Lessons from Global Activists to Protect and Rebuild Democracy and Civic Space in the United States
By Benjamin Naimark-Rowse
Lessons from Global Activists to Protect and Rebuild Democracy and Civic Space in the United States
“For many in the world, what is happening in the United States is eerily familiar…’We have had our own version of Trump for decades.’”
Arthur Larok, Secretary General of ActionAid International
The threats to democracy that we face in the U.S. today are transnational and so our responses ought to be locally rooted and transnational. This is the working assumption that many of us are making as we strategize about how to protect and rebuild democracy and civic space in the United States.
Over the past months, the Better Preparedness Initiative hosted by Human Rights Funders Network (HRFN) and Peace and Security Funders Group (PSFG) has been holding public and invitation-only conversations to collectively make sense of these threats and to discuss specific, actionable strategies and tactics that can be adopted and adapted from abroad for the U.S. context. These conversations have been convened for members of the Better Preparedness Initiative and in collaboration with fellow philanthropy support organizations, including Democracy Funders Network (DFN), Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement: PACE funders laboratory, and Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees (GCIR).
In the spirit of centering movements, sharing knowledge, and relationship building, these convenings have offered unique knowledge to funders while fostering transnational solidarity between funders, many based in the U.S., and movement leaders from around the world. In the spirit of humility, these convenings sought to help funders avoid reinventing the wheel and instead to benefit from the hindsight of movement colleagues around the world. And in the spirit of action, we sought to honor the urgency of the moment that we are living by making space to discuss actionable strategies and practices. Our shared struggle, solidarity, and success have been at the center of this work.
Where transnational or intermestic learning, coordination, and collaboration to foster human rights have happened, the impact has been powerful. In fact, even the United States Civil Rights Movement had international roots. Yet, such linkages have tended to be ad hoc. And so, we hope that the following topline takeaways from our recent convenings provoke intentional solidarity, coordinated strategy, and strategic action.
The lessons highlighted below are not meant to be comprehensive but reflect top-line insights connected through careful analysis. Relevant lessons abound from Guatemala, Hungary, Poland (here and here), South Korea, Tunisia, and Venezuela, amongst other countries. Moreover, these lessons are meant to complement insights from other convenings of academics, strategists, as well as civil society and movement leaders in the United States. It is in fact, historically excluded communities in the United States – immigrants, women, and African Americans, amongst others – who have led many of our successful movements and who hold deep knowledge, relationships, and power relevant for the present moment.
Top Ten Takeaways
- Do not mistake a large Signal group and a huge email list for power. Teams of organizers training regular people in leadership, decision-making, nonviolent discipline, and political analysis – that builds power.
- Positive coalitions that build the future that we want and negative coalitions that block harm to people, communities, and institutions are both critical in this moment. The former is especially challenging when it comes to coordinating with political parties. Coordination amongst the two coalitions (and amongst funders supporting them) is critical.
- There is often too much focus on short term mobilizing, and not enough focus on mid- and long-term organizing that builds power by using resources like this one.
- Organize across party lines. It would be a mistake to believe all people who voted for one political party are forever anti-democratic. Generating defections – from anti-democratic to pro-democratic positions – is key to success. They have historically quadrupled the odds of success.
- It is challenging for any incumbent to maintain a large and unwieldy winning coalition. So, use resources like this one to identify the different pillars of support within that coalition and the fissures amongst them.
- Talk normal especially outside the bubble. Using plain language and mediums of communication online and offline that reach outside the progressive bubbles in which we often live and work is critical to success. Otherwise, we’re preaching jargon to the choir.
- Every time we thought it couldn’t get worse, it did. Reflecting on their own country, one democracy-advocate-in-exile reinforced the fact that democratic backsliding is a process. Space still exists in the U.S. to act and block further dismantling of democratic institutions and norms and block additional harm to people and communities.
- There is a qualitative difference between hybrid democracies, competitive authoritarian regimes, and autocracies. Being incisive about similarities and differences between the U.S. today and comparative cases will improve the effectiveness of our responses.
- A democratic opposition must deal head on with their unpopularity that contributed to them losing at the ballot box. In what ways have politicians and political institutions failed or ignored their constituents? Relatedly, speak truth to power about how democracy in the U.S. has historically excluded and harmed certain communities such as immigrants and African Americans.
- A Nonprofit Killer Bill and a bureaucracy weaponized against philanthropy and civil society increase the cost of moving money. So, move money now before the cost of moving it increases.
Grantmaking as a Practice
My organizer friends talk about their work as a practice – a practice of organizing. We iterate. We fail. We learn. We succeed. We do it all over again.
Similarly, we can think of democracy not as something we have, but as something we do. It’s also something we practice. Our country was far from perfect at its founding. I don’t have to tell any woman or African American that.
And so, I like to think of our support for democracy and activism as the practice of grantmaking and the practice of solidarity. In fact, nonviolent activism is as American as apple pie – it was central to the founding of the United States.
Moreover, there will be no such thing as a perfect grantmaking strategy or a perfect new portfolio. The context in which we live changes too quickly. The attacks come from too many sides. So, we must act quickly. We will fail at times. We will succeed at others. We must learn. And it is an ethical practice to stand steadfast alongside our partners in moments of “failure” just as in moments of success.
Each of us has financial and non-financial resources within our purview that we can allocate without lengthy review and approval processes. Such quick support is not mutually exclusive to in-depth strategy and planning processes that we are accustomed to.
With the recent legally contested shut down of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the United States is no longer the purveyor of rapid response support for pro-democracy activists and opposition leaders around the world. Organizers, movement leaders, and formal civil society organizations in the United States are now in a position of seeking rapid response support. Solidarity has been flipped on its head.
The Data Is On Our Side
As a scholar, I would be remiss if I didn’t highlight the data we have to back up the importance of activism for the protection of democracy. Colleagues statistically modeled whether democracy was protected during a spell of backsliding. They found that the predicted likelihood of democracy being protected without nonviolent activism was 7.5%. But with nonviolent activism, the predicted likelihood of democracy being protected against backsliding rose to 52%. That’s a 700% increase in success when civil society relied on nonviolent activism as a strategy. This is not a causal relationship. And these correlations are based on a few dozen countries. But it is the best data we have for the importance of supporting the agency, resiliency, and effectiveness of social movements, movement participants, and their related ecosystem for stopping democratic backsliding.
Time is a Matter of Justice
In closing, I want to channel an activist’s reflection on the current moment that HRFN shared with many of us not so long ago. And that is – time is a matter of justice. We have time. We are reading this blog post. The nearly 100,000 people detained by ICE over the past five months do not. Neither did my Tufts PhD colleague, Rümeysa Öztürk. Until recently, she was detained in a private, ICE detention facility in Louisiana for exercising her first amendment right to free speech.
As a former donor, I know that we like to take time to strategize, plan, and obtain board approval for shifts in strategy. Again, that’s not mutually exclusive to acting immediately in the myriad ways that are under our direct authority. Rümeysa was recently released from detention thanks to a confluence of activism, legal representation, and an ecosystem of support. Her case is just one example of what we can achieve by acting with urgency, with purpose, with resources, and in the spirit of solidarity.