kashmir. Solidarity protests in Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi were met with arrests. In Lahore, police arrested activists and dozens of bystanders outside the press club during a peaceful demonstration on July 31. In Islamabad, the capital, 88 people were sent into 14-day judicial remand after a solidarity protest the same day. Human rights groups called the arrests part of a broader attempt to criminalize solidarity with Kashmir.

I asked Omer Khan, a member of JKNSF, about the current situation. “I don’t know how to answer this or where to begin,” he said. “A living hell was unleashed upon us, something this region has not witnessed in recent history. Our region was once one of the most peaceful, and now it has almost been turned into a war zone.”

“Dozens have been killed through direct state violence, and countless others have been injured,” he continued. “Food and medicine have been blocked. Frisking, raids and searches have violated the privacy and sanctity of people’s homes” and the entire region is under an undeclared curfew. 

He describes collective punishment as one of the more visible forms of state pressure, but says the psychological toll is harder to measure.

#newsletter-block_c3213103c1912d58a2c829ac5fe0be11 { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_c3213103c1912d58a2c829ac5fe0be11 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our Newsletter

We’ll send you a weekly email with the latest articles.

But for now, despite the killings, crackdowns and internet restrictions, the movement the government tried to outlaw is still organizing. On Sept. 9, the JAAC led a region-wide shutter-down and wheel-jam strike, a form of general strike that aims to shut down all businesses and halt all road traffic. As of today, protesters remain in the streets. 

How the movement got there 

Organizers say that the keys to the movement’s durability have been its flat structure, the strong participation of women, and how it has built trust and solidarity by delivering victories that affect people’s everyday lives. 

“I consider it the world’s most modern and well-organized movement, and its biggest achievement is that it built solidarity among people,” said Haris Ahmed Khan, a member of Progressive Student Collective, or PSC, who was arrested at a peaceful solidary protest in Lahore on July 31 and later released. “When a call is given, everyone gathers.”

The movement began on May 8, 2023, when residents of Rawalakot, the capital of Kashmir’s Poonch district, held a sit-in over the sharp increase in government-subsidized flour prices. Out of that sit-in came the district’s first organizing body, initially called the Poonch Awami Action Committee.

The movement might have stayed local if the government hadn’t handed it a second grievance. When electricity bills for the month of August 2023 arrived from the state-owned power department, people with higher usage rates found their bill had roughly doubled. What began as a flour protest in one district spread across Azad Jammu and Kashmir, as the Poonch district organizing committee folded electricity into its demands, and organizers in the Muzaffarabad and Rawalakot district joined in with a call for a shutter-down and wheel-jam strike. What started as scattered demonstrations turned into a sit-in in Rawalakot that stretched on for months.

People attend the funeral prayers of a man who was reportedly killed during clashes between protesters and police in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, on August 1, 2026. (Sajjad Qayyum / AFP via Getty Images)

Young leaders, lawyers and journalists all joined in. And slowly, the movement started gaining traction on social media.

“They had two or three pages [on Instagram and Facebook] that people trusted, so whenever news came from these pages, people knew it was authentic,” Haris Ahmed Khan explained. Speeches and announcements shared on these pages quickly spread, he said.

But organizers in Kashmir did not consider social media alone to be enough. They went to village councils and formed local committees. In Poonch district, they walked through every bazaar and convinced people to join the movement. They explained to people how they could get flour and electricity at lower prices. 

The movement won on its material demands when flour and electricity prices were lowered in 2024. With these wins, Omer Khan said, the movement proved something to people who’d been told for decades they had no power. 

“It instilled confidence in people across the state that it is possible to fight and to win,” he said. “In particular, securing the right to electricity at the cost of production was an unprecedented achievement in South Asia.”

By building confidence in the movement, these successes led to bigger demands and marked it as a threat to the state, Haris Ahmed Khan said. “People are now demanding public spending and want the state to spend for the people,” he said. “The state does not want people to reach this point in such a peaceful and organized way. So, this has become a threat to the state structure because people are demanding that the state work for them.” 

Previous Coverage

Repression backfires in Pakistan, as oppressed Baloch people hold historic mass protest

In September 2025, Omer Khan joined more than 60 others at a protest outside the Islamabad Press Club. The demonstration didn’t go long. Police with batons charged the crowd, made arrests and held people for over eight hours.

“Women were treated especially badly,” Omer Khan said. “Locked up, they struggled to breathe and were refused basic things like light and fans. Some came out with bruises.” One woman who traveled in from outside the region to show solidarity was questioned by a male officer and had her phone searched, Omer Khan said.

Women have been at the center of the movement from the start, and Omer argues that’s not incidental to its resilience. “The movement was banned because it had spread across the state, especially among women, who have been suffering for a long time, arguably even more than the men,” he said. “This was reflected in the extraordinary mobilization of women, in earlier marches as well. They were the ones who organized and sustained the marches wherever they went.” 

Both Omer Khan and Haris Ahmed Khan credit the movement’s flat, local and deliberately decentralized leadership, as well as its delivering on concrete demands, for its ability to survive repeated crackdowns. 

“The JAAC was not centered around one or a few leaders,” Omer Khan said. “Instead, it was based on representatives from each district. This horizontal structure gave the movement remarkable flexibility, allowing it to absorb pressure and withstand repeated shocks.”

An election without a mandate

The movement has “evolved beyond purely economic demands and began to raise broader political questions, including the right to ownership and the right to self-rule,” Omer Khan said. 

The demands have extended to more, harder targets, including an end to special privileges and perks for the political elite, political and constitutional reforms, stronger local government, accountability for deaths and violence during the protests, withdrawal of cases against protesters, and improvements in public services and infrastructure, including health, education, roads and water supply. The government acquiesced to some of the movement’s demands in an October 2025 peace agreement, but JAAC says many of those commitments remain unfulfilled.

One major demand opposed by the government is the abolition of 12 seats in the 45-seat Azad Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly that are reserved for refugees from Indian-administered Kashmir who live elsewhere in Pakistan. JAAC argues the arrangement lets mainstream Pakistani parties engineer the region’s government from outside; Islamabad says the seats are constitutionally protected and can’t be touched without an amendment. 

The elections Omer Khan predicted would lack legitimacy have now concluded, with Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz party, or PML–N, securing the majority. The movement boycotted the elections, arguing that they could not be legitimate while its leaders were facing a ban and the region was emerging from months of unrest.

JAAC had called for the elections to be annulled and for the establishment of a caretaker government, electoral reforms and a new Election Commission before fresh polls. Government officials rejected those claims, saying voters had given the PML–N a clear mandate and that the elections had been conducted fairly.

#support-block_c7b70e7675d78c184ceb9bd43799568f { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

Tensions in Azad Jammu and Kashmir remain unresolved. In the massive  shutter-down and wheel-jam strike on Sept. 9, JAAC demanded implementation of the October 2025 agreement, while the government says it has fully implemented some demands and is working on others.

Internet access has been partially restored in several districts, but remains completely suspended in Rawalakot and Sudhnoti, while other areas have restricted access mainly for educational institutions and banks. The banned JAAC continues to demand the withdrawal of its proscription, the release of detained activists and an independent judicial inquiry into the June violence, including the killing of Shahzaib Habib and injuries to other protesters. Meanwhile, police continue to accuse the movement of attacking law enforcement personnel and using protests to challenge state authority.

“So many people have died that the movement has reached a point of no return,” Haris Ahmed Khan concluded. “People are demanding the U.N. intervene and ask Pakistan’s government to remove the Rangers from the ground.” Despite everything, he says, people are still standing with the movement and demanding justice.

This article A popular movement in Kashmir defies severe repression was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article 25 years after 9/11, how do we build a movement to stop endless wars? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Twenty-five years after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, on the surface it may seem that American foreign policy has followed a course filled with continuity. A quarter century ago, the U.S. launched the “War on Terror” in response to 9/11. Today, Trump’s attacks on Iran have embroiled the country in another conflict in the Middle East.

Yet while the War on Terror gave rise to a disastrous wave of military intervention, it also produced a historic surge of antiwar activism, which played a critical role in discrediting “forever wars” across the political spectrum. Whereas the Iraq War began with 70 percent public approval, Trump’s war in Iran has been widely opposed from the beginning, with only around a third of Americans currently in support. 

Jeremy Varon, a historian at the New School for Social Research, recently released the first definitive history of antiwar organizing against the War on Terror. His book is entitled “Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War.” I spoke with Varon to discuss the organizing that took place against the war in Iraq that started in 2003, the impact the movement had, and how that activism has been popularly remembered — or, too often, forgotten. 

We also discussed the prospects for antiwar organizing today, when Trump’s attacks on Iran are wildly unpopular, and yet we lack a movement that can be a mechanism for raising the political costs of interventionism. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

There is a very common impression — maybe the dominant impression of antiwar activism under George W. Bush — that the movement was a failure because it did not stop the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. I think that is a distorted perception of the impact the movement did have. What is your assessment?

The first thing to say is that success and failure are relative. And indeed, certainly with regard to the invasion of Iraq, the movement failed in its overarching goal to stop the war before it started. A lot of people intuitively knew that when the bombs started falling, disaster would follow, and that reorienting American policy would be like turning around a tanker, not a tugboat. 

If you look at American military casualties, the implosion of Iraqi society, civilian casualties and so on, the calamity that people feared came to pass. I can appreciate the sense of failure many activists felt, because the stakes were so high — literally life and death.

Previous Coverage

Lessons from the movement to stop the ‘war on terror’

That said, the antiwar movement can claim accomplishments as well. It substantially delegitimated the war before it ever started, especially within the realms of global public opinion and even geopolitics. The United States went to war with just one significant military and political ally: the United Kingdom. It didn’t have the support of traditional allies in Western Europe, like France and Germany. Most of Latin America, Asia and Central Europe rejected the U.S. position. The United Nations, while not declaring the war illegal, fundamentally disapproved of it, and Secretary General Kofi Annan privately thought the war would be a grave mistake. So the actual military campaign was inhibited by both a domestic and a global movement arguing that the war was wrong-headed and likely illegal. 

In a way, the antiwar movement peaked before the Iraq War even started. On February 15, 2003, you had thousands of coordinated antiwar protests all over the world. Between 15 and 30 million people turned out to protest the war. It was the largest single day of protest in human history. For sure, many people on the streets that day were gravely disappointed that the demonstration didn’t have the intended effect of preventing the war. Some percentage maybe never came back to the antiwar movement, because they were so dispirited. But organizing the mass demonstrations built a protest infrastructure that lived on. The main antiwar coalition in the U.S. came into its own through those demonstrations.

I give enormous credit to the people who had the tenacity and stamina to keep grinding away at protest. I’m thinking of Code Pink, United for Peace and Justice, World Can’t Wait and all of these smaller grassroots formations throughout the country that continued to organize.

When the war started, public opinion in the U.S. was substantially in its favor, around 70 percent right after the “shock and awe” invasion. But that was a soft 70 percent, with people in the middle rallying around the flag. They wanted the swift victory Bush promised, which would mean limited American casualties. But as the war bogged down, the antiwar position grew steadily more salient, and antiwar sentiment grew steadily bigger. 

Eventually, public opinion caught up with the antiwar movement. The most recent polling is from 2023 or so. Something like 60 percent of the American public, by that point, thought that the Iraq War was a mistake. A similar percentage thought the Afghanistan War, long considered the “good war,” was a mistake. And a whopping 58 percent of veterans of both deployments think that the wars were not worth fighting.

We’ll never know with any certainty the extent to which the war itself or the antiwar movement was the driver of shifts in public opinion. But in my book I cite observers who argue that the antiwar movement likely limited the duration and intensity of the war in Iraq, and therefore saved lives. That’s a highly general statement, but I think it’s a fair statement. Others note that it may have constrained the neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration from pursuing military action in places like Iran and Syria, which had very much been on their agenda. 

In the book you write that, as the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq in 2003, “For months, the public had been schooled in the reasons for the invasion, and expectations for it. Americans were also versed, if to a lesser degree, in the case against the war. Events on the ground would determine which position was right.” 

I think that’s a very important point: In relation to the War on Terror, the movement created a counter-narrative about what the administration was doing and what actions were actually going to make us safer. And so when the war started going bad, there was already an explanation in place for why this was always a horrible idea and why there should be political consequences.

Yes, and this is important for understanding how public discourse and policy interrelate. There was a counter-narrative about the war coming from the movement. It said that Iraq doesn’t pose a clear and present danger, that there’s no proof of the existence of weapons of mass destruction, that lots of people are going to die, and that it may plunge the region into chaos. Over time, more and more observers could see the reality aligning with those warnings. 

#newsletter-block_49211cb9e613de99c9abf99466e50a26 { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_49211cb9e613de99c9abf99466e50a26 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our Newsletter

We’ll send you a weekly email with the latest articles.

Rather than having to create arguments against the war from scratch, people who were growing increasingly critical could appeal to an existing body of antiwar criticisms and bring them into the public square in a new way. Eventually, you have the political class catching up with where the public already was — aligned, more or less, with the core positions of an antiwar movement. It’s a long and complex process by which dissenting ideas achieve a kind of hegemony and then compel shifts in policy. Even endless wars can end, when they lose legitimacy in the eyes of the nation waging them. That process begins at the grassroots.

Of course, the end of the war came too late to spare untold death and destruction. But the antiwar movement at least limited the damage, and that’s a real achievement.

One of the ways in which the antiwar movement had a swifter impact was in shifting the debate within the Democratic Party. You quickly go from having the leadership of the party voting in favor of the war in Iraq, to there being a complete revolt from the base. This results in the rise of figures such as antiwar candidate Howard Dean in 2004, and it leads to the eventual Democratic nominee John Kerry trying to position himself as an antiwar candidate — even though he’s not an entirely credible one. 

In the 2004 election, George W. Bush was an incumbent, wartime president who most analysts expected to coast to victory based on the massive surge of patriotism after 9/11. And instead this election, in no small part, became a referendum on the war and became an extremely close race. If just 60,000 votes in Ohio had gone the other way, Bush would have been ousted.

During the electoral season in 2004, much of the antiwar movement considered Bush’s defeat to be the quickest way to end the war. The war had already started to crash and burn, but ultimately not badly enough to turn the tide against Bush. Remarkably, he won the so-called “security vote.” Bush had gifted political operatives, notably Karl Rove, who had him run on culture war issues and turned out droves of evangelicals. Last, there was an enormous effort by the right to discredit John Kerry over his opposition to the Vietnam War. As it is, he was a kind of wishy-washy alternative on the war in Iraq, whom the antiwar movement only grudgingly backed. 

It ended up being a close election. Bush’s win was a huge disappointment, even a shock for progressives. Still, the antiwar movement found a way to write another chapter.

By late 2005, the failures of the Iraq War — along with the callousness of the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina — had turned George W. Bush into a premature lame duck president, hamstringing him for the rest of his second term. I would argue that antiwar activism played a big role in that. What is your take?

After the 2004 elections, a new wave of antiwar activism emerges, with powerful new advocates and constituencies.

With Cindy Sheehan, most famously, it had a grieving Gold Star mother asking, “For what noble cause did my son die?” She was really asking, for Bush and the nation to hear, why the war was being fought at all.

Embed from Getty Imageswindow.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'3cEXwTAYTnpykwTTvNGP-w',sig:'kyEsLbpiQ1cHAWrNWps3ZQ_6lTGTiYSt75dM88ZGrDE=',w:'594px',h:'396px',items:'53458598',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});

For weeks in the summer of 2005, Cindy Sheehan and others set up Camp Casey — named after her son — near Bush’s ranch in Texas. Veterans, antiwar activists, celebrities, everyday people and important politicians all gravitated to it. It became ground zero, if you will, for the antiwar movement. And it got intense coverage: CNN, Anderson Cooper, Oprah Winfrey and all sorts of global media. It was the first time since the big demonstrations in 2003 that the antiwar movement drove the narrative. For millions of Americans, the suffering and folly of the war felt real in a new way. 

From the start, some families of 9/11 victims had opposed war, and their voices had unique power. You also had groups like Veterans for Peace working to communicate the bitter lessons of Vietnam to the American public. By 2005, they were joined by a growing mass of veterans of the Iraq War, and even active duty soldiers, reporting that American conduct had nothing to do with spreading peace and freedom and democracy. Instead, it was menacing Iraqis and turning the Iraqi people against the occupation. They had seen it themselves. 

With the activism of the military community, the antiwar movement took on a somewhat different class character. Sheehan is a kind of upper-working-class, all-American mom from small town California, and veterans typically hail from the working class. The U.S. military is a working-class institution. It is also racially a very integrated institution. So you have heartland spokespeople, speaking from a heartland perspective, denouncing a war that is chewing up their lives and falling far short of the high-minded ambitions that Bush had set for it. And I think this gives a kind of permission structure for everyday Americans, who may consider themselves conventionally patriotic, to say, “Wait a second. Who is this war helping?”

Then Hurricane Katrina hits in late August. The botched response is a massive policy failure for the Bush administration, which claimed it had things under control. The whole nation could see that was a lie. Camp Casey breaks up, with a whole contingent, led by Veterans for Peace, leaving Crawford, Texas and rushing to New Orleans. In and around the city, they distribute massive amounts of food, water and other necessities. They use satellite phones to help the Red Cross save people from rooftops. They help people get legal services and deal with insurance companies. They felt duty-bound to rally to the suffering present in America. And they absolutely made the connection of the misuse of resources to wage a foreign war that the country no longer wanted with the neglect of urgent problems at home. 

Then, in September, a pre-planned demonstration happens in Washington that very much connects conditions at home and overseas. It was in some ways the most ambitious of all the antiwar protests — three days that included lobbying, civil disobedience, art exhibits, interfaith events and on-the-ground organizing. 

By late 2005, you see a cratering of public opinion in support of the war. And the pro-war stance never again becomes the majority position. 

Soon enough, you have powerful people in Congress giving new credibility to the antiwar position. There was the famous “Murthquake,” in which John Murtha, a military veteran and initially a big supporter of the war, comes out against it. He himself said that the political class was way behind public opinion. 

And then you have the 2006 midterms, where this sentiment is translated into a major defeat for the Republicans.

Yes. The Democrats have blowout wins, functionally retaking control of both houses of Congress based on an antiwar message. After that it was really a question of when and not if the war ends, with the U.S. far short of having achieved the military and geostrategic objectives that Bush set. From 2006 on, you have the painful extrication of the United States from a quagmire of its own making. 

What I consider the most significant Congressional action after 2006 was the impaneling of the Iraq Study Group. That was a bipartisan group to diagnose what went wrong and advocate a way forward, which was ultimately some form of U.S. withdrawal. You have the eminences of the American foreign policy establishment basically calling bullshit on Bush’s signature policy. When they release their report, it’s a bestseller. It’s being sold in bookstores and airports and downloaded something like two million times. 

Reading the narrative you present in your book, and remembering all of the organizing that took place on so many different fronts, it’s startling how much of it has been utterly forgotten in the media and in the popular imagination. What do you think accounts for that?

The movement, in its own day, was woefully underreported on. I blame the legacy media and major cable outfits — almost all of the press, really — for confusing post-9/11 patriotism with an excuse to abdicate its responsibility to report on domestic dissent. For years, activists struggled to get sustained attention to their efforts.

I was part of this movement, but probably 90 percent of what I report on in my book, I had no idea was happening at the time. Part of the intent of the book is to give this big, robust, spirited, movement its due, while also understanding why knowledge about it was suppressed. 

#support-block_f20b5ddf86a1e542d2dee92d4c3194b8 { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Become a monthly donor today!

Monthly donations sustain our vital movement journalism. Please donate today!

Donate

The larger purpose is to try to induce a broader legal, political and moral reckoning with the totality of the War on Terror. My argument is that we hear so little about the antiwar movement in part because we hear so little about the War on Terror itself. It’s as though the Iraq War never happened. It was so consequential, it was so costly in blood and treasure. But, historically speaking, it feels almost like a non-event. My college students know almost nothing about it.

I was born in 1967, and I came of age in the post-Vietnam War era. That war had a massive, lasting impact on American political life and culture. There was the “Vietnam Syndrome” that discouraged new wars. There was the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial in Washington. Every Hollywood auteur made a Vietnam War movie. It was understood that the United States had been through something big and traumatic, and that the nation needed soul-searching to examine its foreign policy, the meaning of patriotism and the appropriate uses of the military. 

The War on Terror, in its most intense phase, has not been succeeded by anything like that kind of public reflection. We badly need it. My thesis is that the War on Terror was so ugly, so confusing, so divisive, that we simply don’t know what to do with it. And when you don’t know what to do with something, the easiest thing is to ignore it. 

Of course, there are millions of people for whom forgetting isn’t a luxury: all the Iraqis who were murdered or displaced or dismembered, and all these veterans suffering from traumatic head wounds or who have missing limbs. We owe it to them to remember and learn from past mistakes.

Today, we face a unique situation in that Trump’s war in Iran is incredibly unpopular, and across political parties there is huge opposition to the U.S. getting into so-called “forever wars.” And yet, we lack any large antiwar movement that is actively raising the political cost of unpopular interventionism. 

It’s stunning. My take is that Trump doesn’t like “endless wars” for all of the obvious reasons. At the same time, he is eager to use the lethality of the American military to project his own power on the global stage. For him, stupid wars are simply wars that the United States can’t easily win. So he craves “victory.” He got very excited by the intervention in Venezuela and the initial strikes against Iran. And he thought that, with advances in military technology, we could have these quick-hit mini-victories with minimal, if not negligible, cost in American lives. 

Previous Coverage

Where’s the resistance to the Iran war?

Right now, we’re in this weird limbo with the Iran conflict. On the one hand, it’s a war frightfully outside traditional constraints on a president, which Trump disdains. He doesn’t believe in limits set by Congress, international law, the U.N., or the opinions of allies. 

At the same time, he likely recognizes that some number of U.S. casualties would be unacceptible to Americans and would sink the war. So that lesson from Iraq, from Vietnam even, he does seem to get. My fear is that low-intensity conflicts, like in Iran, may grow routine and become background noise in American political life that never quite rile the public to demand their end. The trick for Trump is to continue waging war without prohibitive costs that would trigger widespread outrage among a disapproving but disaffected public. 

I think the midterms will be a crucial test of whether disapproving public opinion can have a real price. If the Democrats win big, we may have part of the answer.

I would love it if there were a dedicated antiwar movement addressing Iran as well as possible intervention in Cuba. Personally, I don’t think we’re going to have such a movement. Barring some dramatic escalation of the war in Iran, which is still possible, I think we’re going to have a continuation of the current circumstance where dissatisfaction with the war is one of a number of grievances with Trump — along with the public corruption, inattention to issues of affordability, vanity projects, et cetera. If Republicans get routed, public opinion experts will have to sift through the data to find out how important the war has been. 

What lessons do you draw from antiwar organizing in the years after 9/11 that you think are relevant for movements today?

I think there are strategic lessons for activists today. One is that, while a movement’s message matters, the messenger matters enormously as well. When it’s a Gold Star mother, when it’s a veteran, when it’s an ex-general, when it’s a formerly pro-war politician articulating an antiwar position, the message behaves very differently than it might otherwise. Effective movements always need to think about how to present and highlight those voices that have the greatest credibility among the broader public and political class. We may bristle at this dynamic, but historically our most successful social movements have understood that.

Another takeaway is the general power of conscientious dissent to alter political conditions. If you think of Bush declaring “Mission Accomplished,” which he did on May 1, 2003, it was a great moment of bluster. But then you look at the profound turning of the American public on the War on Terror over the two years that followed. It’s a remarkable difference. That change would have been incredibly hard to predict. 

That’s part of political life and part of life more generally. We can be thoughtful, we can be strategic, we can identify goals, but we can’t ultimately know the consequences of our actions in advance. 

America and the world would have been much better off if antiwar voices had genuinely been listened to, and not belittled and ignored. People with enormous expertise and good moral instincts captured the truth of the moment. So one needs to work really hard — against the biases of the media and government alike — to make one’s truth heard. There are rewards of stamina, even when things seem bleak. Any number of issues, from global warming, to Gaza, to the abuses of immigrants, feel incredibly bleak now. But temporary setbacks shouldn’t be a reason for resignation. History has too many examples of the rewards of holding on to hope. 

This article 25 years after 9/11, how do we build a movement to stop endless wars? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Making change from the dirt up was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Twenty-eight years ago, a group of neighbors in downtown Tucson, Arizona, led by permaculture designer Brad Lancaster, cut curbs in their neighborhood to let rainwater into the verge, where they guerrilla-planted indigenous flora. These and other crimes made their once-barren neighborhood an urban refuge. Then they put on their lobbying hats; today, Tucson’s government gives financial incentives to do what the scofflaws once did illegally.

When I first moved back to Tucson part-time to find good care for my mother, I met David Walker, a friend of Brad’s with another ambitious vision: Use a huge, extremely destructive weed called buffelgrass — imported from Africa by the USDA and Big Cattle, for feed — to make beautiful adobe housing for the unhoused, while paying them to help build it. He imagined a network of brickyards, sponsored by the city and providing not only money but food, music, community and new skills to people in need, and to anyone. 

#newsletter-block_a38e1326bc8767f66615493212057552 { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_a38e1326bc8767f66615493212057552 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our Newsletter

We’ll send you a weekly email with the latest articles.

This felt like the best idea I’d ever heard, and once my mother was finally in good hands I helped gather a group of university students and others to start making it a reality. Long story short, today we have a functioning prototype brickyard where volunteers — and, soon, a number of unhoused people paid by a local non-profit — pull buffelgrass, mold it with dirt and water into 4-foot-long bricks, eat freshly cooked food and make friends. We’re working towards five buffelgrass-adobe structures, including a low-income row house and two low-income accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, in backyards volunteered by their owners. This isn’t mutual aid, or not only: Once these pilot projects prove viable, we’ll lobby the city to sponsor this kind of low-income housing at scale, for a fraction of the cost of commercial construction and a whole lot more social, ecological and aesthetic benefit. Never having lobbied before, I don’t know all that’s involved, but several city officials have been very supportive, and Brad has given us a good roadmap. 

Escaping the corporate maze

In Tucson, regular people — especially the less privileged — once built their own houses from dirt and plants and water, and could repair them when needed. Then, in the 1960s, the city razed most of downtown, uprooting hundreds of families to make way for a brutalist convention center meant to attract business dollars. Today, what remains of that old adobe neighborhood is one of the most prized parts of the city to live in and homes there command the highest prices. Building adobe structures citywide to serve the unhoused could be a way for the city to make amends for those 1960s-era crimes against people, community and aesthetics. 

Buffelgrass-adobe housing would also be an improvement over commercially built shelters, and not only because they’d be cheaper to build and run and a whole lot nicer to live in: The ways corporations make buildings, even “green” ones, ruin natural landscapes, emit massive carbon and fuel a race to the bottom among providers of raw materials. 

Volunteers pack adobe-coated buffelgrass into brick. (Beihua Guo/Barrio Buffelworks)

In other forms of housing for vulnerable populations, it’s the corporate structure itself that’s the source of the problem — but that, too, could be fairly straightforward to fix, at the municipal level at least. 

When my mother was diagnosed with dementia and keeping her in her home proved untenable, I found a nearby facility that was part of a statewide chain called The Villas. The place was as stately and manicured as its name suggests, but a host of dysfunctions appeared soon enough: neglect of some residents, conflict between staff and management, and so much turnover that I sometimes couldn’t keep track of who the director was, let alone staff. For want of activities, the TV often served as a caregiver. I visited other facilities that looked just as good, but all clearly had the same problems, or worse: one large branch of Atria Senior Living, with more than a billion dollars of revenues yearly, informed me that they didn’t even have a staff nurse for residents and so couldn’t administer medicines on an as-needed basis, for anxiety or anything else. (Atria did not respond by deadline for a comment request for this piece.)

I finally stumbled onto a large independent facility and was able to settle my mother there. This place is owned by a local couple who built it and now help to run it. They don’t advertise, and the building is unimpressive, but the high-ceilinged inside is airy and bright, with big windows everywhere onto a courtyard that — in contrast to the perfunctory runs of some corporate places — is lush and green, with a path that weaves through three distinct zones. It also has chickens and rabbits, plus one gregarious tortoise named Penelope; the owners know animals are good for those with dementia, and to hell with the small extra cost. Besides the full-time medical staff there is also a full-time activities director and a music director, and the TV stays off except for occasional movie nights. The staff changed little in my mother’s last years, and we both formed valuable bonds with several of them.

Local ownership may not guarantee this kind of quality, but I’ve come to believe that corporate ownership guarantees quite the opposite. The hierarchy required to run a chain of facilities manufactures a kind of psychopathy: People at the top, making decisions for profit, are shielded by layers of management from what their decisions might mean. Local owners, by contrast, must face the results of their decisions; to be as cutthroat as chains they’d need to be actual psychopaths — and luckily that’s pretty rare.

To make eldercare less psychopathic at local levels, we could disincentivize ownership of more than one care facility. Getting good-enough city governments to do this would take lots of legwork, but it would be possible. Just as corporate lobbyists work hard to accomplish their aims — like building water-guzzling data centers in the desert near Tucson, against the city’s wishes — regular people can also lobby and win, as Brad and his cohort proved.  

Local change can be deeper change

Back when the Yes Men began in early 2000, we thought the world just needed a few giant tweaks. The final action of our first movie was a fictional mega-tweak: a reform of the World Trade Organization to serve human people instead of big corporate ones. Over the next two decades we never let go of the feeling that change at the top could occur through public pressure, and we communicated that through dozens of actions.

Today, of course, positive change at the federal level is unimaginable in the U.S. At that level, and in some cities and states, progress can only occur through changes in leadership — as has happened in New York City. But in most cities, and many states, the government’s good enough as it is: We just have to use it to fix what’s been broken in better, creative ways. That can also change worlds: Many movements, like women’s suffrage and marriage equality, spread city to city and state to state before changing national policy.

#support-block_eab1e8c9c46d9ae305200da029808894 { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

And who knows? The takeover of farming and manufacturing by big corporations destroyed rural economies, creating deep hardship that a tin-pot wannabe dictator turned into false grievances. Maybe building the muscles we need to declare independence from big corporations could not only help us to solve big problems now, but even help prevent future slides into fascism. That’s just theory; what’s certain is that it’s great fun to get our hands dirty. 

This story was produced in partnership with The Yes Men substack.

This article Making change from the dirt up was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article US communities are organizing to end complicity with genocide in their backyards was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Dwight Hua’s roommate knocked on his door at 5:30 a.m. on May 22, saying there was a notice for nearly 50,000 people in their city of Garden Grove, California, to evacuate due to the danger of a deadly chemical explosion at a nearby GKN Aerospace plant. Hua quickly left for a shelter in a neighboring city. But he had a lot of questions. 

As the evacuation stretched over five days, advocacy groups VietRISE — where Hua is a youth programs coordinator — the Harbor Institute for Immigrant and Economic Justice, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and Orange County Justice for Palestine formed a coalition to demand “transparency about why a facility tied to global hazardous weapons manufacturing is operating in the middle of working-class immigrant neighborhoods.” Research led by the local chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement, or PYM, found that the company manufactured parts for military vehicles, including F-35 fighter jets, which are used in Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians.

“No one really knew that this was what we were living close to,” Hua said. “A company that makes money off of violence abroad is not the character of Garden Grove and its residents.”

Many residents who, like Hua, live just blocks away from the facility felt enraged when they found out. The coalition joined the People’s Embargo for Palestine, an international movement to establish an arms embargo on Israel, and began organizing actions to push the city to shut down GKN Aerospace and place a moratorium on military manufacturing in Garden Grove. They have been canvassing, showing up to city council meetings and circulating a petition that has drawn more than 11,000 signatures. Addressed to the mayor and city council, the petition demands “an immediate end to the use of our tax dollars, public land and public infrastructure to manufacture, store or transport the weapons that make this genocide possible.” 

While the Garden Grove City Council has canceled meetings and omitted GKN Aerospace from meeting agendas in the months since the evacuation, Hua said, the coalition has kept on growing in size and influence. Members continue to show up to city council meetings, canvass and meet with city officials, some of whom have shown support for the embargo.

The campaign for a weapons embargo is part of a larger international movement to stop global manufacturing and shipment of weapons to Israel. From Türkiye to Italy to the U.S., localized campaigns targeted at Israeli weapons suppliers have emerged, led by community groups and unions, and often supported by PYM chapters. Their goal is to end local complicity in the genocide — and ensure worker and community safety — through bans on weapons shipments through local airports and seaports, as well as shutdowns and moratoriums on weapons manufacturing facilities in residential areas.

Putting communities at risk for Israel

A coalition of community groups is leading an embargo campaign in New York City’s John F. Kennedy Airport, where dangerous explosives and F-35 bomber components bound for Israel have passed through the same runways as passenger flights. The campaign is calling on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to end arms shipments through public infrastructure. Most of the coalition’s efforts have been geared toward organizing and educating workers, especially unionized workers in warehouses and on planes. 

#newsletter-block_a1e425957c01ae1929deaa1cb3b697fb { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_a1e425957c01ae1929deaa1cb3b697fb #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our Newsletter

We’ll send you a weekly email with the latest articles.

Abdullah Shehadeh, communications co-chair of Break the Chain, the coalition leading the campaign, said that workers were unaware they were handling explosives bound for Israel because they were mislabeled. 

“Workers feel very scared about what they’re doing in their day to day, not knowing that complicity like this is even possible for them,” Shehadeh said. “They didn’t sign up to be part of a supply chain of genocide.”

In outreach to workers, volunteers with the coalition also point out the dangers of handling explosives, noting that a munitions plant in Tennessee which manufactured the same explosives experienced a blast last year that destroyed an entire building and killed 16 people. 

Organized by New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter, Break the Chain was founded in 2025 by Palestinian liberation organizers in New York who wanted to focus on a tangible campaign to organize labor. 

The coalition is advocating for more transparency for workers and the public to know what is passing through their workplaces and communities. Volunteers with the coalition post educational flyers in Queens, New York, where many airport workers live, and hand them out on the air train that workers use to commute. The coalition encourages small businesses in the area to display informational posters and hold events in their spaces. A tool on the coalition website lets workers search for whether their employers are complicit in the genocide.

“It’s their right to know what they’re moving and to not be a part of a war machine that they didn’t sign up for,” Shehadeh said. “They should be moving civilian goods, not military goods or bombs going to a genocide.” 

Break the Chain also advocates for labor unions to pass resolutions calling for a ceasefire and end to military aid, to bargain for contract protections for workers who refuse to contribute to the supply chain of Israeli arms, and to work with elected city officials to explore expanding the rights of working-class New Yorkers. After meetings with union leaders and working groups, more than 20 unions have signed the coalition’s resolutions, including the United Auto Workers, Association of Flight Attendants, National Education Association and 1199SEIU.

Shehadeh said the coalition’s activism is “an intersection between labor, Palestine, and community and public safety.” He is concerned that if the explosives are mishandled or improperly stored, there could be a catastrophic explosion threatening the lives of the more than hundred thousand people who pass through JFK every day, as well as nearby communities. 

Previous Coverage

Pro-Palestine activists arrested blocking New Jersey port

Garden Grove and the area of Queens surrounding JFK are both predominantly immigrant communities. Shehadeh said the transfer of weapons through JFK is an example of how “massive private profit fuels endless conflict, and the environmental health and moral burdens fall on working-class communities here in New York City.”

“A handful of billionaires line their pockets with profits from weapons contracts, while we are seeing crumbling infrastructure in our subways here in New York City; we’re seeing climate change get worse and worse,” Shehadeh said. 

Embargo campaigns at the ports

Activists in Texas have called on the Port of Houston to place an arms embargo at their ports, where critical parts for the F-35 fighter jet pass through to Israel. Upon learning from a PYM report that the Houston port was shipping parts for the same weapons used to bomb schools, refugee camps and hospitals, activists came together with PYM and local groups to form the Houston Arms Embargo Campaign in 2024.

The campaign took inspiration from PYM’s global Mask off Maersk campaign, which calls on people to get Maersk to end its contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and Israeli Ministry of Defense to ship military components to Israel. Under the contracts, the logistics and shipping giant handles everything from tactical vehicles used to transport Palestinian prisoners  to parts for armored tanks and aircraft and artillery systems used for slaughter in Gaza and Lebanon. According to a recent report published by PYM and Oxfam, Maersk shipped millions of pounds of cargo to Israeli military manufacturer, Elbit Systems, between October 2023 and July 2025.

PYM organizer Fouad Salah said that localizing the campaign has helped activate constituencies from students and workers to faith communities, and built relationships with 40 national and local organizations, including other Palestinian campaigns, and anti-gentrification, Black and Latino groups. 

There are similar campaigns at major ports in California, Louisiana, New Jersey and more. In New Jersey, activists used their own bodies and cars to block a port from delivering weapons to Israel in May.

“So many of the ports in this country are implicated in the transport of military cargo that’s used in an ongoing genocide, and I think this is a really important piece because this is public infrastructure, these are not military ports,” Salah said. “As constituents, we should have a say in what happens with our public infrastructure.”

A child attempts to strike a piñata resembling a F-35 aircraft at a picnic hosted by Houston Arms Embargo in late July. (Courtesy of Houston Arms Embargo)

Like the Break the Chain campaign, the Houston Arms Embargo Campaign has been flyering at community centers, parks, malls, mosques and churches. They have also circulated the Houston Arms Embargo petition, engaging constituents in the idea of an arms embargo and encouraging them to get involved. The campaign has also held free lunches provided by local restaurants for people interested to learn more about their work. In July, they held a picnic at a park to bring the community together for the campaign’s one-year anniversary, which was well-attended despite the Texas heat.

“The power is with the people, but for the people to exercise that power, they need to be educated and conscious of what’s going on, and so a lot of our tactics revolve around getting the average Houstonian aware and agitated about what’s happening at the port,” Salah said.

Many people Salah comes across don’t know much about how the ports near their homes are shipping weapons to Israel; once they find out, he said, they generally support the campaign and want to help. He said many people “have watched Palestinian children limbless crying for their mothers and fathers because of a genocide being committed by weapons manufactured and transported from the United States, and at a certain point, there is an ethical line that a person draws.”

He said that having a localized campaign at the ports gives people a place to feel like they can do something about it. 

“We were able to build a campaign that took [people’s general desire] to stop the genocide in Gaza, and hone it in to something that is happening in our city,” Salah said. “I think this gave people a sense of real purpose and real direction. It gave them a real, concrete, tangible thing that they could channel their energy into.”

#support-block_40241ddbea47dd77453354893f478ab4 { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

Similarly, Hua said that having a community-based coalition has empowered residents by giving them a platform for action.

“Having a coalition has really been a space for community members to be able to feel empowered to be involved in shaping their community,” Hua said. “We want to continue to strengthen the community power and not let this get swept under the rug, and so we are continuing to show up to city council meetings and continuing to build that power.”

This article US communities are organizing to end complicity with genocide in their backyards was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article What the 1960s can teach us about cross-racial solidarity was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

There is a particular kind of political amnesia that can overtake movements in difficult times. We remember the victories but forget the arguments that preceded them. We remember the marches but forget the years of patient organizing that made them possible. We remember solidarity as a feeling rather than a political practice.

Alice Echols’ “Black Power, White Heat: From Solidarity Politics to Radical Chic” is a useful antidote to that amnesia.

Echols tells the story of interracial and cross-racial organizing within the Black freedom movement through two organizations that bookend the decade: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, and the Black Panther Party. The Panthers’ commitment to armed self-defense, and later debates over militancy and guerrilla warfare, form part of that history. Echols’ central concern — and the focus of this review — is the difficult work of solidarity: how movements build relationships across differences in race, power and political position.

This book arrives at an important moment. Across the United States and elsewhere, racism, xenophobia, and religious and white supremacist nationalism are again being mobilized to divide people who might otherwise have common interests. Authoritarian movements understand something the left sometimes forgets: people who can be persuaded to see one another as enemies are much easier to govern.

The question of how we build solidarity across difference is therefore an urgent question of power.

From Black Power to “Radical Chic”

The title captures the book’s historical arc.

Black Power meant, among other things, the assertion of Black autonomy, self-determination and political power.

White Heat comes from SNCC organizer Bob Moses’s metaphor for the transformative potential of white participation in the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. Nearly 1,000 mostly white college students traveled to Mississippi that summer to support Black voter-registration efforts. Moses hoped their presence would expose white America to the reality of racial violence and help generate political transformation beyond Mississippi.

And then there was “Radical Chic,” Tom Wolfe’s infamous 1970 caricature of wealthy white liberals hosting a fundraiser for the Black Panther Party at Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s Manhattan penthouse. Wolfe transformed cross-racial political solidarity into a punchline: wealthy liberals playing at revolution, fashionable people dabbling in radical causes. Echols argues that the essay became more than a satire of one awkward party: It helped create a durable political language for attacking solidarity itself.

What happened between those moments is the heart of the book. Echols resists a simple story of interracialism giving way to Black nationalism, or a morality tale in which one side was right and the other wrong. She describes experiments in solidarity that were sometimes extraordinarily productive, sometimes painful, and often both at once.

That complexity is precisely what makes this history useful now.

Solidarity is not sameness

The early SNCC experience illustrates both the promise and limitations of interracial organizing.

SNCC brought Black and white activists together in a shared struggle against segregation and disenfranchisement. But Freedom Summer also intensified questions about power inside the movement. What did it mean for white people to participate in a movement led by Black people? Could interracialism reproduce the racial hierarchy it was supposed to challenge?

Echols gives this contradiction a particularly revealing form. Some Black SNCC organizers noticed that local Black people who had repeatedly ignored their appeals to get involved would suddenly listen to newly arrived white male volunteers. In other cases, white volunteers arrived in Mississippi with assumptions about how things should be done, even taking over office work that Black staff had been doing. The conflicts revealed a deeper problem: The racial hierarchy SNCC was trying to dismantle could reappear inside an interracial movement.

#newsletter-block_ed6c54480f005beb0bdaefd79c34f1f7 { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_ed6c54480f005beb0bdaefd79c34f1f7 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our Newsletter

We’ll send you a weekly email with the latest articles.

These questions shaped the organization’s strategy and eventually contributed to SNCC’s turn toward Black Power and the expulsion of white staff in 1966.

Echols’ history offers no simple verdict on interracial organizing. It shows how coalitions can generate real political power while reproducing some of the very inequalities they are trying to overcome. The people in her history wrestled with that contradiction, producing new strategies, organizations, alliances and political possibilities.

Their experiences point toward a more demanding alternative to divide and rule: organized solidarity capable of turning difference into political power.

Organizing is more than mobilizing

One of the book’s most important lessons for the present concerns the difference between mobilizing and organizing.

The 1960s are often remembered through spectacular images: marches, demonstrations, sit-ins, crowds in the streets. But the power of the movements Echols describes depended on much more than protest.

It grew through people living in communities, building relationships, developing political confidence, creating institutions and learning how to act collectively. One example is the Freedom Schools organized during Mississippi Summer. Their purpose went beyond political messaging. Organizers developed curricula intended to help people understand their communities and develop the confidence and skills to participate in changing them. The schools became part of the infrastructure through which Freedom Summer could turn a national moment of attention into deeper local organizing.

Freedom Summer did not emerge from nowhere. Neither did the Panthers’ survival programs or their legal and political defense networks. This infrastructure depended on relationships and material capacities built over time.

The mass protests following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, and more recently against Trump’s authoritarianism, demonstrated extraordinary popular anger. But mass participation alone does not create durable power. Movements need the capacity to bring people into action — and then to keep organizing them after the cameras leave. They need structures through which people develop political agency, and organizations capable of surviving repression, disagreement, electoral cycles and changes in public mood.

We need movements that can mobilize. We also need movements that can organize.

The politics of the “ally”

Another question running through the book has become familiar on the contemporary left: What should people do when they want to support a struggle that is not their own? Echols offers no simple answer.

White activists sometimes became important organizers and collaborators. Others became what Echols calls “awkward allies” or “clueless comrades.” The harder question concerned the terms of participation: what could meaningful support look like in a movement organized around Black self-determination?

Ella Baker advocated for a broad movement expansive enough even to include what she called the “matron in the fur coat.” Her approach was not merely rhetorical. When SNCC was getting started, Baker hired Jane Stembridge, a white Southern theology student and poet, as the organization’s first paid staffer. Echols notes that historian Clayborne Carson has suggested SNCC might have collapsed during that first summer without the energy and skills Baker and Stembridge brought to the work. Baker’s organizing philosophy centered on developing people’s capacity rather than accumulating authority. As Echols notes, she believed that “strong people don’t need strong leaders.”

Solidarity is a relationship, not a performance. That does not mean every contribution carries the same value or that movements should welcome everyone without conditions. It means that meaningful participation depends on relationships of trust, accountability and a willingness to support work that one may not control.

The Panthers offer a particularly interesting example. They remained committed to Black political autonomy while deliberately cultivating relationships with white radicals, lawyers, journalists, publishers and other supporters. These relationships could be politically useful, but they also created tensions. White radicals sometimes struggled with being asked to play supporting rather than leading roles, while the Panthers had to navigate relationships with people whose social position was fundamentally different from their own. Huey Newton later acknowledged the importance of progressive white activists to the Panthers, even as relationships between Black and white radicals remained fraught.

SNCC’s evolving approach to white radicals points toward another way of thinking about this relationship. Stokely Carmichael, later Kwame Ture, increasingly argued that white activists should organize in their own communities. White radicals were encouraged to confront the institutions shaping their own lives, including the military draft and the Vietnam War. Bob Moses himself worked with white antiwar organizers such as David Dellinger, A. J. Muste and Staughton Lynd.

Organizer Staughton Lynd shakes hands with a Mississippi resident during Freedom Summer. (Mark Levy Collection/The Civil Rights Archives of the Queens College)

Carmichael’s argument proposed a different structure for solidarity: people developing power in their own communities and around the forms of oppression shaping their own lives while remaining connected to a broader struggle.

That approach can help shift solidarity away from paternalism. Rather than entering someone else’s struggle primarily as a helper, people are asked to examine how the systems they are fighting also shape their own lives, communities and possibilities. That can create a more grounded basis for political commitment.

There is a tension here as well. A politics built around one’s own stake can narrow into self-interest, with people feeling responsible only for struggles in which they can identify themselves as directly affected. The challenge is to begin from one’s own lived position without ending there — to build power where we are while recognizing the larger systems that connect our struggles.

Autonomy and coalition can coexist.

The material side of solidarity

Echols also pays unusual attention to something movements sometimes overlook: the practical resources needed to keep political work going. Movements need lawyers, meeting spaces, printing presses, transportation, ways to communicate, food, bail money, staff, research, childcare, and, of course, money. 

The Panthers’ relationships with white lawyers and other supporters offer a useful example. Their legal defense efforts depended on people who could provide skills, money, publicity and access to institutions that the Panthers themselves could not easily command. In courtrooms across the country, mostly white left-wing lawyers defended Black radicals against prosecutors and police forces. These relationships could strengthen the movement materially and sometimes helped expose the workings of the state itself. 

Political economy is inseparable from organizing. Good intentions do not build legal networks, communications systems, or the other infrastructure movements need.

Resources, however, also create relationships of power. A movement dependent on wealthy supporters can become vulnerable to their influence. A donor may want to help without understanding the political work — or may expect gratitude, access, influence or even authority in return.

Movements often need resources from people outside their core constituencies. The challenge is to build relationships in which those resources expand collective power rather than quietly shifting power toward those who control them.

Rather than resolve this contradiction, Echols shows why movements have to confront it.

Repression and the politics of division

Movements do not operate in a vacuum.

Echols shows how repression can reshape a movement from within. COINTELPRO and local police “Red Squads” amplified existing rivalries and ideological divisions inside the Panthers, helping create a climate of debilitating paranoia. Panther chief of staff David Hilliard captured the bitter irony: The party had been created to help Black people determine their own destinies, yet increasingly “the state — FBI, police, Red Squads — is deciding our fate.”

Repression also pushed the Panthers toward coalition. Echols traces how the pressure of state surveillance and police attacks encouraged the party to seek alliances with other radicals and left-leaning liberals, including through the 1969 United Front Against Fascism, a broad coalition that brought together the Panthers and other groups concerned about state repression and the threat of fascism.

Previous Coverage

Ingredients for building courage

Authoritarian politics thrives on fragmentation. It encourages workers to blame migrants rather than employers, poor people rather than concentrated wealth, and racial minorities rather than the institutions that reproduce inequality. It turns religious difference into a political weapon and cultural difference into evidence of threat.

The parallels between the present and the 1960s have limits. The present should not be reduced to a replay of that earlier period. The underlying political problem, however, is familiar: Those in power often seek to divide people who might otherwise recognize their shared interests and build power together.

Echols’ history shows what becomes possible when movements resist that fragmentation — and what can happen when they cannot. 

“Radical Chic” and the attack on solidarity

Perhaps the book’s most surprising contribution is its treatment of Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic.”

Wolfe’s 1970 essay mocked a fundraiser for the Black Panther Party held at Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s Manhattan penthouse. The image was almost irresistible: wealthy white liberals in evening clothes mingling with Black revolutionaries, champagne and revolution sharing the same room. Wolfe turned the gathering into a joke about fashionable people playing at radicalism.

Echols argues that something more consequential happened. “Radical Chic” helped establish a political language for dismissing cross-racial solidarity as fundamentally unserious: the rich were hypocrites, the radicals were dangerous, and everyone involved was performing for status.

That framing has proved remarkably durable. Echols traces how the idea of “radical chic” migrated into conservative politics, becoming part of a broader effort to portray progressive politics as the indulgence of cultural elites rather than a response to real systems of exploitation and racial domination.

There is an important tension here. Some of the people who participated in these relationships undoubtedly were motivated by status, fashion or a desire to be close to something exciting. Yet the imperfections of individual participants do not tell us much about the value of solidarity itself. Treating privileged or imperfect allies as evidence that coalition is inherently fraudulent can become a way of making solidarity seem suspect.

Echols shows that cross-racial solidarity persisted in forms far removed from Wolfe’s caricature. Black radicals continued to find unexpected points of connection with white lawyers, journalists, activists, jurors and ordinary people who encountered their politics through organizing, political trials and community work. What mattered was whether those relationships could produce greater political understanding and collective power.

That distinction matters now. In a political culture increasingly eager to reduce solidarity to social-media signaling, celebrity activism or elite posturing, cynicism can spread easily.

We should be capable of criticizing performative solidarity without becoming cynical about solidarity itself. The first can sharpen political judgment. The second can become political disarmament.

A history worth putting to work

“Black Power, White Heat” offers no formula for building the next movement. Its value lies in the richer political history it gives us for thinking about our own organizing — and in the questions that history leaves us with:

How do we build solidarity across real differences in power and experience?

How do we combine autonomy with coalition?

How do we organize people rather than simply mobilize them?

How do we build institutions that can survive repression?

How do we develop political power within our own communities while remaining committed to a larger movement?

And how do we build relationships strong enough to withstand the deliberate efforts of those in power to divide us?

#support-block_8a4f3e0ae2dc2256b76e0f87f1993a01 { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

Echols’ story offers no easy answers, and the people she writes about did not have them either. Their collaborations were productive and fraught, sometimes exhilarating and sometimes heartbreaking. That is precisely why this history is useful.

The left does not need another mythology about the 1960s. We need its contradictions.

For those of us trying to build movements now — against racism, militarism, ecological destruction, exploitation, xenophobia, patriarchy and authoritarianism — this history offers something more valuable than nostalgia. It offers political literacy.

Read it with your organizing group. Read it with your political education circle. Argue about it. Ask where the people in the book succeeded and where they failed. Ask what their dilemmas look like in your own community.

Because solidarity is something we build.

In an age increasingly defined by attempts to divide us, building solidarity may be one of the most important forms of power we have.

This article is co-published with ZNetwork.org.

This article What the 1960s can teach us about cross-racial solidarity was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article Why solidarity is vital to freeing imprisoned human rights defenders was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Every Aug. 30, the world marks the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. Beneath the official statements and solemn commemorations lies a stark, unsettling reality: the practice of making people vanish — and holding them in silence away from the world — remains a favored tactic for powerful regimes seeking to crush dissent. The goal of authoritarian states is to cut dissenters off from the outside world until public attention fades. 

Yet as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani highlighted during a global leadership summit last month, solidarity is far more than a moral sentiment; when organized effectively, it acts as a concrete strategy to pull those trapped in state-enforced shadows back into the light. 

Six years ago, when CIVICUS, a global alliance dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society, launched the Stand As My Witness campaign, we made that exact wager: that the surest way to protect an imprisoned or disappeared defender is public visibility. In practice, that means turning quiet solidarity into loud, coordinated action, sharing their stories, mobilizing petitions, amplifying their voices across borders, and forcing governments to act. The objective is simple: to make their continued detention impossible to ignore.

Since 2020, the campaign has put faces to some 50 detained defenders and helped win freedom for 32 of them. Among them are Loujain al-Hathloul, who stood up for women’s right to drive in Saudi Arabia; Floriane Irangabiye, who set up a radio station to profile the lives of exiled Burundians; and Muhammad Ismail, who spoke out against human rights abuses by security forces in Pakistan. Solidarity works. That is exactly why we cannot stop now. 

Refusing erasure

Authoritarian regimes rely on the quiet assumption that if a prisoner is hidden long enough, the outside world will simply move on. Countering this state-enforced oblivion requires bringing individual names, faces and struggles back into the light.

Khurram Parvez has spent decades ensuring that victims of state-enforced disappearances in Kashmir are not forgotten. For that work, the prominent human rights defender was jailed in November 2021 under India’s draconian anti-terror laws. In exposing how security forces made citizens vanish, Parvez became a target of the same machinery of erasure himself.

#newsletter-block_afca38c5816b8bd005f161fa569d00b2 { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_afca38c5816b8bd005f161fa569d00b2 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our Newsletter

We’ll send you a weekly email with the latest articles.

In 2023, the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention declared his imprisonment unlawful. Though an Indian court recently granted him bail after four and a half years without trial, state authorities moved instantly to halt his release. His ongoing ordeal is a reminder that when those who document disappearances are silenced, an entire society loses its voice.

Narges Mohammadi’s story reveals both the power of witness and its fragility. The Iranian Nobel laureate who has spoken out against torture and the death penalty has been repeatedly arrested, re-sentenced and subjected to periods of incommunicado detention — a form of short-term enforced disappearance designed to cut her off entirely from family, legal counsel and the outside world. 

Her ongoing persecution maps almost exactly onto the world’s attention span: when global pressure was high, she was granted temporary relief; when it eased, authorities placed her in punitive isolation and handed her additional sentences. In May, after collapsing in prison following suspected heart attacks, she was released on medical bail, some 45 pounds lighter and barely recognizable. Her cumulative sentence still stands at 44 years. A conditional release is not freedom, and the threat of return — and total isolation — has never lifted.

Buzurgmehr Yorov’s decade behind bars illustrates how states turn the justice system itself into a tool of erasure. Arrested in 2015 after taking on targeted political clients and speaking out against their torture, the Tajik lawyer has faced continuous punishment for refusing to stay silent. Held incommunicado and repeatedly placed in solitary isolation, he has been subjected to secret trials behind closed doors that pushed his sentence out to 2043, when he will be in his 70s. Though the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention called for his immediate release years ago, Tajikistan continues to keep him in the shadows. Silencing the advocate to bury the abuse is the ultimate act of state-enforced invisibility.

Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya embodies a newer frontier of enforced disappearance: the deliberate targeting of those who keep others alive. Director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, he was detained by Israeli forces after refusing to abandon his patients, and he has since been held without charge, cut off from his family and the outside world as his health deteriorates. 

He is not alone. He is one of 14 Gaza doctors whose release Physicians for Human Rights-Israel is now seeking before Israel’s Supreme Court. Amnesty International has warned that his life is in grave danger, the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has ruled his detention unlawful, and Médecins Sans Frontières has called for the release of all arbitrarily detained Palestinian healthcare workers. Their vanishing carries its own chilling logic: when the very people who run toward catastrophe to save others can be made to disappear, no one is meant to feel safe.

Breaking the architecture of erasure

Demolishing this system of state-enforced silence cannot be left to traditional diplomacy or closed-door negotiation alone. Protecting the space for dissent requires transforming public solidarity into an active, organized strategy.

At that same forum, Mamdani challenged governments to consider who among today’s vilified activists will be glorified in retrospect once history passes judgment. Parvez, Mohammadi, Yorov and Dr. Abu Safiya are direct answers to that question, alongside dozens of other defenders sitting in cells or secret detention facilities.

#support-block_8067bfa3da5944308c5b7aa9a4e2cac4 { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

And the space to defend them is shrinking at an alarming rate. Through the CIVICUS Monitor, we have tracked a steady global closing of civic freedoms — to the point where a mere three percent of the global population now lives in countries with open civic space. Across 83 countries now classified as “closed” or “repressed,” states rely on a familiar playbook: new laws branding activists as foreign agents, cross-border surveillance, and a news cycle so crowded with crises that political prisoners risk slipping into total obscurity.

Human rights defenders are not a threat to national security. They are often the last line of defense between a society and its own collapse: the journalists, lawyers and organizers who strive to hold power to account when institutions fail. Defending them is not charity; it is self-defense for democracy.

When powerful regimes attempt to bury dissenters in prison, global solidarity becomes a lifeline. Just as worldwide public pressure was instrumental in freeing Nelson Mandela after 27 years of state isolation, public witness remains the most formidable tool we have today. Thirty-two former political prisoners are free because ordinary people chose to speak up when states demanded silence.

As Mamdani noted, it is often in the darkest moments that true light becomes visible. The current darkness around civic freedoms is undeniable. Our ask remains deceptively simple: Learn a name. Say it out loud. Stand as a witness. Let us make sure that Khurram Parvez, Narges Mohammadi, Buzurgmehr Yorov, and Dr. Abu Safiya are not still waiting in the dark when the next anniversary comes.

This article Why solidarity is vital to freeing imprisoned human rights defenders was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article The movement to defend the Minneapolis 15 was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

When Minneapolis organizer Alec Stewart pulled out of his parking spot on June 16 and headed to work, it seemed like an ordinary day. That is, until Homeland Security Investigations, a detective-like sub-agency of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, rolled up with multiple squad cars and dragged him out of his vehicle. 

“I was never told I was arrested,” said Stewart, who goes by Mac. “I was not told what for. I was not shown any warrants. I had no idea [I was going to be arrested] until I was in cuffs.”

Mac was among the thousands of Minnesotans who rallied to defend their neighbors this January when Trump inundated Minneapolis-St. Paul with federal immigration agents who outnumbered regular police 3 to 1. Residents responded with one of the most sweeping, complex and powerful movements of the decade, mobilizing a multitude of existing relationships and organizations to craft a shield capable of fighting off Trump’s domestic militia. Using the encrypted app Signal, they built networks to track officers and warn potential arrestees. They launched mutual aid networks to support those who were in hiding to avoid becoming targets of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. They blockaded roads, tailed ICE vehicles and went out on a one-day general strike. 

The charges faced by Mac and his 14 co-defendants, all of whom were arrested on the same day, carry multi-year sentences. The government claims all 15 people indicted “did knowingly conspire … to prevent by force, intimidation and threats, officers and employees of the United States Department of Homeland Security … from discharging the duties of their officers,” while individual defendants have been charged with additional crimes like assault on a federal officer. The alleged “conspiracy” involved everything from conversations in Signal chats about plans to blockade an ICE processing center, to assigning working groups for the Jan. 23 General Strike, to possessing homemade defensive shields or just following federal officers — as tens of thousands around the country have done. 

What’s particularly alarming to the defendants and their allies is that the charges don’t cite any specific officers who were assaulted, and the government’s evidence includes mundane activist chatter: discussing protests and ICE locations, posting an article from the anarchist website CrimethInc. Anything provably tied to organizing, or just radical ideas, became proof of conspiracy: renting a U-Haul, purchasing a trailer from Facebook Marketplace, calling on Facebook for the public to “become ungovernable” — all were alleged evidence of malicious intent. 

#newsletter-block_ba0195913623622a3a7e208e4a96ceeb { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_ba0195913623622a3a7e208e4a96ceeb #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our Newsletter

We’ll send you a weekly email with the latest articles.

What’s also alarming is how that information was gathered. Recently, the defense filed a motion that revealed the existence of Operation Puppet Master, a program to surveil and investigate Twin Cities labor unions, churches and community groups in advance of the filing of criminal charges. Unions in which defendants were member leaders had their finances quietly inspected, including their national unions’ political donations. Undercover officers attended protest planning meetings and covertly recorded unsuspecting citizens. The level of surveillance was shockingly broad: Homeland Security Investigations had near carte blanche to categorize almost any organization that could oppose sweeping deportation arrests as potentially criminal. 

If the government can make these charges stick, it could have a profound chilling effect on one of the largest social movements of the 21st century, and could chart a pathway for the Trump administration to effectively criminalize any opposition. That is why these 15 defendants have vowed to fight the charges, and why they have a committee of supporters who are doing what it takes to support those who have been singled out.

They came for everyone

“I think they picked us out because we’re good organizers,” said Treasure Thoreson, a special education teacher who was among those indicted. All 15 of the defendants are union members, and many are leaders in their locals. Thoreson is an executive board member of the Minneapolis Federation of Educators and was a captain during their confrontational strike in 2022. When Trump came back in 2024, she knew deportation defense had to be the priority. She built on her strike experience as she began to organize against ICE in her neighborhood, working with a group of rank-and-file union members called the Workers’ Solidarity Circle.

“This is purely a way to try and send a message of fear and of repression,” Thoreson said of the charges. That opinion was echoed by everyone working on the Minneapolis case, and also by those doing jail support for criminalized protesters across the country. 

Protesters rally at the Whipple Building, an ICE processing center, on Jan. 30 in Minneapolis. (Octavio Jones / AFP via Getty Images)

The Minneapolis 15, as the defendants have become known, are the latest in what is becoming an institutional strategy by the federal government. In the fall of 2025, a 12-count indictment was issued relating to a shooting of an officer during a July 4 protest outside of the Prairieland Detention Center in Texas. In September, Trump labeled “antifa” a “Domestic Terrorist Organization” and connected the Prairieland case to it. Prosecutors in the case used “antifa” ideology as evidence of “providing material support to terrorists” — support that allegedly came in the form of offering “property, services, training, communications equipment, weapons, explosives, personnel (including themselves) and transportation.”

The Prairieland indictments cast a wide net and tried to implicate protesters, some of whom barely knew each other, in the shooting based on their attendance at the demonstration, participation in a Signal channel coordinating direct actions and, in one particularly shocking situation, having moved a box of political zines that were considered evidence. 

Many of these defendants were ultimately convicted of charges like rioting or providing material support to terrorists and sentenced to lengthy prison terms, for a cumulative sentence of more than 450 years in federal prison. The defendant who transferred the box of protest literature received 30 years for “corruptly concealing a document or record.” 

“The outcome of this case will haunt movements for decades to come,” wrote the Prairieland defense committee in a public statement. “The Trump administration is using what happened on July 4 to test its ability to criminalize dissent and chill all opposition.” 

Also last fall, six demonstrators, including a congressional candidate, were arrested while protesting the Broadview ICE facility in the Chicago suburbs and charged with felony conspiracy to impede a federal official, among other charges, though the felony charges were eventually dropped. Then, in January, 39 people were arrested at the Cities Church in St. Paul for protesting against the ICE officer who served as their lay preacher, and charged with interfering with religious freedom. These arrests galvanized the media because former CNN host Don Lemon, who was covering the event as a journalist, was among those charged, thus sending the message that reporters could be treated as perpetrators. 

Reuters found at least 655 cases brought in 2025 and early 2026 under 18 U.S.C. Section 111, the primary law being used against people accused of interfering with ICE, which punishes anyone who “forcibly assaults, resists, opposes, impedes, intimidates or interferes with” federal officers. This was the rationale given by masked federal immigration agents for arresting 42-year-old Minnesota resident Becky Ringstrom after surrounding her car and pounding on her window with a metal object. As a result, she was told, her information was entered into a government database, presumably allowing the administration to further build out a list of activists who challenge their authority. 

What’s different about the Minneapolis case, is that it uses another statute, 18 U.S.C. Section 372, focusing on alleged coordination, which widens its potential scope. 

With arrests mounting, charges escalating, and the government employing broad infiltration and surveillance, those who are organizing the defense committee hope that their model can be reproduced by communities around the country if and when their resistance is criminalized.

The best defense

“A lot of what the defense committee is trying to do is bring attention to the fact that this happened and show support for these people,” said Emily, a Minneapolis organizer who is a part of the defense committee and asked that only her first name be used for fear of government reprisal. 

When activists are arrested, they are at a huge disadvantage in terms of resources and finances. A defense committee is critical to pooling community connections and skills that can support them as they head towards trial. 

Because legal costs and the expenses of other consequences from facing such extraordinary charges can become insurmountable, creating a fundraiser was the first order of business. The fund had reached over $390,000 as of Aug. 27. Immediate support is often the next priority: helping the defendants pay their rent, get groceries and figure out day-to-day needs, particularly since in this case the defendants were ordered to have no communication with each other by the court. 

Previous Coverage

Steadfast resistance under occupation from Minneapolis to Palestine

“I think that’s another reason they’re doing this is to scare people that this could happen to you if you do anything to protect your neighbors,” Emily said. “You could be facing legal charges and have to go through that process, which could take months, if not [longer].” 

This is why Mac says “the process is the punishment,” since the time and money it takes to even win a case, or see it through until it is dismissed, can be enormous. Since the evidence includes things most of the city was doing, the slogan “Minnesota, the land of 100,000 unindicted codefendants” has spread.

While financial and legal support are absolutely critical, so, too, is ensuring that the defendants stay a part of the public conversation and are supported by larger institutional players. Some members of the defense committee work with the media, while others connect with community groups. And as members of unions, the co-defendants have a built-in base of support. 

“Today, the Trump administration is trying to criminalize those who speak up for their neighbors — trashing civil liberties, transparency and accountability — and then pepper spraying those who dare to call them out,” said Randi Weingarten, the national president of American Federation of Teachers, of which Thoreson’s union is an affiliate. 

Union membership is mentioned in the indictment, as is the historic Jan. 23 general strike, which suggests that labor activism is part of why the Minneapolis 15 were singled out. Unions have played an especially large role in the movement against ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis, above and beyond that single-day strike. Unions like Unite HERE helped to transport vulnerable immigrant workers to and from work, and others, like CWA Local 7250 and SEIU Local 26, built mutual aid networks to support those who couldn’t work for fear of ICE arrest. The Minneapolis Federation of Educators had one of the most central roles, working with parents to prevent ICE arrests at schools by establishing hundreds of weekly watch shifts each week.

Minneapolis teachers, parents and children rally against ICE targeting schools. (Riley Bruce / Take Action MN)

Most movements that have faced extreme legal repression, from the Black Panthers to the New Left, have had to maintain long-term support for political prisoners. These efforts are necessary to help to ensure that no one is left behind, though they can require significant time and financial resources. But they also help the larger project survive, which in this case means maintaining the systems of mutual aid and direct action that activists are invested in.

“It would be tragic to see all the work we’ve done get hamstrung by this politically repressive move,” said Mac, echoing what other defendants have said: The best form of support is to continue to defend our communities. 

“[We need to] keep on going and doing what we have been doing — organizing, developing decentralized local groups that can have each other’s backs, so that when something happens again, we have this protection — and to continue to get unions involved,” said Emily, in a point echoed by the defendants.

The committee is eyeing upcoming court dates over pretrial discovery motions that will determine how widely the state can cast its evidentiary net. Discovery can be punitive in the same way that the length and cost of a court case can. The process can be used to pull private conversations and information about dissidents into the public record. This can include conversations and internet activity that range from embarrassing to incriminating, often forcing activists to go through a painfully humiliating process of exposure that leads them open to further repression. Putting limits on that is a priority for the committee. 

#support-block_37c3008540954335821b0fe78c3b18c2 { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

With the federal government’s wildly outsized indictment and sweeping surveillance tactics, the outcome could be precedent-setting for what options federal authorities have when looking to infiltrate a particular locality’s anti-ICE network. Given that Trump has also used ICE as a kind of federal protest police, his federal allies need a legal victory that would allow Trump to target any city that defies him.

The only thing that will stop that, besides good legal counsel, is having the community behind them to remind prosecutors and judges that their actions are observable and have consequences ranging from protests to lawsuits and election losses. Trump’s attacks on civil liberties and democracy are sustained primarily where resistance wanes. While the neutrality of courts has held in some cases and bent to Trump’s will in others, what happens outside of the courtroom is just as important as what happens inside it.

This article The movement to defend the Minneapolis 15 was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

This article The fight to clean up the damage of US war in Laos was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

In the city of Phonsavan in northern Laos, May Sinoun, a 107-year-old woman with a gentle smile, leaned forward on her chair. She tells how she survived one of the most intensive bombing campaigns in world history. 

“During the war, if we stayed at home, we had to sleep in pits or holes,” she said. “At night, even a small light could be dangerous. One person died because the plane saw the light and dropped bombs. If we fell down, we would cover ourselves with grass to pretend to be dead.”

From 1964 to 1973 the U.S. led a massive bombing campaign along a supply route it called the Ho Chi Minh Trail. “Operation Barrel Roll,” as it was called, provided support to a CIA-led clandestine army in efforts to subdue the communist Pathet Lao and Northern Vietnamese fighters. The vast majority of victims, however, were civilians. 

May Sinuon, 107, survived the US bombing of a school in Laos. (Brendan Maslauskas Dunn)

May Sinoun survived the blast from a bomb dropped on a school she was in, but her friends were killed in front of her. She is reminded of the bombing daily. “I have wounds from that time,” she said as she squinted her eyes and contorted her body. She pointed to her arms, shoulders and back, where the pain is most intense. Shrapnel has worn down her muscles for over half a century. 

Daily reminders of the war are ubiquitous in Sinoun’s province of Xieng Khouang. The ancient Plain of Jars is covered in bomb craters and a number of funerary jars thousands of years old cracked by the blasts. Defused bombs are scattered across the province, used as construction material, garden beds and as decoration in cafes. Spoons and chopsticks in restaurants are made by melting down aluminum from the bombs. 

But the deadliest reminders of the war are hidden in the mountains, farms and villages of Laos. Millions of bombs never blew up. Most of them lie just beneath the surface in Xieng Khouang and surrounding northern provinces, and in the southern regions of Laos that border Vietnam. Finding and removing the bombs is a labor-intensive, slow, dangerous process. At the height of the antiwar movement, activists demanded the U.S. government come up with a long-term postwar plan to remove the bombs. Decades after the movement subsided, a small network of grassroots activists has continued to advance the demand under incredibly challenging circumstances. 

#newsletter-block_dea3a91185a098f1d2bbe12880202bd1 { background: #ECECEC; color: #000000; } #newsletter-block_dea3a91185a098f1d2bbe12880202bd1 #mc_embed_signup_front input#mce-EMAIL { border-color:#000000 !important; color: #000000 !important; } Sign Up for our Newsletter

We’ll send you a weekly email with the latest articles.

The most bombed country in history

“Laos is the most heavily bombed country per capita in history,” said Sera Koulabdara, who leads Legacies of War, an organization dedicated to finding solutions to the long-term impacts of the American war in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. “The U.S. dropped more than 2.5 million tons of ordnance across 580,000 bombing missions — equal to a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years.” In total, across the three countries, the U.S. military dropped some 13 million tons of ordnance.

Locals who survived the war say that “everything” was bombed — houses, ancient temples, hospitals, farms, schools, entire villages. The ancient city of Xieng Khouang was completely leveled by the U.S. bombing campaign, save for the crumbling remains of some old stupas, a temple and a few French colonial buildings. 

One of the more devastating legacies of the war is the unexploded ordnance, or UXO, which still claims lives in Laos every month. It’s estimated that over 30% of the ordnance dropped during the war did not explode. “Today vast amounts of land remain contaminated with unexploded ordnance,” Koulabdara said. “It continues to pose a threat to citizens in all three countries, with many survivors permanently disabled and their families impoverished.”

A poster warns about the dangers of unexploded US ordnance, which has killed over 20,000 people in Laos since the war ended in 1975. (Brendan Maslauskas Dunn)

On a backcountry road in Xieng Khouang, trucks filled with workers stir up clouds of dust as they navigate the crumbling asphalt. The workers will spend the next few weeks finding and defusing bombs in a remote mountain village. Thousands of government and NGO workers risk their lives daily in the nerve-wrecking hunt for UXO.

Koulabdara’s organization coordinates with a vast patchwork of NGOs, volunteers, grassroots organizations, activists and government workers who are dedicated to making Laos bomb-free. Koulabdara said the group brings together “veterans, members of the diaspora community, government officials, students, artists and supporters from across the globe.” 

If the work continues at its current rate, however, it is projected to take 1,000 years to clear Laos of UXO. This is a fact that weighs heavily on the people that live and work among the bombs.

The rebellion of the 1960s

Demands for the U.S. to make reparations and clean up the millions of bombs scattered all over Southeast Asia once emanated from the ranks of a mass antiwar movement in the U.S. and communist liberation movements in Southeast Asia. 

At its peak, the U.S. antiwar movement was ablaze with resistance on many fronts. Students, workers, the Black Freedom struggle, the feminist movement and the broader New Left rose up in the political whirlwind of the time, not only calling for an end to the bloodshed, but at times openly declaring support for the communist movements in Southeast Asia. Organizations like Students for a Democratic Society swelled to nearly 100,000 members. 

A nine-year bombing campaign by the US leveled entire towns in Laos and left massive craters, like this one in Xieng Khouang province. (Brendan Maslauskas Dunn)

In May 1970, more than 4 million students launched a mass strike in response to the U.S. expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos, and the FBI’s increased political repression of the Black Panther Party. Protests were held at over 700 U.S. colleges and universities. Occupations of buildings, mass teach-ins about the war and pitched battles with the authorities were common. 

The strike turned deadly at Kent State University when the National Guard opened fire on demonstrators, killing four. Eleven days later, police killed two students at Jackson State University. In total, nearly 100 people were wounded by authorities across the U.S. during the May strike. 

George Katsiaficas was deeply active in the antiwar movement and the New Left, struggles he has chronicled and theorized about in a host of books and articles. In 1972 he was invited to attend a conference in Versailles called the World Assembly for Peace and Independence of the Peoples of Indochina.

At the conference, he witnessed a deep and sincere form of solidarity in practice and was inspired by the speeches given by Vietnamese revolutionaries. It was there that he learned about cluster munitions — the kind that are still killing people in Laos today.

“The Vietnamese gave me a three-inch-high stack of photos about cluster bombs,” Katsiaficas said. He recalled being told, “we don’t think the American people know about this” and being urged to educate them when he returned home. Although there was some public knowledge of the U.S. using cluster bombs in Southeast Asia and even actions targeting their production, Katsiaficas said this was the first time he learned about them. 

He was horrified. Cluster bombs are designed to open in midair and release smaller “bombies” over an area as large as five football fields. The bombies are filled with plastic and fiberglass shrapnel so they could not be detected by X-ray. They are specifically designed to kill and injure humans. 

Previous Coverage

A 40-year fight against cluster bombs offers lessons to stop the US-Israel weapons pipeline

“I was outraged at the U.S. government. I’m still outraged,” Katsiaficas said. He went back to the U.S. and gave the information on cluster munitions to other activists who created brochures and distributed them en masse. He and other activists drove across the U.S. in a speaking tour to mobilize local antiwar and activist groups to protest the 1972 Republican and Democratic national conventions. Education about cluster munitions became part of their presentation. 

“People were genuinely shocked,” he said. “Outrage, I would say, was the main reaction that people had. Indignation, you know, digging their heels in to really fight against the war. It just made people more determined than ever that the United States was evil.”

As more people became aware of cluster bombs, more protests were organized against their use. 

Sera Koulabdara said that over the years, this mass organizing, educational work and advocacy to pressure the U.S. government for reparations and cleanup has certainly helped her group and other NGOs secure U.S. funding to address these “legacies of war.”

The revolt of American soldiers who turned against the war was also at the heart of the movement. 

Susan Schnall was a lieutenant and nurse in the Navy during the war, and now serves as president of Veterans for Peace. She made headlines in 1969 when she was dismissed from the Navy for wearing her uniform at a veterans antiwar march in San Francisco. She later launched a daring action with two other activists where they flew a plane over military bases in the Bay Area and dropped thousands of antiwar flyers. “When I look back on it, I think we were just very, very lucky that they didn’t shoot us down,” Schnall said. She organized alongside other GIs and healthcare professionals, joining the Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Medical Aid for Indochina, which sent medical supplies and aid directly to North Vietnam. 

Map of U.S. bombing runs during the Vietnam War, with each black dot representing a 1,000‑pound bomb.

As the war progressed, and as more Americans began to see what the U.S. military was doing in Southeast Asia as mistaken, futile or inhumane, GI resistance surged. Vietnam Veterans Against the War and other antiwar veterans groups formed, and GI coffeehouses and underground newspapers sprung up across the country to organize soldiers against the war. Increasingly, more soldiers went AWOL, refused orders or refused to fight. Morale broke down in the military. In 1970 alone, the Pentagon reported 209 fraggings (targeted killings of officers by soldiers). There were 65,643 desertions from the Army that same year. This was the largest form of soldier-led resistance to a war in the history of the United States.  

The mass antiwar movement and GI resistance played a critical role in hastening the end of the war. The military conflict finally ended in 1975, but economic sanctions and political isolation became U.S. policy in the region for decades. Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos lay in ruins, UXO continued to kill and maim, and the U.S. reneged on the Paris Peace Accords agreement in its promise to give $3.25 billion in reconstruction aid to Vietnam. No similar aid was ever promised to Laos. 

From national liberation to NGOs

Fifty years after the war’s end, the demands for reparations are now muted. The movement has long since faded away, and the communist forces in Southeast Asia became consumed by bureaucracy and state power, replacing the revolutionary language of Marxism and liberation with the capitalist language of development and finance. 

With no mass antiwar movement using disruption and direct action to pressure the U.S. government to address the legacies of war, a small network of volunteers and grassroots activists have filled this void and turned toward raising public awareness, lobbying and directly assisting with UXO education and removal on the ground in Laos.

Workers from the Mines Advisory Group prepare for a three-week mission to find unexploded bombs in the mountains of Xieng Khouang. (Brendan Maslauskas Dunn)

In the 1990s the U.S. started to change its policy towards Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia and work more closely with its former foes. As more money for international aid and development began to trickle in, NGOs became increasingly dominant in efforts to clear UXO. While these shifts have benefited people most at risk from UXO, they also come with strings attached. 

Susan Hammond’s organization, the War Legacies Project, was once offered a $20,000 grant from a development consulting firm that she calls a “D.C. Beltway bandit for-profit corporation.” Her organization was slowed down by bureaucracy and constraints set by the donors. “I would never do it again,” she said. “A lot of the funding that’s going to Vietnam right now and Laos is going through these for-profit entities. NGOs are all having a really difficult time, and so they tend to not want to take on issues that might be sensitive.”

Funding to clean up UXO in Vietnam often comes from the Department of Defense and USAID, Hammond added. “They don’t do it for any kind of reparations, or even feel guilty by any means. It’s a way for them to get closer to the Vietnamese military.”

This also happened in Laos when President Barack Obama visited the country in 2016 and pledged over $90 million in aid to address UXO. The closer political relationship between both countries has been beneficial for American corporations as they vie to establish new markets, and for the U.S. military and government as they work more closely with Laos in a U.S.-led attempt to counter Chinese dominance in Southeast Asia. 

Activists have to grapple with the ethics of getting funding from the U.S. government, and in particular from agencies like USAID, which was central to the war operation in Southeast Asia.

Susan Schnall said that Veterans for Peace had an opportunity to apply for a grant from USAID to assist survivors of the effects of Agent Orange. “We had major issues and disagreements, and some people … wouldn’t take the money. Then there were others of us that said we need to take care of these children. We need to clean up the land.” In the end, the money was not offered. 

When President Trump froze funding to USAID and UXO programs in Laos in early 2025, the limitations of doing work contingent on funds from the U.S. government became painfully clear to people in Laos. Thousands of de-mining workers were taken out of the field, programs were shuttered and many NGOs heavily scaled back their operations or halted them altogether.

Legacies of War took a series of actions to reverse the funding freeze, Koulabdara said. “When many partners hesitated to go public, we stepped forward — using our voices, our credibility and decades of collective experience to reframe the national conversation on U.S. foreign aid and war legacy. We refused to allow the narrative to be so narrow.”

Legacies of War put pressure on the U.S. government through public education and delivered a letter signed by 17 former American ambassadors to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, urging him to continue funding UXO removal.

#support-block_e1b9ea31b4acc91e50a5f88fe830c67d { background: #000000; color: #ffffff; } Support Us

Waging Nonviolence depends on reader support. Make a donation today!

Donate

The funding began to flow again after months of mounting public pressure and organizing, and a Supreme Court decision upholding a lower court’s ruling that the Trump administration must release over $2 billion in frozen funds.

What will it take ultimately to make Laos bomb-free? It’s a difficult question, but there is an acute sense from volunteers on the ground that it will take much more than increased education, awareness and funding. 

Another mass movement could address the war legacies in Southeast Asia and also stop current wars, interventions and support for genocide. Until that day comes, the people of Laos must shoulder the bulk of the burden, clearing one bomb at a time. 

This article The fight to clean up the damage of US war in Laos was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.