The Trump administration’s retreat from supporting independent media abroad has been arguably even more damaging than its attacks on the press at home.

A recent study found that the sudden loss of US funding forced organizations like El Salvador’s FOCOS, Mozambique’s h2n, and Libya’s El Kul to slash staff, scale back coverage, and in some cases cease operations entirely. While other international donors made modest efforts to fill the gap, none have been able to replace American leadership.

This is not merely a moral failure but also a strategic one: when US support for independent media collapses, corruption goes unchecked, authoritarianism spreads, and disinformation fills the vacuum, ultimately harming American interests alongside those of the affected countries.

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Independent, public interest media is on the back foot both in the United States and internationally. While most American free press advocates and civic-minded, philanthropic donors focus on the threats to the media at home, it is easy to lose track of how the US has retreated from defending a free press abroad—and the consequences of that failure. In this essay, I draw from a recent in-depth study conducted by Susan Abbott and myself to profile a handful of the media organizations that the US used to champion overseas and explore what that loss of support has meant—both to them and to us.

The Trump administration’s actions against a free press at home are alarming and include restricting access to administration officials, eliminating federal funding, threatening the licenses of television networks, pursuing defamation lawsuits, and supporting corporate buyouts of media critical of the administration. These actions contradict a three-hundred year old American value, dating back—at least in American history textbooks—to Alexander Hamilton’s successful 1735 defense of John Zenger, a printer accused of seditious libel for printing news criticizing the Royal Governor of New York. In that case, Hamilton convinced a jury to acquit Zenger in the name of truth and in defiance of a British judge’s instructions.

But the domestic impact of the administration’s actions seems modest when compared to the damage it has done abroad. Prior to 2025, the US had for decades provided financial and technical support to independent media in dozens of countries, supplied news through the Voice of America and other publicly funded international broadcasters, and intervened diplomatically to protect journalists. On this first point alone, in 2023, the US budgeted $248 million to strengthen independent media overseas.

This financial and technical support had become a lifeline to many public interest news outlets unable to otherwise sustain themselves in increasingly restricted spaces. Despite this, the Trump administration effectively ended almost all financial, technical, and political support for independent media abroad.

The costs of retreat

In a late 2025 survey of 177 media outlets, Abbott and I found that as a result of the cuts in US assistance, the median US grantee lost an estimated 40 percent of their annual revenue. This loss had an obvious impact on journalistic staffing, content, and quality. In fact, the median grantee’s number of employees declined from 16 to 10 and journalists fell from 8 to 6. These impacts were not evenly distributed: outlets in challenging political environments suffered the most. Here I profile a few of the media organizations that lost US support and what that has meant to them, their countries, and the US.

The El Salvadoran investigative news organization FOCOS (formerly Focos TV) has had a difficult run. Founded in 2016, Focos TV provided viewers of Channel 33 a weekly investigative television news program covering issues of corruption, organized crime, abuse of power, and human rights. The owners of the channel came under political pressure from the increasingly autocratic Nayib Bukele government, and in 2021 Focos TV and other vital outlets were kicked off the air. But Focos TV was resilient, and with the help of international donors—primarily from US sources—they reinvented themselves as a digital investigative outlet. They grew their staff to 17 people and produced high quality investigative journalism, including stories identifying red flags in land sales involving the president and his family. Recently, Bukele developed a strong partnership with the Trump administration, which sent over 250 foreign nationals to El Salvador’s notorious terrorism confinement center (CECOT) and has deported thousands of El Salvadoran migrants.

In February 2025, the US cancelled all grants to Focos TV. At the same time, US diplomats stopped their efforts to protect journalists, and the Bukele government took a number of actions that dramatically reduced the ability of a free press to operate. The rebranded FOCOS would have to reinvent itself again. It reduced its staff from 17 to 4, shifted its operations to Costa Rica, and two of its remaining journalists went into exile. It survives and still produces valuable content, including a recent deep dive in how Bukele’s party has taken control over the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, but its content has been reduced dramatically.

h2n is a Mozambican media support organization that emerged in the late 2010s from an earlier USAID media program. It invested heavily in ensuring high quality and professional management, winning a highly competitive $11.6 million dollar award from USAID to support community radio. Through the program, h2n provided grants of $40,000 a year to 60 community radio stations in the north of the country. This allowed the stations, previously hobbled by high rates of turnover, to pay their volunteer staff, increase and improve news content, and implement business plans to raise future revenue. As a result, the stations were able to provide valuable information to often remote communities on issues important to their audiences, including health, nutrition, agriculture, and climate change. h2n was also developing a platform that would make it easier for national advertisers to place advertisements with community radio stations in regions they wanted to target.

Absent USAID funding—which was cut in February 2025—the community radio stations returned to volunteer labor, and news coverage was largely replaced with music. For their part, h2n and two other sister organizations have reduced their staffing by more than half. The irony is that US support for h2n was not entirely altruistic, but independent media also served US national security interests. The radio stations receiving US support operated in the north of the country, where an al-Shabaab faction threatens natural gas and ruby extraction. In addition, the funding was designed to help radio stations develop additional sources of revenue to move them toward financial sustainability, rather than creating financial dependence on continued US support.

El Kul, an independent media initiative in Libya, was started by BBC Media Action after the Arab Spring uprisings. Using funds from the government of the United Kingdom, over time BBC Media Action brought around 200 journalists from Libya to Tunisia for weeks or even months of intensive journalism training and mentorship. In a media landscape dominated by political and foreign interests, El Kul offered a valuable independent voice through a Facebook page that attracted over 1.3 million followers. In the aftermath of the devastating 2023 Derna dam collapse, El Kul provided vital information to survivors on how they could help themselves and their neighbors. USAID issued a large award in 2024 to help transition El Kul from an standalone initiative to a consolidated, independent media outlet.

Two months after El Kul’s future head gave up his apartment and moved to Tunis in preparation for the transition, the USAID award was cancelled. El Kul continued to develop content for some time after the cuts, but on November 30, 2025 it issued its last post condemning the lack of drainage that causes small amounts of rain to flood Libya’s roads. Again, the investment in El Kul served US national security interests, as US policy makers, including in the Department of Defense, hoped independent journalism could help counter the Russian-backed disinformation spreading in a strategic oil exporting nation.

Once media organizations like FOCOS, h2n, and El Kul got over the shock of the US cuts, they turned to other donors to fill the gap. In some cases donors did step up, but there were limits, and the support was modest and short-term. In our survey of media outlets, of those that had received US funds in the past, only 21 percent reported an increase in support from other international donors, and only one organization reported a substantial increase. By contrast, 48 percent actually reported a decrease in non-US support.

It was as though the donor community determined that because they couldn’t fill the large gap, it was better not to even try. The US had led the world in promoting a free press, and no other country or institution was willing to take up the mantle.

Everybody loses—including the US

The value of US investments in media is clear. These news sources provided communities in rural Mozambique with health, agriculture, and climate information they needed, served as a check on El Salvador’s increasingly authoritarian and corrupt government, and provided independent information in Libya’s co-opted media environment. These investments also benefited the US. To be sure, they did not produce a financial return; rather, they were what Alexis de Tocqueville termed “self-interest rightly understood.”

The US benefits when corruption is reduced, when authoritarians are exposed, when communities have information to address their own problems, and when foreign and political disinformation don’t crowd out the truth. Unfortunately, a sense of enlightened self-interest seems quaint in our current political moment. Perhaps the United States will eventually return to its time-honored values—both at home and abroad—realize the benefits a free press offers, and once again provide financial, technical and diplomatic support to independent media.

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Daniel Sabet is a researcher and consultant with Eidos Insights Research Partners conducting research on the impacts of ending U.S. foreign assistance to strengthen democracy. Prior to that he was a Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University SNF Agora Institute and a Senior Learning Advisor at USAID’s Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance at the time of USAID’s aid cuts. Daniel holds a PhD in Political Science from Indiana University.

The debate turned to the topic of electoral reform. Lange was supposed to deliver the party line: the government would refer a recently released report it commissioned on electoral reform to a committee for review. Instead, as the cameras rolled and the nation watched, Lange stumbled. Maybe he misread his notes, or succumbed to the heat of the moment to score a quick political point.

Whatever the internal misfire, the words that came out of his mouth changed New Zealand forever. He promised the electorate that the report would go to a committee, and then, inexplicably, he went off-script: “A referendum thereafter will be held.” This shocking statement blindsided his own party, provided new ammunition for the opposition, and set off a chain reaction that permanently shattered the country’s two-party duopoly.

Today, the United States is facing a similar gerrymandering challenge as New Zealand in the 1980s. Fortunately, lessons from New Zealand’s experience can help fix America’s broken, winner-take-all voter maps that disenfranchise everyone from liberal coalitions to Trump voters.

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The arithmetic of alienation

For 80 years, since 1913, New Zealand operated under a First Past the Post (FPP) electoral system very similar to what is currently in place in the United States. In FPP, a country is divided into single member electoral districts in which the candidate who gets the largest percentage of votes wins the seat. FPP is easy for voters to understand and provides for a close connection between the elected representative and their constituents. It also can empower primary voters, who tend to be more extreme, and force general election voters to choose between the lesser of two evils. These dynamics converge to produce unrepresentative legislatures, extremist candidates, political polarization, and widespread voter apathy.

Across several elections in New Zealand, it became mathematically undeniable to voters that something was wrong. In 1978 the Labour party won 10,000 more votes than the National Party, but secured 11 fewer seats in the 92-person legislature. Similarly, in 1981, Labour won more votes than the National Party but secured fewer seats. Voters could clearly see that their votes weren’t being translated into actual representation. When Labour finally took power in 1984, it established an independent, nonpartisan Royal Commission to study alternative voting systems. The commission eventually recommended a transition to a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) system that was projected to produce results more proportional to each party’s vote share and increase voter participation. In 1993 New Zealand held the referendum that Lange mistakenly promised and, in a relatively close election, voters chose the MMP system.

Several factors contributed to this dramatic reorganization of voting in New Zealand. First, recognizing that any reforms proposed by politicians would immediately be suspect, the decision to create an independent, nonpartisan commission provided a credible platform for reform. Second, the public referendum helped insulate the reform efforts from political manipulation by politicians with a personal stake in the status quo. Third, the preponderance of “safe seats” under the old FFP system had citizens feeling that politicians were out of touch with regular people—a sentiment compounded by the two major parties passing unpopular economic reforms. The direct pocketbook impact of unresponsive leadership sharpened New Zealanders’ appetite for reforms that might produce new candidates and alliances.

The American arms race

The political warfare over voting districts in 1980s New Zealand bears striking similarities to what we see today in the United States. In both contexts, gerrymandering—the deliberate manipulation of voting district boundaries to give one party a political advantage—operates much like a rigged game where the players are allowed to redraw the boundaries of the field whenever they are losing. .

Until 2025, there was a concerted effort by democracy advocates to discard the partisan processes that set electoral districts for the House of Representatives. A number of red, blue, and swing states established independent redistricting commissions. But over the past year the gerrymandering wars have heated up, instigated by President Trump’s demand that Texas redraw its districts outside of the traditional 10 year post-census redistricting cycle. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are now in a no-holds-barred arms race to gain seats.

Just like 1980s New Zealand, in several US states the seats now won by the two parties for the House of Representatives are dramatically out of proportion with their vote totals. For example, in 2024, Illinois Democrats won 53 percent of the vote, but secured 82 percent of the seats in the House. North Carolina shows the other side: in 2024 Republicans won 53 percent of votes but secured 71 percent of seats.

Trump voters are fed up

As in the New Zealand example, Americans are fed up with how the federal government seems to ignore their day-to-day economic challenges. I’ve seen this firsthand as I conduct interviews of Trump voters across the country as part of my Democracy Listening Tour of Conservative America. The Trump voters I’ve interviewed often feel that their priorities are of secondary concern to elected officials, sometimes even in places where their preferred candidate is in office.

When it comes to gerrymandering, some of the people I’ve interviewed haven’t engaged with the complexities of voting systems; they tend to be suspicious of the motives of anyone suggesting change. This should not be surprising. I’ve worked on elections internationally for more than 20 years and I still get headaches diving into the inner workings of the alphabet soup of electoral systems: Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), Proportional Representation (PR), Single Non Transferable Vote (SNTV), and so many more. Few people who are worrying day-to-day about the cost of groceries and gas have the time or desire to dive into the intricacies of electoral design. It’s like handing over a dense technical repair manual to someone who just wants to drive their car.

However, many Trump voters I’ve interviewed expressed disgust with the current set up. Just like voters in New Zealand, it’s abundantly clear to them the unfairness of our system. A 55-year-old male software engineer Trump voter in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania told me, “I think we do have a challenge when it comes to the drawing of the districts…It would be good to have some consistent [system] across all states, independent means of establishing a balanced district. [Today] either as a Republican you get landed in a Democrat district and you’re never going to win anything, or a Democrat in a Republican district, you’re never going to [win]. So that diminishes people’s thoughts about voting, or even participating.” He even characterized voting in places where gerrymandering is prevalent as more of a “suggestion” than an actual vote.

Another 40-year-old male Trump voter (who previously supported Barack Obama in 2008) in Fairfax County, VA said, “I think the gerrymandering is terrible. I think that the California system that was in place where you had these independent commissions to set the districts, that makes total sense. What [gerrymandering] is doing is just making the districts more radical.”

A 31-year-old female Trump voter in Akron, Ohio who serves as a volunteer poll worker offered a blunt solution: “I’d like to get rid of gerrymandering. No one’s going to be happy about this, but why don’t we just plop a grid down on the map of the United States, and where the lines fall, the lines fall. Then everyone’s unhappy and it’s all good.”

Another 59-year-old male Trump voter who works in township government near Erie, PA told me, “Gerrymandering to me is part of the problem, that you’re trying to make as safe a district as you can for your party and hope that at the end of the day, you have more safe districts than the other party does. I would much prefer to see a system that makes as many competitive races as you can.”

These sentiments are backed up by polling. An April 2026 Economist/YouGov poll found that 71 percent of Americans felt that states should not be allowed to draw congressional districts in a way that intentionally favors one party over the other, up from 67 percent in 2022. Yet, during the past year, the gerrymandering affliction has gotten worse, not better.

The Kiwi playbook for fair maps

Several lessons from New Zealand could help. First, New Zealand overcame stagnation and the political status quo by handing over the study of alternative election systems to an independent, nonpartisan commission. Of course, there have been several bipartisan, nongovernmental studies in the United States that have not yet broken the logjam, including the 2020 American Academy of Arts and Science Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship that proposed a transition to multimember districts. But a higher profile initiative—such as an independent commission established by Congress—could move the reform process forward at the national level. One Trump voter I interviewed in Pennsylvania even suggested such a commission.

Second, electoral outcomes in New Zealand that didn’t match actual votes provided an impetus for reform. The challenge in the United States is that reforms such as independent redistricting commissions have largely taken hold in blue and swing states. Democrats are now thinking twice about those moves. Relinquishing your partisan advantage in a single state while your opponents retain theirs in other states is like laying down your weapons while the opposing army is still charging. One potential solution would be to develop interstate agreements between red and blue states whereby each state agrees to institute independent redistricting commissions as long as they are done jointly, thereby reducing the threat of upsetting the nationwide political balance in the House. What’s clear from my interviews and polling is that plenty of Republicans would be happy with non-gerrymandered districts in their states. Yet the political pressures at the national level push in the other direction.

Finally, the New Zealand independent commission ultimately concluded that even perfectly drawn independent maps cannot fix the inherent distortions of single-member districts, so it recommended multimember districts. Today, multimember districts are increasingly the global norm. Unlike single-member districts, which elect only one representative, multi-member districts combine larger geographic areas to elect several representatives at once. Because these multiple seats are typically awarded proportionally based on the overall vote share, they naturally neutralize the winner-take-all mechanics that make partisan gerrymandering possible.

Single-member districts are not enshrined in the US Constitution. In fact, it wasn’t until 1967 that a federal law established a national standard of single-member districts—a law that could be amended. Reformers have focused on state-level reforms in recent years because getting anything done at the federal level seems like a sisyphean task. But with the current gerrymandering race to the bottom and increasing public frustration, Americans may be reaching an inflection point where actual reforms at the national level are possible.

New Zealand demonstrated that sweeping reform is possible when independent analysis and direct voter action bypass the political establishment. In the United States, the “unilateral disarmament” trap presents a formidable hurdle, but solutions like a congressionally mandated commission, interstate agreements, or even the holy grail of a nationwide transition to multimember districts could achieve mutually assured fairness without upsetting the national political balance. Across the political spectrum, and explicitly among the conservative voters I’ve been speaking with, Americans are demanding an end to a system that structurally silences their voices. By harnessing this shared, bipartisan frustration, reformers can break the grip of self-interested mapmakers and deliver a democracy where every vote genuinely counts.

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Brian Vogt is currently conducting a Democracy Listening Tour of Conservative America. He has more than two decades of experience strengthening democracy in countries such as Afghanistan, Burma, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Thailand. He also played a key leadership role in the 2021, 2023, and 2024 Summits for Democracy that brought together more than 100 countries to recommit to democratic values and fundamental human rights.

Beginning with their rise to power in 2015, eight years of illiberal rule by PiS led to widespread democratic backsliding, as it weaponized government, took over public media, and politicized the judiciary. The Civic Coalition’s victory offers a plethora of practical insights for an American audience, including that constructing a truly big-tent coalition that can win back control is essential. And yet only two years later, PiS-aligned candidate Karol Nawrocki won the presidency, demonstrating both the durability of the right-wing movement and the limitations of electoral victories alone to secure long-lasting change.

I came away from Poland with two distinct takeaways. First, state-centric solutions to problems that are increasingly global in nature are insufficient. And second, in some ways, American democracy actually is exceptional, in spite of the title of this newsletter that I co-founded: America’s trajectory matters to the rest of the world in a manner unmatched by any other country.

Global backsliding, global responses

We ostensibly came to Poland to learn from their distinct experience. But while meeting with civil society leaders and governmental officials, we heard concerns that could have easily emerged from conversations in American cities and towns. Young men are becoming increasingly conservative, falling down YouTube rabbit holes and gravitating toward messages of strength, masculinity, and grievance. Young people broadly distrust political parties and public institutions, especially in the aftermath of the 2023 elections, the results of which, they feel, have not changed their lot in life. Political polarization has reached the point where citizens rarely engage across ideological divides. Urban and rural communities are disconnected, culturally and politically.

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There is a tendency to observe democratic erosion through national political parties and leaders: Donald Trump in the United States, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Law and Justice in Poland. But the underlying conditions of democratic decline appear remarkably similar across countries with divergent histories, cultures, and institutions. Yes, country-specific elections, experiences, and leaders matter in the story of democratic backsliding. But increasingly, many of the forces reshaping democratic life are replicated across borders in ways that echo: the distortionary effects of social media algorithms, growing economic inequality, the disenchantment of the youngest generations, and the decline of trust in institutions. This is to say nothing of the dislocation that will inevitably come from the emergence of AI. These global trends create an underappreciated problem for people seeking democratic renewal: we are devising and implementing country-specific interventions to solve challenges that span the globe.

The alienation of young men provides an example of the limitations of a country-specific approach. Promising initiatives are emerging across the United States to provide support, purpose, and community to boys and young men—and such efforts are necessary. But hearing nearly identical concerns expressed in Poland suggests that the roots of this challenge extend beyond any one country’s politics. If the forces driving disillusionment are global, then country-specific solutions will always be incomplete. Acknowledging this should lead organizations and individuals working on this issue in Poland, the United States, and in other parts of the globe, to engage with each other, and to explore interventions that recognize the global context (for example, regulating and making transparent the algorithms imposed by technology companies).

The lesson should not be that country-specific action is futile. It is that democratic renewal may require a level of international learning and cooperation that we have yet to fully embrace, especially in the American democracy ecosystem.

The American exception

While our time in Poland reinforced the global nature of challenges to democracy, it also underscored another reality: what happens in the United States still carries outsized importance to the rest of the world.

Throughout our conversations in Warsaw, the subject returned again and again to American politics. Current and former government officials, local leaders, journalists, and civil society advocates expressed deep concern about America’s democratic trajectory. They tracked specific races in the upcoming midterms with granular precision. For Poland— a country that shares a border with Ukraine and lives with the constant threat posed by Russia—the strength and reliability of the United States is not an abstraction. It is tied directly to questions of their own security and survival.

That the rest of the world can have an ambivalent relationship with the United States is no secret. There is often frustration with our politics and foreign policy, skepticism about our claims of exceptionalism, and criticism of our perceived hypocrisy. Yet there remains an undeniable recognition that the health of American democracy carries consequences far beyond the United States, as well as an admiration for America’s historic journey to date.It was humbling to hear concern about America’s democratic trajectory from people whose own public institutions have faced extraordinary recent challenges. It was also a reminder that democratic renewal in the United States is not merely an American project; its outcomes will be felt globally.

I left Poland inspired but uneasy. Democratic renewal in Poland and the United States requires citizens electing leaders who respect democratic norms. But at the same time, the forces eroding democracy increasingly transcend national borders. Neither Poland nor America can solve its challenges alone—the struggle for democracy in the twenty-first century is not purely national.

For Americans, that realization carries a particular responsibility. Whether we like it or not, we remain one of the central actors in this story.

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Scott Warren is a Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently leading an initiative focused on exploring, researching, and convening a pro-democracy conservative agenda in the US, organizing convenings focused on bridging long-term and short-term fixes for democratic reform, and exploring ways the US can learn from global efforts to improve democracy (including helping to run Democracy Without Exception).

In late October, while the raids and violence were still ongoing, Governor J.B. Pritzker established the Illinois Accountability Commission (IAC). “We will not meet intimidation with fear—we will meet it with truth,” the governor declared. “We are going to show the public…exactly what is going on.” The governor’s Executive Order mandated that the IAC document and investigate abuses by federal agents, hold public hearings, create a factual record, examine community impacts, and recommend policy reforms.

The IAC is the first of a new kind of institution emerging in the United States: a sub-national accountability mechanism set up to address ongoing federal repression. It is comparable to transitional justice bodies developed in societies around the world to confront authoritarianism and violence, and lay the foundations for democratic accountability. These global experiences, and the IAC itself, offer valuable lessons for Americans standing up for democracy—especially at the state and local levels—about the promise of transitional justice as one tool to combat authoritarian overreach.

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Accountability in real time

For nearly two decades, I worked as a transitional justice practitioner and diplomat, including at the U.S. State Department. I helped set up truth commissions, reparations programs, investigative bodies, and war crimes tribunals in countries such as The Gambia, Guatemala, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Myanmar.

Transitional justice has profoundly transformed societies and led to democratic progress. In Ukraine, prosecutors, assisted by international experts, have opened thousands of war crimes investigations, even while Russian attacks continue. In The Gambia, testimony before the national truth commission about abuses under a previous regime riveted the country and galvanized efforts to build a specialized war crimes tribunal. In Guatemala, post-conflict truth commissions laid the foundation for the prosecution—decades later—of a former president and other top-ranking political and military leaders. Such transitional justice initiatives are usually established at the international level or by national governments, rather than by state or local entities. They also address mass atrocities, authoritarianism, and violence at a scale not seen in the United States. Even so, when the IAC was created, I immediately recognized it as a transitional justice mechanism.

As the IAC launched, I advised its leadership on mandate design, hearings, documentation, evidence preservation, and impact. Alongside another former colleague with international expertise, I shared best practices for building legitimacy, analyzing patterns of abuse, and supporting accountability, reform, and truth-seeking.

The IAC moved quickly to appoint commissioners, hire staff, and begin operations. Chair Rubén Castillo and Vice Chair Patricia Holmes, both former judges, were assisted by six commissioners, including high profile legal professionals, community leaders, and a former police commander. A small staff, including several former investigators from the Department of Justice, drew up hearing schedules and investigative workplans. The IAC was housed within the state government (the Department of Human Rights), which offered immediate staffing and operational support. The reputational and relational cache of the Commissioners and staff helped the IAC quickly build legitimacy and trust with traumatized communities.

Still, the IAC needed to burnish its legitimacy as a non-partisan body mandated to establish an independent record of events—especially since it was created by a Democratic governor with a national profile. So it relied on non-partisan expert witnesses, invited Trump officials to provide their views (they declined), and called the former Republican statehouse leader as a witness to testify about threats to election integrity. The IAC demonstrated credibility and integrity through competence: conducting a transparent process, explaining how it gathered and evaluated evidence, and characterizing its legal findings in a clear and measured tone. As the Chair explained, “the record is substantial, corroborated across multiple sources, and developed through independent investigation.”

Within six weeks, the IAC held its first public hearings, and soon after convened private community listening sessions for residents too afraid to testify publicly. In six months, the IAC held five public hearings, seven listening sessions, issued an interim and final report, and conducted sixteen in-depth investigations into “egregious incidents.”

In late April, I attended the last of the Commission’s five public hearings in downtown Chicago. Witnesses described residents brutalized by federal agents for peacefully recording arrests or attempting to protect neighbors. Marimar Martinez testified that a Border Patrol agent intentionally rammed Martinez’s car—using a tactic previously restricted under earlier federal pursuit rules that were loosened under the Trump administration—before shooting her five times as she tried to drive away. At the hospital, agents arrested her under the Kafka-esque charge of assaulting an officer. The Commission later presented evidence suggesting the officer had repeatedly lied about the encounter and yet faced no consequences. Instead, Commander-at-Large Greg Bovino praised him for “excellent service” and offered to extend his retirement eligibility. Another witness described how communities resisted with “whistles and cellphones and their voices,” even as federal agents wielded guns and tear gas and enjoyed promises of immunity from senior administration officials.

From individual incidents to systems of repression

Throughout its proceedings and final report, the IAC documented systems of repression, institutional impunity, and responsibility reaching up the chain of command to the senior-most officials in the Trump Administration. The Commission highlighted propaganda campaigns by senior administration officials, attacks on freedom of expression and assembly, and the normalization of state violence in the name of public order. Commissioners warned that methods first used in Chicago to terrorize immigrant neighborhoods could be employed elsewhere to threaten political dissent and even free and fair elections.

The IAC outlined what it called three federal “directives”—the policies behind Operation Midway Blitz: militarize neighborhood streets, suppress lawful speech and assembly, and normalize immunity for lawlessness. These policies, the Commission concluded, made “Illinois a testing ground for a new model of federal power…so the President could invoke the Insurrection Act to occupy an American city.” The IAC referred incidents it investigated to state and local authorities, urging them to open criminal investigations and prosecute individual agents named in the report—although some prosecutors have resisted doing so.

The Commission issued nearly 80 recommendations to government officials and the private sector, ranging from stronger accountability mechanisms and ICE vetting standards, to support for affected communities and expanded state authority to prosecute abusive federal officers. It also highlighted Illinois laws and policies that had mitigated some harms of Operation Midway Blitz, recommending that other states consider these defenses “in anticipation of potential immigration enforcement surges.”

This is where transitional justice frameworks become useful for defending democracy: they don’t just document abuses, they also identify broader patterns of repression; elevate democratic resiliencies; and propose systemic reforms.

Bringing transitional justice home

While the IAC was the first official body at the subnational level to confront ongoing violent repression by the federal government, much more transitional justice work has taken place in the United States than is often recognized. A study by Howard University Law School identified more than 90 such initiatives in cities and states around the country, mostly addressing historical racial violence and discrimination against Blacks and Native Americans. These include, for instance, truth commissions in Maine and California focused on Native Americans, and the Lynching, Truth, and Reconciliation Commission in Maryland. Reparations initiatives and payments have been enacted in municipalities such as Amherst, Massachusetts and Rosewood, Florida.

The Chicago area, too, has transitional justice precursors to the IAC, including a 2015 law creating a public memorial and reparations for victims of police torture, and a reparations program in Evanston for victims of racial discrimination in housing policies.

These efforts across the country, however, remain fragmented and underdeveloped. Local leaders often lack practical guidance on designing commissions, conducting investigations, preserving evidence, and linking accountability efforts to democratic reform. International experience in transitional justice offers rich comparative practice and useful guidance. As commissions and investigators in the United States collect, authenticate, and share evidence of federal abuse across jurisdictions, they can benefit from practices, guidelines, and techniques honed by international investigative commissions for Syria, Myanmar, and South Sudan, and by the Ukrainian war crimes prosecutors.

The Illinois Accountability Commission offers a promising example of adapting comparative approaches to transitional justice. The broad scope of its recommendations resemble those of truth commissions around the world, ranging from referrals for criminal investigation, legal and institutional reforms, and reparations for economic harm suffered by small immigrant businesses, to longer-term efforts to restore trust between residents and democratic institutions.

The IAC also faced real constraints, including a short timeline and lack of power to subpoena and prosecute. Perhaps the most consequential limitation was one out of its control: the reality that the federal executive branch has no interest in holding itself accountable. In the face of federal impunity, the IAC asserted the accountability prerogative at the state level—creating a public record, preserving testimony and evidence, and connecting the responsibility for abuses on the ground to political and law enforcement leaders. Crucially, the Commission provided a forum for ordinary people to describe both abuses and acts of courage, resistance, and solidarity.

These are forms of democratic defense and an assertion of state power in a federalist system. Democracy defenders in the United States—from neighborhood ICE watch groups to philanthropies—should pay close attention. In anti-authoritarian struggles, resistance can be contagious, and institutions like the IAC grow the muscles of democratic power.

Toward a network of subnational accountability institutions

Already, other states are following suit. In March, Governor Tim Walz established a “Truth Council” to document federal enforcement operations in Minnesota, supported by Advocates for Human Rights, a Minneapolis-based organization with decades of transitional justice expertise. In Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass held hearings about ICE abuses, and there are discussions about creating a more formal response.

Future accountability initiatives should be linked across states and cities, designed to move evidence, investigative methods, perpetrator dossiers, and resistance lessons across jurisdictions—just as easily as (now former) ICE Commander-at-Large Greg Bovino moved from Los Angeles to Chicago to Minneapolis.

These bodies can also connect to international justice and human rights networks to share evidence, techniques, and forums for spotlighting federal abuse (a group of United Nations human rights rapporteurs has engaged with the Minnesota Truth Council). To combat perceptions that these bodies are partisan exercises, legislatures and city councils, rather than executives, could create the mandates, appoint diverse political representation, and seek the support of good government groups across the political spectrum.

Civic organizations, philanthropies, and national democracy groups can provide connective tissue to support domestic transitional justice through funding, investigative capacity, community support, and specialized expertise. The support required goes far beyond importing “lessons learned” from abroad; crucially, communities and subnational leaders need help accumulating the tools, resources, transnational alliances, and institutional knowledge to build accountability structures here at home.

Other societies have spent decades developing methods to confront authoritarianism and democratic breakdown, and the United States is not exempt from those patterns. In that sense, the Illinois Accountability Commission was more than an investigation into abuses in Chicago. It was an early experiment in democratic resilience rooted in global traditions of accountability, truth-telling, and justice.

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David G. Mandel-Anthony is an independent consultant, strategist, and foreign policy expert. He sits on several advisory boards, including of the Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide. From 2012 to 2025 he served in the Office of Global Criminal Justice in the U.S. Department of State, including as Deputy to the Ambassador-at-Large.

For as long as the United States has supported international development, officials have employed lofty rhetoric about the need to foster local leadership and allow local voices to shape their country’s development journey. However, while USAID signed agreements with each host country outlining the sectors that both were interested in working on, the specific objectives for USAID’s work were set either by Congressional earmarks from Washington or country strategies designed in Embassies. Likewise, most of the work was done through large international contractors and nonprofits working on discrete projects.

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In the 2000s, the pace of the push toward localization increased, with renewed calls for greater country ownership. The international development sector recognized that in order to achieve sustainable improvements in human lives, it needed to shift from simply providing goods and services (e.g. building hospitals and schools) to improving markets and networks (e.g. supporting local governments to deliver services). Doing this required building buy-in with local stakeholders and moving from a top-down approach to one that involved partnership with local governments, businesses, nonprofits, and civic groups.

Reforms intended to move in this direction tended to focus on formal funding arrangements: streamlining regulations to enable funding to flow directly to host governments and local organizations, instead of passing through international nonprofits and contractors. While an understandable starting point, this overlooked the importance of restructuring programs to better align with local priorities. Indeed, the term “localization” came to mean adapting aid flows so that local actors received a larger portion of funding—rather than empowering local stakeholders to define project priorities. Local organizations got more of the money, but the projects were still largely designed by donors.

Localization in Bosnia and its shortfalls

A case in point is USAID’s work in Bosnia. On the surface, programming there fit the profile of a localization success story: most of the USAID portfolio was delivered through Bosnian NGOs. A number of strong professional organizations regularly critiqued draft legislation, issued shadow reports to the EU, and promoted democratic norms and values through public advocacy campaigns. These were significant gains, achieved collaboratively between the USAID team and its Bosnian partners, representing real wins that fostered a more open society.

But when I travelled to Bosnia in the mid 2010s, USAID staff expressed more frustration than satisfaction. Just in the past week, there had been a protest in Tuzla around a land grab. Someone connected to the city administration tried to claim land and build a restaurant in a park that was valued by mothers who liked to walk with their strollers there. Groups of women began to protest—a big deal in a country known for apathy more than engagement! It seemed like a real opening for citizens to raise their voice and protest corruption. However, when two USAID-funded Bosnian NGOs showed up in Tuzla, they wasted no time trying to take charge. They sought to take the lead in organizing, telling the mothers where to go and how to protest, analyzing which laws were being broken, and generally asserting their control, rather than listening to the women and finding ways to serve. This did not go over well. The women of Tuzla quickly asserted that the NGOs didn’t speak for them; nonetheless, the women were sidelined from negotiations over what would happen next.

The USAID team’s takeaway was that the partners they funded were not oriented toward serving citizens directly—they undertook actions paternalistically, on citizens’ behalf, largely without their input or knowledge. USAID funded organizations to press for reform, not to foster a more cohesive civil society, and so those organizations had learned how to deliver pressure campaigns, not support grassroot efforts. USAID had been able to influence the direction of their Bosnian partners, which yielded victories when the goal was to pressure the government to align with EU standards and the rule of law; but USAID staff now saw how that approach had not equipped these organizations with the skills necessary to support hyperlocal priorities.

What I saw in Bosnia was a microcosm of the ways that efforts to foster local leadership fell short. USAID higher-ups measured success by dollars spent on projects, and measured localization by dollars distributed to local organizations. In Bosnia the north star was EU accession, so every project needed to demonstrate how it brought Bosnia closer to the EU. Thus it was natural that USAID retained strategic (and often tactical) direction for those projects even as they tried to incorporate local actors into project delivery. This was ultimately the fatal flaw: USAID could imagine local actors running projects, but not steering the broader strategy to move towards those local actors’ vision for the future.

Notably, the mismatch wasn’t between Americans and Bosnians. The staff who directed the projects were themselves Bosnian, and keenly felt the urgency for change. The drawbacks were only apparent when we started to envision our legacy: over time, USAID empowered Bosnian civic organizations that were highly capable at donor-driven advocacy, but less practiced at amplifying citizens’ own initiatives. Their instinct was to take charge and direct energy toward formal policy or legal changes, which left most citizens on the outside of change processes. They sought to solve problems technocratically, through hearings and plans, but couldn’t amplify protest, collaborate around a larger vision, or add much value to broad-based movements of engagement and solidarity. Local priorities and goals took a back seat when they didn’t overlap with USAID objectives, and the realities of donor funding crowded out local leadership despite the best of intentions.

Bright spots in practice

To be fair, there were a number of instances where USAID did support more strategic locally-led programs. From my vantage, the strongest locally-led programs emerged when outsiders could not impose predefined outcomes. This tended to happen when:

1. empowerment itself was the goal

2. problems were locally defined

3. uncertainty forced humility

Among the most effective programs I saw were those designed to increase youth engagement and empower them to take on future leadership roles. In North Macedonia, I met student activists who ran a moot court competition for 10 years beyond the end of USAID funding because they thought critical thinking skills were central to resisting autocracy. In Kenya, I saw a youth congress where young people from all walks of life, ethnic backgrounds and religions shared experiences and built a sense of what might be possible in the next decade. There wasn’t any more urgent task to crowd out their ideas, because empowerment was the deliverable. Free from the pressure to achieve short-term, measurable milestones, youth empowerment programs could focus on the perceived value and satisfaction of participants and let them dictate more of how programs operated.

A second category of strong, locally-led programs clustered around cross-sectoral governance work. Essentially, this meant pursuing governance improvements on topics prioritized by local communities, rather than starting with pre-defined focus areas. In practice, this turned out to be migrant resettlement and electricity access in Colombia, fair grading in schools in Kyrgyzstan, and greater community control over health clinic availability and tax revenue use in Senegal, to name a few examples. These projects were required to use community meetings and surveys to find out what issues people in specific towns or regions wanted to address and were willing to work on. Of course, such techniques were used in many programs, but in too many instances locally-defined priorities competed with specific goals or objectives set in USAID’s country strategy or earmarked into its funding. By contrast, in the projects I saw work best, the lack of a pre-determined overarching outcome created an authentic space for listening to and following local stakeholders’ ideas.

The other most innovative programs I saw were where USAID had no choice but to stay humble about what could be achieved in a volatile context. I witnessed incredible local leadership in some of the most difficult operating environments, for instance in programs to support civic action in Belarus despite an oppressive regime and mistrustful public, or to empower communities to take action on health and natural resource management in Myanmar while the government alternately ignored or repressed them. What these had in common was a sense that USAID was fighting uphill, and that partners were hoping to “surf the tidal wave” and figure out how to defend human rights or deliver public goods in contexts where corruption and oppression were the norm. By necessity, we deferred more to local partners’ judgment, given the risks entailed in their work. We also had no independent expectations of targets that we should achieve by funding local partners; amidst oppression, it was a fool’s errand to define which rights we could safeguard or which public goods we could ringfence. We focused on finding the right partners to trust, rather than the right projects to fund.

Learning from localization

Democracy is not only a set of institutions to defend, but a habit of collective public action that citizens develop through practice. Hannah Arendt argued that politics begins when ordinary people act together around shared concerns. In Tuzla, the mothers protesting the seizure of park land were already practicing a form of democratic action before civil society organizations funded by USAID arrived to direct them. Similar tensions can emerge when national organizations attempt to channel community energy into predefined advocacy campaigns. Making space for local agency is possible: for instance, in the United States, Indivisible regularly runs national campaigns and calls to action, but each local chapter is free—and indeed encouraged—to shape its own priorities, strategies, and tactics aligned with the movement’s values.

The promise that we can both invest in longer-term local leadership capacity and achieve targeted immediate results is a siren song to be resisted, as much in the United States as abroad. Democracy depends on citizens developing the capacity to act together without being managed into action. Lots of funders aim to support local problem solving as part of a broader pathway to democratic resilience. But seeking synergy or win-wins between donor and community priorities in that process can often undermine it. The desire to align grassroots energy neatly with institutional strategy too often reshapes the former.

The challenge for funders and the broader democracy support community is not simply to mobilize people more effectively, but to resist crowding out the very forms of agency they hope to strengthen. And the most frequent culprit isn’t ill intent, but a fixation on the big picture at the expense of the fabric of local reality.

Democratic capacity is not built through expertly managed interventions. It is cultivated slowly through trust, participation, and the experience of acting together in public life. In other words, strengthening democracy is less about teaching people how to participate than making space for them to discover that they already can.

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David Jacobstein has worked for more than two decades at the intersection of democracy, governance, and social change. As a Democracy Specialist at USAID, he helped shape the agency’s approaches to political economy analysis, locally led development, and capacity strengthening, co-authoring the Local Systems Framework and Local Capacity Strengthening Policy. He now writes and teaches about systems change, democratic renewal, and what the field of international development can teach about strengthening civic life and democratic institutions. He remains fascinated by how our assumptions about change shape the way we pursue, evaluate, and sustain it.

Over the next year, tensions continued to rise. Jaclyn Tsai, Taiwan’s Minister without Portfolio tasked with handling the government’s response, could have retreated behind closed doors or deployed riot police. Instead she took an unprecedented risk and handed the crisis over to civic hackers. Utilizing vTaiwan, a citizen-led initiative powered by an algorithmic consensus-mapping tool called Polis,1 the government crowdsourced the debate to thousands of Taiwanese. As the algorithm processed the chaotic web of grievances, bypassing the loudest trolls, a surprising conclusion emerged: a silent, overwhelming majority actually agreed on the need for passenger safety, fair taxation, and liability insurance. What began as a volatile street blockade was defused by technology that illuminated shared views. This unorthodox intervention transformed explosive public rage into widely accepted recommendations that informed subsequent regulation of ride-share operators.

A core challenge for democracies is that citizens express their preferences on election day, but often are limited in their ability to engage in policy development between elections. The Polis tool employed by vTaiwan has been used to address a range of contentious public policy issues in Taiwan, including how to regulate online alcohol sales and stop revenge porn. Polis was created in the United States but, somewhat paradoxically, so far hasn’t been used in the United States to the same effect as in Taiwan.

The problem is that, unlike Taiwan, the United States lacks a strong institutional infrastructure to implement consensus recommendations. In other words, the challenge is often not a lack of consensus, it is a governance system that grants multiple stakeholders veto power, combined with political incentives that discourage ceding agenda-setting authority. Proponents of civic technology often point to its effectiveness in building consensus around “common sense” reforms, but sometimes ignore the structural challenges in getting those reforms actually implemented. But with AI increasingly enabling rapid and broad citizen consultation, now is the time for Americans to reconsider how to translate consultation into reform.

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How vTaiwan Works

vTaiwan is a decentralized, crowdsourced policy-making process that combines digital tools with face-to-face meetings to help the Taiwanese government resolve complex issues, particularly those related to the digital economy. The process typically moves through four stages: Proposal, Opinion, Reflection, and Legislation. Polis is the algorithmic consensus-mapping tool that is the core engine of vTaiwan, allowing citizens to submit opinions and vote on ideas proposed by other users. Polis drives users towards areas of agreement by grouping like-minded users together and then identifying points of agreement between them, while rewarding users for refining positions that attract support from other groups. Once a clear, supermajority consensus emerges that bridges the divides between groups, community and government stakeholders hold live-streamed, structured meetings to refine areas of agreement into actionable policy recommendations. In Taiwan the government frequently uses those recommendations as the basis for new legislation. Governments and other entities in countries such as New Zealand and the United Kingdom have used Polis and other similar algorithmic consensus mapping tools.

Polis in Bowling Green

There have been some efforts to employ Polis in the United States. In 2025, local officials in Bowling Green, Kentucky deployed Polis to modernize public engagement in their comprehensive 25-year urban planning initiative, “BG2050.” Faced with rapid population growth and concerns about losing its small-town character, the city partnered with the Computational Democracy Project and Google Jigsaw to launch a digital campaign, “What Could BG Be?” Unlike traditional, sparsely attended town hall meetings that often amplify the loudest or most extreme voices, this digital approach crowdsourced input from over 7,700 residents (roughly 10 percent of the city’s population). Citizens submitted nearly 4,000 unique ideas regarding infrastructure, housing, and development, while the Polis algorithm mapped their voting patterns to identify areas of broad, cross-demographic agreement.

What made the Bowling Green experiment particularly innovative was its integration of a new AI analysis tool called Sensemaker, which rapidly digested the massive, month-long online conversation and significantly reduced the time required for analysis. The platform revealed a surprising consensus among the politically and geographically diverse population, including overwhelming agreement on priorities like riverfront redevelopment and managing traffic congestion.

What the results did not do is translate into new laws or regulations. In contrast to vTaiwan, Polis was used for advisory visioning rather than developing legislation. To be fair, the high-consensus data did allow the city to rapidly form specialized community planning groups that developed a vision document to guide the county’s development for the next 25 years, and today, some private developers are altering their construction strategies to match the Polis consensus data. However, although city planning is an important task, the Bowling Green example feels less immediately consequential than some of the policy reforms enacted in Taiwan.

Similarly, other jurisdictions in the US have used civic technology but stopped short of producing regulatory or legislative reforms. The New York City Department of Homeless Services used Polis to map opinions, understand pain points, and identify areas of consensus regarding shelter policies and the Colorado state government partnered with the civic-tech organization RadicalxChange to use Polis to collect citizen input on climate issues. But the key challenge to using consensus-driven digital tools to inform policy decisions in the United States remains turning that consensus into tangible results.

Consensus is the Easy Part

In the United States there are plenty of policy positions that have broad bipartisan support. For example, multiple polls (a tool that now seems quaint compared to Polis) from sources such as Fox News, the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, and NPR show that 80 to 90 percent of Americans support requiring background checks for all gun sales. According to a Gallup survey, 79 percent of Americans favor a requirement that voters provide some form of identification. And according to the Pew Research Center, roughly 72 percent of Americans believe there should be strict limits on the amount of money individuals and organizations can spend on political campaigns. Yet all of these popular reforms remain stuck thanks to the veto power of key political stakeholders and the bias in the electoral system towards political extremes due to gerrymandering, primary elections, and media polarization.

America’s founders wisely created a system of checks and balances that forced lawmakers to slow down, debate, and find broad consensus before acting. However, we must distinguish between mechanisms that force deliberation and mechanisms that enforce paralysis. For example, at the federal level, the veto power of individual Senators is significant. At the state level many governors have line-item veto authority and at the local level unelected zoning boards often hold substantial influence over local development decisions.

By contrast, in Taiwan many of the consensus positions identified by vTaiwan have become law thanks to facilitating structures put in place. The vTaiwan organizers refused to host a debate on the platform unless a specific government ministry agreed to sponsor the issue first. vTaiwan also had the direct backing of the Premier, who forced often stubborn ministries (like Transportation, Finance, and Justice) to sit down at the vTaiwan table and respond to the findings. Finally, the digital consensus identified on Polis was only phase one of the vTaiwan process. Once Polis identified the “hidden consensus,” vTaiwan transitioned into face-to-face, live-streamed meetings. These gatherings, typically including government officials, subject matter experts, industry representatives, civil society, and regular citizens, eventually led to formal reforms.

How to Make it Work

Reformers in the United States should learn from Taiwan’s experience—not just its use of technology, but its method for its method for connectinging consensus to reform, minimizing opportunities for politicians to sidestep issues on which citizens are broadly aligned. To do this, some structural changes are needed, which could include:

1. Reform the Administrative Procedure Act. For any new proposed federal regulation (not legislation) there is a required “Notice and Comment” period. Most states have similar requirements. These processes can be hijacked by organized campaigns that drown out consensus positions. Perhaps it is time to integrate a consensus-building AI tool into that antiquated process. Individual agencies could proactively do this or Congress could mandate it through legislation.

2. Establish a commitment for legislative review. At the state or local level, legislatures could commit to consider all recommendations that originate from a consensus-driven civic technology tool.

3. Modernize the ballot-initiative procedure. Each state has a different procedure for advancing citizen-led ballot initiatives, but they generally involve collecting thousands of signatures. In some cases, deep-pocketed special interests have played a leading role in ensuring that their preferred ballot initiatives are put to a vote. States could design alternative mechanisms to translate consensus recommendations derived from tools like Polis into proposed ballot initiatives.

Technology alone cannot overcome a gridlocked political system. But when paired with institutional reforms that smooth out the pathway between broad consensus and policy reform, tools like Polis, and initiatives like vTaiwan, may prove to be invaluable.

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Brian Vogt is currently conducting a Democracy Listening Tour of Conservative America. He has more than two decades of experience strengthening democracy in countries such as Afghanistan, Burma, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Thailand. He also played a key leadership role in the 2021, 2023, and 2024 Summits for Democracy that brought together more than 100 countries to recommit to democratic values and fundamental human rights.

Corruption is commonly defined as the abuse of entrusted power for private gain—for example, an official directing a contract to a crony in exchange for money, or a police officer asking for a bribe in exchange for ignoring a traffic violation. But the most dangerous form of corruption is rarely one-off transactions like a single bribe. Rather, it happens through complex informal networks of power, with tentacles spreading across both public and private sectors, through which people quietly trade influence and stack the decks to favor insiders. It’s not just about money trading hands, but who has access, and ultimately how and for whom decisions get made, often with legal cover. As those networks gain political power and twist the rules in their favor, they increasingly capture the state for their benefit.

This is a common pattern globally, and Americans would do well to learn from other countries’ experiences, both of how corrupt capture happens, and how to break free when it does.

Capture and its Harms

From Russia to Turkey, Hungary to Sri Lanka, examples abound of states captured for the benefit of the few. Often, this happens within formally democratic systems, with powerful people behind the scenes turning democracy on its head. Once these corrupt systems are entrenched, their harms are devastating for ordinary people.

In the Peru where I grew up, former President Alberto Fujimori was a trailblazer in using his elected position to amass power, destroying democracy from within. The key to his power was the creation of an influence-peddling network of thousands of people who profited from access to the president and bribes and paid back in kind. Complicit media spread disinformation. Judges and politicians in the network made decisions to favor Fujimori’s interests. Government became a criminal enterprise benefiting only those on the inside. Fujimori and his advisors misdirected hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds—money that could instead have been used for schools, infrastructure or poverty alleviation.

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Similarly, in Guatemala, economic elites, sectors of the military, and public officials have long wielded power behind the scenes for profit and protection, a set of relationships colloquially known as the “Pact of the Corrupt.” The head of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), Iván Velásquez (who helped open more than 120 major cases involving extensive campaign finance abuse, fraud, and bribes) told me once that the work had exposed the state as “an extractive enterprise” that operated like “a business profiting the few.” In a country where more than half the population lives in poverty, corruption directly impacted public services, such as health care.

In another example, in Lebanon, where power has been formally divided by religious sect for decades, the state has been captured by sectarian elites focused on dividing the spoils of government among their networks, rather than governing for the people. The costs of this capture are enormous: on August 4, 2020, 218 people died in an ammonium nitrate explosion in Beirut’s port resulting from corruption and mismanagement. Unsurprisingly, years later, Lebanese authorities have failed to complete an independent investigation into the blast.

Each of these countries followed a different path to state capture, but the common trait is powerful actors pulling strings to get the government to work for them, not for ordinary people.

US Corruption, Hiding in Plain Sight

Systems of accountability in the United States have been eroding for years, across several administrations and Congresses, and this erosion has increasingly facilitated elite influence, systemic corruption, and state capture. That’s most obvious in the explosion of dark money in elections since the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v FEC, which has created a legal avenue for wealthy interests not only to shape electoral outcomes, but to create incentives—even in the absence of an explicit agreement—for politicians to favor their interests. A current example is the way the crypto industry is wielding its massive “war chest” ahead of 2026 elections to shape conversations about regulation of the industry that should instead be grounded in the public interest.

Meanwhile, the president and vice president, Supreme Court, and Congress all have weak guardrails against conflicts of interest. Aside from the “emoluments” clause—a difficult-to-enforce constitutional bar on foreign gifts—only traditional ethical norms limit conflicts for the president. Despite endless scandals over members of Congress profiting from stock trading based on apparent insider information, bipartisan bans have been hard to get over the finish line.

Criminal accountability, too, has increasingly happened on two tracks. In a country that arrests millions of mostly low-income people every year for low-level offenses, prosecutions of white collar crime have been steadily declining, dropping from about 10,000 cases in 2011 to 4,000 in 2024. Prosecutions for bribery have also become harder, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly narrowed its definition under federal law, and Congress has failed to step in.

Both major political parties are heavily dependent on big money donations, creating incentives to avoid reform. While the “For the People” Act would have helped with key changes to campaign finance rules, neither party has taken on corruption in a way that meets the scale of the problem. President Joe Biden rightly declared the fight against corruption a core national security interest, but focused on kleptocracy abroad while leaving domestic accountability largely unaddressed.

Americans have felt the consequences. For many, the 2008 financial crisis made it personal: banks got bailed out and almost no executives faced criminal consequences for their actions, even as millions of ordinary Americans lost jobs, income, and homes. The Epstein files, and what they suggest about how power moves in some elite circles, have further underscored the sense of impunity for some, and the limited number of prosecutions reinforces the perception that the wealthy and powerful get a pass.

It is no surprise, then, that concerns about corruption and self-enrichment are major factors driving Americans’ loss of trust in government.

President Trump built his campaigns on that loss of trust, promising to “drain the swamp”—but then deepened the problem. Following in the footsteps of Viktor Orban in Hungary and Fujimori in Peru, the Trump administration has aggressively used power for self-enrichment and to entrench itself and its network, rewarding those who play along while punishing those who don’t. It has systematically dismantled accountability mechanisms that could check executive overreach: firing inspectors general, slashing the Justice Department team charged with corruption investigations, and promising mass pardons for senior officials.

Reasons for Hope—and Action

Many Americans have succumbed to cynicism or despair, thinking there is no way out of this quagmire. Yet other countries—and the United States’ own strengths—offer reasons for hope.

In Peru, I was present when a domestic court convicted Fujimori of corruption and crimes against humanity in 2009. He had fled the country and resigned the presidency by fax in 2000, after videos surfaced of his right-hand advisor paying off media moguls, judges, and congresspeople. That led to a transitional government that had the public support to enact meaningful anti-corruption and pro-democracy reforms, as well as thousands of investigations and prosecutions of enablers in Fujimori’s network.

The CICIG in Guatemala racked up real anti-corruption wins in partnership with local prosecutors in ways that fueled hope domestically. The Guatemalan government eventually expelled the commission, but its progress showed what sustained independent investigations, backed by adequate resources, can achieve.

In Hungary, we just saw how public disgust with corruption and economic stagnation ultimately became a uniting force and led to the democratic end of Orban’s rule. Whether that energy is directed toward meaningful reform remains to be seen, but the opportunity is there.

Despite growing corruption and increasing capture, the United States has a long history of strong and independent institutions, commitment to the constitution and rule of law, and a vibrant civil society that often speaks its mind. Yes there is the pressure of money in politics, but legislators still have to answer to their constituents at the ballot box. America’s systems are all under strain, but we can still use them to push back.

But moving away from the inequality and corruption baked into our political system will require more than just speeches about corruption or voting for one party over another. It will require accountability for those responsible for abuse of power. It will require courage and honesty from political leaders, whatever their party, about the problems in our system, and action to fix them. And at root, it will require all of us, ordinary Americans, to exercise our agency, as voters, as constituents, as citizens, to insist on something better.

We may already have a captured state. But we the people can still claw it back.

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Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno is CEO of RepresentUs. She is a Peruvian-American advocate, author, and attorney with over two decades of global and domestic experience on issues of corruption, authoritarianism, organized crime, and human rights.

When I attended the annual conference of the International Association of Official Human Rights Agencies (IAOHRA) last October, I met dozens of officials from member agencies who promote human and civil rights in employment, housing, education, public services and financial transactions (as one measure of the number of domestic human rights agencies, IAOHRA has more than 70 member organizations). In listening to their concerns, I recognized that these agencies are encountering many of the same digital threats, such as mis- and disinformation, faced by human rights defenders globally. As a guest presenter at the conference, I delivered a workshop on how human rights agencies can build resilience to mis- and disinformation by strengthening their media and information literacy skills (misinformation refers to false and misleading information that can be spread accidentally, whereas disinformation is false information spread with the intent to cause harm).

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Impressed by their work and dedication to human rights, I interviewed three leaders representing city, county and state level human rights agencies to better understand the challenges they confront and identify additional strategies—many drawn from experience and models abroad—to strengthen their digital resilience.

Three Challenges at the Local Level

All three officials pointed to the same underlying harm: mis- and disinformation don’t just spread lies, they fracture community trust and fuel polarization. For example, one official described how citizens can be misled on social media about how to file discrimination claims, with some believing they must file through federal agencies, even though many types of discrimination claims can also be filed at the state level. This misunderstanding can lead to delayed justice if federal responses are prolonged and, consequently, heightened distrust in local institutions mistakenly perceived to have no capacity to help. In another case, a city official focused on local conflict resolution said that they frequently deal with false information about immigration enforcement raids. Rumors that spread on social media about raids can cause panic and traumatize communities unless officials can verify the information and communicate directly with community leaders to defuse tensions. Kyla Hanington, Public Outreach and Engagement Division Chief at the Prince George’s County (Maryland) Office of Human Rights, summarized their collective views: “mis- and disinformation sow resentments, division and polarization, all of which harm our communities, our democracy, and our very selves.”

Another challenge the officials emphasized is that human rights agencies are under-resourced in combating digital threats. They said that none of their agencies have standardized, formal protocols for mitigating these harms; instead, their responses generally range from informal self-care practices for mental wellness, to basic IT firewalls, to relying on local partnerships to verify information about law enforcement actions. The gap between the scale of the threat and institutional capacity is striking. Ideally, agencies would have a combination of digital security protocols to protect against attacks like hacking and phishing, as well as integrated media and information literacy training to help staff develop both cognitive skills like emotional regulation and technical skills like image verification, all of which help build resilience to mis- and disinformation.

Additionally, they emphasized that mis- and disinformation don’t affect everyone equally; vulnerable communities are often the most negatively impacted. For example, Heather McVay, Deputy Executive Director at the Hawai’i Civil Rights Commission, explained how false information can drive civil rights violations:

In this case, vulnerable communities face the dual challenge of the original false narratives, and those narratives magnifying their distrust of the very institutions which could help them.

Toward Digital Resilience

What can local human rights agencies do to build digital resilience? There are myriad examples from other countries which agencies can draw from to protect themselves and their constituents from mis- and disinformation and foster social cohesion.

Tap into media and information literacy education

All three officials viewed media and information literacy (MIL) as a long-term solution for their staff and the communities they serve. MIL refers to the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication. It is the primary means for building overall resilience to mis- and disinformation (and other forms of false and misleading information) and can be practiced by institutions, communities, and individuals.

Human rights agencies can look to several local and global models for guidance on what works in MIL. For example, at the institutional level, Finland has built defenses against Russian disinformation campaigns by integrating media literacy into the school system. Starting at the preschool level, Finnish children learn key skills for identifying false information, such as critical thinking and fact-checking. At the community level, international non-profit IREX has worked with partners in Ukraine and North Macedonia to introduce young people in youth clubs to its Learn to Discern media literacy curriculum. Online learning platforms like IREX’s Very Verified course in the Baltic states have shown strong results in inculcating MIL competencies among individual learners. Using these and other models, human rights agencies can raise awareness among their communities about the importance of children receiving media and information literacy in schools, as well as in other venues such as public libraries, where vulnerable groups like seniors can also build their digital resilience skills. Officials themselves can improve their media and information literacy by accessing online training through organizations like the Media Education Lab and the News Literacy Project.

Amplify independent voices

One of the best defenses against mis- and disinformation is access to, and the production of, high quality, accurate information. Even as public trust in mainstream media erodes, newer actors are emerging to fill the gap and provide factual media and information: they include investigative organizations such as Bellingcat, independent journalists, and digital storytelling organizations that support human rights, such as BBC Media Action, Witness, and Global Voices. Human rights leaders at the city, county and state levels can identify and promote independent voices for their communities and facilitate access through offline and online events like the Prince George’s County’s Lunch and Learn virtual series, which gives the public access to experts discussing a range of human rights issues. These efforts can help to restore trust in credible information sources and elevate independent and often marginalized voices.

Build out international resilience networks

Human rights agencies can extend their existing networks by collaborating with international networks such as UNESCO’s Media and Information Literacy Alliance and the Poynter Institute’s International Fact Checking Network (IFCN). The former provides useful media literacy resources and a global support network for vulnerable communities and human rights agencies. IFCN links fact-checking organizations around the world and can provide fact-checking training for human rights agencies. At the policy level, human rights agencies can tap into the multi-national Freedom Online Coalition for information and knowledge sharing about the global protection of digital and human rights. As malign actors increasingly share tactics with each other for producing and spreading disinformation, human rights defenders should deepen their international networks to help close the resource gap in countering these threats.

Become more tech savvy

Although under-resourced human rights agencies might be playing catch-up to mitigate the effects of digital threats, free and low-cost tech tools are already available to help build broader digital resilience. For example, Internews’ Greater Internet Freedom project developed excellent digital security resources for civil society groups and human rights defenders around the world. Its resources include guidebooks and country-specific policy briefs covering digital rights, privacy and security. German non-profit Tactical Tech also offers useful training and toolkits covering topics ranging from digital campaigning and privacy to digital literacy and security. Human rights agencies can also consider using AI-powered deliberative platforms such as Pol.is and Remesh to conduct online dialogues and build consensus on key issues in a safe online space. For example, Pol.is has shown promising results in Taiwan for building public consensus and shaping policy on issues such as the market entry of Uber. Deliberative tech could be applied in similar ways to help resolve local conflicts, build public trust in institutions, and advocate for human and civil rights.

A Human Rights Call to Action

The digital threats that US human rights agencies confront are not going away—if anything, they will grow more sophisticated and difficult to counter. But as the officials I interviewed made clear, these agencies are not powerless. By promoting media and information literacy, amplifying trustworthy independent voices, forging stronger international networks, and embracing accessible tech tools, human rights agencies can build the digital resilience needed to protect themselves and the communities they serve. The risks require an urgent response, but there is also an opportunity: IAOHRA and its member agencies can seize this moment by deepening collaboration, sharing resources, and championing digital resilience as a cornerstone of human rights defense worldwide.

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Theo Dolan is a digital resilience expert and consultant for BBC Media Action. Previously he served as Digital Technology and Civic Activism Advisor at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Dolan has twenty years of experience working at the intersection of media, technology and peacebuilding, including designing and leading international initiatives to address digital threats such as disinformation and hate speech.

For nearly two decades, I was directly involved in Georgia’s democratic reform process—first helping to drive progress, later resisting its unraveling. Although Georgia was never a perfect democracy, I first encountered marked obstruction of democratic reforms toward the end of 2020, at the start of the current “Georgian Dream” (GD) government’s third term. At the time, I was serving as Head of the Government Administration, coordinating government work and facilitating meetings of the cabinet of ministers. When the prosecution service and entrenched networks within the judiciary blocked my efforts to improve the justice system, I felt I had to resign. I eventually became vice chair of an opposition party “For Georgia;” from this perch, I realized that I had underestimated the speed of Georgia’s democratic U-turn.

Once a regional frontrunner oriented toward European and Euro-Atlantic integration, Georgia has gradually become an electoral authoritarian regime. Alongside Russia and Belarus, Georgia is among the few countries where the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has invoked the Moscow Mechanism, a tool designed to investigate grave and systemic human rights violations. Today, over 100 individuals are imprisoned on political grounds (with reports of ill-treatment of detainees), civil society is virtually nonexistent, dissent is suppressed, and the system of checks and balances has been largely dismantled. The country is run by a single individual: Bidzina Ivanishvili, the founder and current honorary chair of GD, an informal ruler who has no mandate to employ that level of power.

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How Democracy Is Hollowed Out

Georgia’s transformation did not begin with a dramatic rupture. It followed a familiar trajectory: the gradual hollowing out of democracy while preserving its formal appearance, including through elections. This made the authoritarian drift difficult to detect in real time. But by the end of 2021, the era of maintaining a “democratic facade“ was over: following municipal elections, GD openly rejected the electoral victories of the opposition and dismantled effective accountability mechanisms such as the independent State Inspector’s Service.

At that point, it became clear to me that something was profoundly wrong. I realized that electoral integrity was the primary target of GD’s strategy.

GD gradually captured election integrity guardrails, cracked down on election watchdogs, and disseminated disinformation and false propaganda. In adopting these authoritarian strategies, Ivanishvili mirrored patterns seen in Orban’s Hungary: capture the judiciary and media, vilify civil society, and spread false propaganda.

Capture of Election Integrity Guardrails

Under the GD, all remaining relatively independent bodies key to election integrity were brought under partisan control, mostly through expedited and dubious legislative processes. Election administration, control of political corruption and party financing, investigation and adjudication of electoral violations, and even protection of human rights (including the right to vote) all ended up in the hands of GD loyalists. GD dismissed hundreds of civil servants on political grounds. Ivanishvili consolidated control over all branches of government: he installed loyalists on the party list to pack parliament; appointed allies to key government positions, including members of his inner circle such as his personal bodyguard, doctor, and banker; and, instead of reforming the judiciary (his major pre-election promise), struck a deal with entrenched networks. All three branches of government were used to capture independent institutions that were supposed to safeguard elections.

Crackdown on Election Watchdogs and Introduction of the Foreign Agents Law

GD aggressively confronted democratic actors, including civil society, independent media, and the political opposition. Civil society was targeted first, as its role in protecting election integrity was crucial. For example, the GD vilified election watchdogs, disseminating false propaganda implying they were engaged in an attempt to rig elections through the falsification of Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT) and suggesting they aimed to overthrow the government with the support of the West. GD’s claims stemmed from the fact that, following the 2020 parliamentary elections, the independent observation organization International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED), with the support of the National Democratic Institute, published the preliminary results of a PVT, which diverged from the results announced by the Central Election Commission of Georgia (CEC). This discrepancy triggered protest rallies. Subsequently, the ISFED stated that the results in fact aligned with those of the CEC and acknowledged that, during the publication of the preliminary findings, a “human error“ had occurred in the vote-counting process.

Through such tactics, the GD laid the groundwork to introduce the “foreign agents“ law, which prescribed Soviet-style labeling of all recipients of foreign funding as foreign agents, making it easier to freeze their assets and subject them to criminal prosecution.

Through these steps, a strategy of “enemy construction“ emerged and gradually broadened: operating under a “with us or against us“ principle, the GD labeled its critics as radicals, extremists, and foreign agents who posed a danger to stability, thus justifying the use of authoritarian methods.

Dissemination of Disinformation and False Propaganda

Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, GD has used fear-based narratives to create distance between Georgian voters and the West. For example, they claimed that the West sought to drag Georgia into war and wanted to open a “second front” to push Georgians to reclaim Russian-occupied territories—a campaign strikingly similar to Orban’s anti-Ukraine and anti-EU messaging in Hungary. From that moment, “peace“ became GD’s central message, which it effectively used during the 2024 and 2025 elections, persuading many voters that there was a real prospect of war.

This disinformation campaign was part of a complex system of intimidation designed to influence voters’ perceptions well before upcoming elections in 2024 and 2025, so that GD did not need to rely extensively on election-rigging techniques—such as ballot stuffing or physical violence—on election day itself. In a further effort to influence voting behavior, security and law enforcement services, as well as GD representatives, systematically intimidated voters who were dependent on state services in various forms, including social assistance beneficiaries, public sector employees, probationers, and pensioners.

Georgia demonstrates that democratic actors around the world—including in the United States—should take statements and narratives that carry anti-democratic implications seriously, regardless of the motivations behind them. Questioning the necessity of elections, casting unfounded doubt on the credibility of future electoral processes, and disputing reliable election results—all of which happened in Georgia—risk undermining public trust in democratic institutions. Similarly, framing political opponents as radicals, extremists, or even terrorists, attacking the judiciary, and disregarding the principles of separation of powers and checks and balances should not be dismissed as mere rhetoric, short-term tactics, or expressions of a strong executive vision. Even well-established institutional democracies such as the US are not immune to pressures that test the resilience of their systems.

When Resistance Is Tactical but Power Is Strategic

Over time, GD’s ultimate goal of prolonging its stay in power by dismantling the system of election integrity became clear, reflected in the consistent narratives spun by GD spokespeople. Unfortunately, the opposition, civil society, and media responded tactically rather than strategically, underestimating GD’s long-term intentions and missing the broader picture.

The clearest example is the resistance to the “foreign agents“ law, which was introduced in 2023. Civil society, the opposition, the media, and the public initially organized an unprecedented mobilization, resulting in large-scale protests and pushback to propaganda, which led to the withdrawal of the law. However, within a year, the GD passed an expanded version of the law, which ultimately crippled civil society; today, almost all civil society organizations in the country have either closed down, relocated, or stopped their activities. Many of the few that remain have reduced their staffing and are in a financial crisis.

On the surface, the initial resistance to the foreign agents law in 2023 embodied all the characteristics of effective resistance: there was coordination across democratic actors, a high degree of mobilization, effective counter-narratives, and international engagement. However, these efforts were not sustained or translated into a broader strategy to counter authoritarianism—they remained tactical rather than proactive and durable, because democratic actors misinterpreted GD’s long-term intentions. They focused narrowly on the foreign agents law, rather than seeing GD’s larger intent to target electoral integrity, of which that law was only one part.

Recognizing the need for a more strategic and proactive approach, I established an Election Task Force within the “For Georgia” political party ahead of the decisive 2024 parliamentary elections, long before election day itself. Composed of election experts, politicians, lawyers, and party representatives, the Task Force held weekly briefings to present evidence showing how GD’s authoritarian strategies were being used to undermine the electoral environment, and how the system of intimidation was designed to influence voters’ choices. Unfortunately, strategic coordination with other democratic actors fell short due to deep polarization, so our effort was insufficient to counter the full threat to elections. Nevertheless, we established a foundation for future efforts to defend electoral integrity. Democratic actors also lost the war on propaganda. GD’s campaign was built on the false promise of peace over war and destabilization. Regardless of whether the prospect of war and destabilization existed or not, the power of propaganda convinced part of the public of its reality and proved electorally beneficial for GD. Yet democratic actors failed to capitalize on the themes of peace and stability. Instead, they ceded this message to GD, and sometimes inadvertently gave the public reasons to believe in the GD’s propaganda. For example, during the 2025 municipal elections a significant portion of the opposition advocated for toppling the government. Indeed, some subsequently attempted to storm the presidential palace and called for a boycott of the upcoming municipal elections, thus feeding into the GD’s narrative that the opposition was a destabilizing force.

The US and EU failed to counter government propaganda, while autocratic actors coordinated closely with GD. For example, the US and EU struggled to counter the GD narrative that the US and EU wanted to drag Georgia into war. Conversely, Russian intelligence services repeatedly issued statements alleging Western interference in Georgian elections, preemptively targeting the most reputable international election observation mission, known as the OSCE/ODIHR, while the Orban government supported the dissemination of propaganda.

What Democracies Must Do Differently

The primary lesson I learned from our experience in Georgia is that preventing authoritarian entrenchment requires aligning tactics with an overarching anti-authoritarian strategy, and shifting from being reactive to proactive. In the face of rising authoritarianism, pro-democracy actors must take steps including:

• Recognize the early signs of authoritarianism;

• Understand the coherent long-term logic behind seemingly isolated authoritarian actions;

• Coordinate across the opposition, civil society, and media;

• Build effective counter-narratives that directly tackle the core messages of authoritarian leaders;

• Organize large-scale grassroots mobilization; and

• Develop long-term strategic responses.

Georgia experienced setbacks in each of these areas, except for large-scale grassroots mobilization. And because we have not followed many of the above steps, this mobilization has not translated into tangible results.

Pro-democracy efforts elsewhere, including in the United States, may suffer the same fate if cross-sector mobilization—encompassing the development of long-term strategy; coordination among civic activists, politicians, civil society organizations, and the media; and construction of effective counter-narratives, particularly in defense of election integrity—does not happen.

Georgia offers a stark warning. Authoritarians advance by emptying democracy of its substance, step by step, until political competition is no longer meaningful. By the time this becomes obvious, it is often too late.

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Natia Mezvrishvili is a democracy and election integrity scholar, Georgian politician, and lawyer currently pursuing her research at the George Washington University. She previously served as Vice Minister of Interior, Head of the Government Administration, and as a prosecutor in Georgia. She is a former Fulbright Scholar and a graduate of the University of Cincinnati College of Law.

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This moment calls for deep sector-level thinking about civil society reform, but also a focus on the organizational level—how leaders and teams make decisions under pressure and prepare themselves to operate effectively in uncertainty.

Of course, for many organizations in the United States, especially those founded by and serving BIPOC communities, LGBTQ+ communities, and Muslim communities, operating under heightened scrutiny or constraint is nothing new. They have been navigating these realities for years, and there is much to learn from their experience and leadership.

In the following sections we offer lessons drawn from patterns we have seen repeatedly when organizations operate in environments marked by uncertainty, scrutiny, pressure, or rapid change.

First, Find Your Footing

When the external environment shifts quickly, the instinct for many leaders and teams is to respond quickly. However, in our experience, organizations under pressure benefit from intentionally creating space to understand what has really changed before deciding how to respond.

In Serbia, in 2020 government officials increased scrutiny of nonprofit organizations working on media and human rights issues, conducting arbitrary financial audits and promoting negative public narratives that cast suspicion on their work. In response, USAID and PartnersGlobal (hereafter “we”)* worked alongside organizations to help them pause and find their internal footing. Together, we developed practical tools to prepare for potential audits and external scrutiny. We also promoted greater coordination among the sector, helping them improve their collective readiness to respond to government pressure. The 37 organizations placed on a government blacklist responded thoughtfully and with a unified voice, denouncing government harassment disguised as legitimate oversight. In the end, due to local and international media pressure, the government did not follow through with the audits, and the organizations continued their work. They were also better prepared when, five years later, the government followed through on similar threats and raided the offices of some civil society groups.

In Cambodia, growing uncertainty around potential government restrictions on foreign funding in the Law on Associations and Non-Governmental Organizations, introduced in 2015, created a fragile operating environment for nonprofits. The situation exposed a structural vulnerability within the sector, as many organizations had become highly dependent on foreign donor support, and authorities used this vulnerability to control their activities. In response, we collaborated with organizations to take the time to reflect on these risks, explore ways to diversify their revenue streams, and strengthen their financial resilience. As a result of that space and clarity, some identified new sources of income; others adjusted their operating models to reduce reliance on a single revenue stream. Ultimately, organizations that took the time to target exactly where to invest their energy on proactive improvements were better equipped to continue serving their communities.

These examples demonstrate that organizations that make intentional space to find their footing early preserve more room to maneuver later.

Decide Together, Act Together

When pressure and uncertainty builds, it is common for leaders, boards, and operations teams to interpret the situation differently. When this happens, people within the same organization are effectively working from different assumptions, and even the best strategies can falter in execution. When operating under uncertainty, organizations are more effective if they create a shared understanding about priorities, risks, and roles.

In Senegal, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a sharp decline in nonprofits’ ability to operate. The government issued a series of emergency orders and decrees that effectively criminalized civic participation, and in the coming years, civic actors, especially activists and journalists, would face brutal reprisals for exercising their rights. In this context, many nonprofit leaders, particularly those working on culturally or politically sensitive issues, chose to shield their staff from external risks by centralizing decision-making and limiting internal information-sharing about organizational strategy and risks. While well-intentioned, this strategy made it more difficult for staff to adapt their activities in response to shifts in the operating environment and fostered discontent and disconnection. We worked alongside leadership teams as they prioritized structured, whole-team conversations that created space for information-sharing, reflection, and alignment. Teams unified their understanding of shifts in civic space, improved communications channels, and aligned on roles, expectations, and decision-making responsibilities. Coordination improved and teams developed a stronger sense of belonging while better supporting and understanding leadership decisions.

Organizations where leaders, board members, and staff make decisions together from a shared understanding of their changing environment tend to steady themselves by adjusting without losing internal cohesion, which leads to better results.

Protect Trust While Adapting

Under pressure, organizations often need to adapt their operations. The challenge is doing so without losing the trust of the communities, partners, and stakeholders they serve.

In Zimbabwe, in 2022 government authorities promoted aggressive anti-nonprofit narratives that began to take hold in the public discourse. Civil society leaders often responded defensively, using jargony language that mirrored Western, donor-centric narratives about closing civic space. Unfortunately, this language reinforced government narratives about civil society and heightened community suspicions. We worked with several organizations to deconstruct and analyze public narratives about nonprofits and civic engagement, identifying language that builds trust and, conversely, may fuel fear and division. The organizations then used these insights to clarify how they communicated their purpose, re-working their mission and vision statements to include language that was simpler and more aligned with constituent priorities. We also facilitated exchanges with peers in former Soviet countries who had navigated similar patterns of pressure. In the end, organizations remained grounded in their mission while better navigating a more constrained and politically sensitive environment.

In 2020, the Guatemalan congress enacted Decree 4-2020, which, among other measures, gave the government the power to arbitrarily rescind the legal status of nonprofits. In Guatemala, the operating environment is marked by social tension and strained institutional relationships, making it difficult for pro-democracy actors to maintain trust across divides. In response, we partnered with local civic leaders to invest in coalition-building and collaborative advocacy. The process encouraged and empowered diverse actors to align around shared and consistent messaging about the Decree and prioritize relationships with each other, even when disagreements were sharp. While the law remains in effect, organizations are more unified and have built broader public support for their work.

In sum, by protecting trust as they resist government pressure, organizations can preserve the relationships central to their missions.

Where This Leaves Us

The examples cited from our experiences are not offered as models to copy, but as practitioner reflections from work we have done alongside organizations making decisions under pressure. Across these experiences, we have seen recurring traits in how leaders and teams steady themselves, make choices, and protect their ability to serve their communities. The specifics differ from place to place, but the underlying choices are often surprisingly similar.

For US nonprofits, these lessons are not abstract or distant. Many organizations are navigating shifts in funding, increased scrutiny, and a more polarized operating environment. The patterns we have seen of what works in other contexts are not prescriptions, but they do offer practical ways to steady leadership, strengthen decision-making, and protect trust under pressure. We are all still learning how to do this. We would welcome reflections on how others are navigating pressure from increasingly repressive governments.

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* For over a decade, USAID and PartnersGlobal partnered to support civil society in closing spaces globally. In the post-USAID era, Civic Safeguard Strategies and PartnersGlobal are collaborating to ensure the work continues. As a result, the “we” referred to in this article is a reflection of past and future partnership.

Eileen Lawless is the Chief of Programs and Engagement at Civic Safeguard Strategies, where she focuses on helping nonprofits navigate pressure, strengthen decision-making, and sustain their ability to serve their communities. She is a senior international and community development leader with more than 20 years of experience with USAID, international NGOs, and the United Nations, advancing democracy, human rights, and good governance across the Middle East and North Africa, Southern Africa, the Balkans, Timor-Leste, and Azerbaijan.

Bridget O’Loughlin is the Director of Partnerships and Ecosystem at PartnersGlobal, where she focuses on strengthening the global ecosystem of civic actors advancing peacebuilding, democracy, and human rights. She has 15 years of experience supporting civil society around the globe to navigate complex and increasingly constrained civic space, with a particular focus on Latin America.

In the dimly lit corner of Chez Frank, an upscale restaurant in Little Italy, the ideals of Canadian democracy were quietly traded for a thick, unmarked envelope. At one table sat an advertising executive who had recently been awarded millions in un-tendered federal contracts. This taxpayer money was officially earmarked to sponsor local hunting shows and sporting events to promote national unity. The public relations campaign was supposed to counter the vocal calls for Quebec’s independence. But instead of buying billboards, the advertising executive left an envelope stuffed with over a hundred thousand dollars in untraceable cash on his chair and got up to use the bathroom. When he returned to his chair, the envelope was gone and so was his companion, a Liberal Party fundraiser.

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The Sponsorship Scandal was a systemic money-laundering machine. Political operatives funneled government contracts to phantom ad agencies that then made illegal kickbacks to finance the ruling Liberal Party’s political campaigns. When testimonies of these cash-stuffed envelopes and fake invoices were finally dragged into the light of a televised national inquiry, the brazen theft of public money shattered the electorate’s faith in Canadian democracy.

While this cinematic display of corruption unfolded in Canada, the underlying frustration with money in politics is strikingly familiar to American voters. Across the United States there is broad agreement that reducing the influence of money in politics is a democratic imperative. But how do we actually achieve it? Canada’s experience—as well as the United States’ own history—shows that the most effective way to limit money in politics is not through the triumphant victory of a single political party, but by forging unlikely multi-party coalitions.

Strange Bedfellows Fight Back

When a scandal the magnitude of the Sponsorship Scandal explodes, it is Politics 101 for the opposition to pounce. That opportunistic strike played out predictably in Canada in 2006, when public outrage contributed to the Liberal Party losing its 12-year hold on power. But the crisis also opened the door to something far more profound: a new coalition of unlikely allies capable of passing substantive anti-corruption reforms.

The newly elected right-wing Conservative Party, led by Stephen Harper, partnered with the left-wing, democratic-socialist New Democratic Party to pass the Federal Accountability Act. Both parties recognized that leveling the playing field was more important than protecting traditional fundraising streams. The legislation completely banned corporations and trade unions from making political donations at the federal level. Furthermore, it strictly capped the amount of money any individual citizen could donate annually to a candidate or party, currently limited to $1,775 CAD (about $1,300 USD). This proactive, multiparty consensus permanently shifted Canadian politics away from corporate mega-donors and toward grassroots, citizen-funded campaigning.

This episode shows that while opposition parties are apt to portray themselves as defenders of “democracy,” substantive and durable democratic reforms frequently come about not when they are championed by one party, but when opposing parties come together to temporarily put down their political pitchforks and work together to reform the system.

The Maverick and the Progressive

Skeptics will argue that while cross party coalitions may happen frequently in other countries, particularly those with parliamentary systems, such bipartisan cooperation isn’t realistic in the United States. They will suggest that the United States’ two party system and climate of hyper polarization means that it’s just not possible here. But they ignore American history that isn’t all that far in the past: the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, widely known as McCain-Feingold.

That journey began with an unlikely alliance born out of a shared frustration with a broken system. By the late 1990s, American federal elections were awash in “soft money,” a massive loophole that allowed unlimited, unregulated corporate and union donations to flow directly to national political parties. Recognizing the corrosive effect this had on Americans’ trust in their elected representatives, Senator John McCain, a conservative Republican, and Senator Russ Feingold, a progressive Democrat, decided to join forces. This partnership was politically dangerous for both men, as it required them to defy their respective party leaders, who heavily relied on the very soft money the senators were trying to outlaw. Instead of yielding to partisan pressure, McCain and Feingold anchored their coalition in the belief that keeping politicians accountable to everyday voters, rather than corporate checkbooks, had to supersede party fundraising priorities.

The path to passing the legislation was a grueling, multi-year battle that required relentless coalition-building to overcome filibusters, hostile amendments, and deep-seated institutional resistance. The turning point arrived in the early 2000s when a series of high-profile corporate scandals, most notably the collapse of the energy company Enron, generated the visceral public outrage necessary to break the legislative gridlock. Leveraging this momentum, McCain and Feingold convinced enough moderate and reform-minded lawmakers from both sides of the aisle to force the bill through Congress. When it was signed into law, the act banned national political parties from raising soft money and strictly regulated corporate and union spending on campaign advertisements. It stood as a defining modern example of American lawmakers collaborating across the aisle to clean up their own electoral house.

It is important to acknowledge that this landmark legislation has been dramatically undermined by ensuing court cases, including Citizens United in 2010. That case equated corporate political spending with First Amendment free speech and paved the way for the creation of Super PACs with no limits to donations. Nevertheless, the bipartisan cooperation that led to the McCain-Feingold legislation still presents important lessons.

A United Front Against Political Cash

Americans across the political spectrum are frustrated with the role of money in politics. A 2024 Pew Research Center poll found that the third most important issue for voters (after the economy and terrorism) was reducing the influence of money in politics, supported by 62 percent of Americans. A 2026 IPSOS/America’s Promise poll found that 81 percent of Americans are concerned about the influence of money in politics, including 78 percent of Republicans and 90 percent of Democrats.

I am currently conducting a Democracy Listening Tour, speaking to conservative voters in several states. The Trump voters I have interviewed are outraged by the influence of money in politics. I spoke with one wealthy retired businessman in Kentucky who reluctantly voted for Trump and explained that he has served on numerous public boards to serve his community. Being in such elite circles, he recounted how governors and other high level political officials frequently ask him for campaign contributions. He responds by pointing to the time he invests in community boards and feels that is his contribution. The constant barrage of requests for political donations has made him a convert to limiting money in politics. I asked him what he sees as the most urgent democratic reform. He said it was quite simple: prohibit all corporate and union donations. He felt that only voters should be allowed to donate to campaigns. He also suggested that if that didn’t work, we should consider public funding for campaigns. Another Trump voter who works in a family business in Ohio complained that “campaign finance laws, I think, are so outdated.” A software developer who voted for Trump in Pennsylvania lamented that “our representatives spend way too much time raising money, and it would be good to be able to get that out of the picture.”

It’s clear that there is strong public support, including from Trump voters, to constrain the role that money plays in American politics. Of course, there remain significant obstacles, including Citizens United. But that does not mean that all is lost; indeed; there are important efforts underway, such as an initiative in Montana to limit corporate political spending. States have this authority—so far, they just have chosen not to use it.

Three Lessons from History

The Sponsorship Scandal and McCain-Feingold present several lessons. First, both reform efforts were spurred by scandals that showed the public, in dramatic fashion, how money corrupts the political system. In today’s political environment, there’s no dearth of influence peddling scandals to serve as the jolt that could spur action. Reform-minded politicians and advocacy groups need to be prepared to take advantage when those opportunities arise. Especially for advocacy groups, the time is now to reach out to unlikely allies. Second, in both instances, reform didn’t come from the moderate center—it was driven by the populist left and right, and withstood the protestations of party bigwigs and much of the establishment. Reform-minded politicians would be wise to activate grassroots populists on both the left and the right to make progress. Finally, both the Sponsorship Scandal and the Enron scandal that spurred campaign finance reform came to light thanks in large part to dogged investigative journalism. Funders should support organizations such as ProPublica and The Center for Public Integrity, along with journalists at the local level, who will expose and shine a light on corrupt practices.

Ultimately, the fight to reclaim democracy from mega-donors will not be won by waiting for the political establishment to police itself. As the history of these landmark reforms proves, victory requires an unconventional, cross-partisan alliance that channels the shared outrage of everyday citizens into undeniable legislative force.

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Brian Vogt is currently conducting a Democracy Listening Tour of Conservative America. He has more than two decades of experience strengthening democracy in countries such as Afghanistan, Burma, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Thailand. He also played a key leadership role in the 2021, 2023, and 2024 Summits for Democracy that brought together more than 100 countries to recommit to democratic values and fundamental human rights.

In the United States, a similar frustration among young people is building. But much of the commentary about Gen Z in the United States—loosely defined as those born between 1997 and 2012—often misses the point. Pundits, analysts, and politicians have been debating whether young voters are drifting left or right, whether young men are becoming more conservative, or whether social media is warping their political views. These questions assume that ideology is the main story. It isn’t.

The defining political shift among young Americans is not partisan realignment, it is collapsing faith in democratic institutions. Gen Z is not simply becoming more progressive or more conservative. It is becoming more skeptical that government as currently structured—and by proxy, democracy itself—works. And that skepticism may be one of the most consequential political developments of our time.

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In countries around the world, fueled by anger towards institutions and leaders, young people are taking action. Will their counterparts in the United States do the same? At least two pathways are possible. Young Americans may channel their distrust into rebuilding democratic institutions that better respond to their generation’s economic and social realities. Or their frustration might harden into disengagement, tolerance for political violence, and even openness to authoritarian alternatives. Gen Z will reshape the future of American democracy: the question is how.

American Youth are Frustrated

Gen Z is coming of age amid historically turbulent times. In the United States, most young people have never known a political landscape without Donald Trump and the rancor that has accompanied his rise. Unlike earlier generations, Gen Z has not experienced a unifying national political moment or narrative such as the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (which was itself short-lived and followed by deep division). Instead, they have been shaped primarily by events that entrenched polarization and eroded trust in institutions.

Young people in the United States and abroad were profoundly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted years of schooling and social development. And now another disruption looms: the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence—already displacing jobs and reshaping labor markets—has created deep uncertainty about whether the future of work will function for them at all.

For example, according to a Spring 2025 Harvard Institute of Politics poll, only 19 percent of Americans aged 18-29 trust the federal government to do the right thing. Just 18 percent trust Congress, 23 percent trust the president, and 29 percent trust the Supreme Court. Only 11 percent believe the country is generally heading in the right direction (while this poll focused on young people specifically, other recent polls have demonstrated that generally, approximately 30-35% of all Americans think the country is moving in the right direction).

To some extent, this distrust in institutions predates the reelection of Donald Trump: a 2023 survey by the American Public Media Research Lab found that only 27 percent of Americans aged 18 to 25 strongly agreed that democracy is the best system of government, compared with 48 percent across all other age groups.

Polling we recently conducted at Johns Hopkins University adds more evidence for growing institutional distrust. When asked about the design and structure of the US government, over 60 percent of Gen Z respondents said it needs significant change regardless of who is elected—compared with 46 percent of Baby Boomers who said the same. While 64 percent of Baby Boomers and 55 percent of Gen X respondents felt their political party was moving in the right direction, only 42 percent of Gen Z respondents agreed.

More troublingly, this distrust in institutions has begun to lead to greater tolerance for political violence. Only 11 percent of Baby Boomers and 14 percent of Gen X respondents believe using violence to advance political goals can be justified. Among Gen Z, 40 percent said violence could be justified to some degree.

These figures are alarming—and historically aberrational. Young Americans’ trust in institutions is lower than that of older adults today, and lower than that of previous generations when they were young. This pattern spans social trust, political trust, and confidence in core institutions—and it will shape the future of democracy.

Around the World, Young People are Taking Action

This growing skepticism of institutions and democracy extends well beyond the United States. In a recent Open Society Barometer survey of 36,000 respondents across 30 countries, 35 percent of people aged 18-35 indicated a preference for a strong leader who dispenses with legislatures and elections altogether (compared to 26 percent for respondents aged 56 and above). Alarmingly, 42 percent of people 18-35 believed military rule could be a good way of governing (compared to 20 percent of respondents aged 56 and above).

This rejection of a failed status quo is leading Gen Z abroad into action. In Nepal, young activists launched campaigns exposing the lavish lifestyles of political elites, using hashtags like #NepoKids. When the government responded by restricting online platforms, young people took to the streets. The protests ultimately forced the prime minister to resign, but also claimed the lives of several dozen people.

In Madagascar, inspired in part by events in Nepal, and fed up with power outages and infrastructure failures in one of the poorest countries in the world, young people mobilized both online and offline, forcing their prime minister from power. In Peru, youth protesters bravely marched during a state of emergency to oppose corruption. In Morocco, Gen Z erupted over unemployment and bleak economic prospects as the government spent lavishly preparing for the 2030 World Cup. And in Kenya, young protesters stormed Parliament to resist a finance bill they believed would further economic inequality and entrench corruption at their expense.

The list goes on—young people have also protested in Mexico, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Thailand, Bulgaria, and the Philippines. Their grievances vary, but the underlying message is remarkably consistent: institutions meant to govern young people’s lives have failed them. This surge in activism is less ideological than existential, rooted in skepticism that democracy, as currently practiced, delivers on its promises.

The long-term success of these movements remains uncertain. Online organizing has fueled mass mobilization and short-term wins, but durable change requires sustained organization and consolidated political power. As the aftermath of the Arab Spring demonstrated, dismantling entrenched systems is far easier than building something better in their place.

A Moment for Young People in the United States

While young Americans demonstrate similar frustrations compared to their international peers, it remains in question whether their institution distrust will lead to real action. To that end, meeting this moment in the United States presents a two-fold challenge.

First, political leaders across the spectrum must recognize that young people’s distrust of institutions is often justified, and does not map neatly onto ideology. Politicians should stop treating young people as an afterthought, and start treating them as potential co-architects of democratic renewal. Young people want action: an acknowledgement that liberal democracy has fallen short of its promises; economic policies that meet the moment; and leaders who are not part of a gerontocracy. It is not enough to lecture young people on the principles of democracy, or employ a staid civics education that teaches young people how government works. Political leaders must make room for new leadership, new ideas, and a generation that is impatient with a system that has asked them to wait indefinitely. Either political party in the United States could deliver the change that young people are clamoring for right now.

Second, there is a real risk that frustration among young people hardens into cynicism and a belief that nothing matters and politics cannot deliver meaningful results. Growing cynicism opens the door to inaction and to remaining on the sidelines. But more than that, it could lead to greater acceptance of violence, illiberalism, and the idea that authoritarianism might work better.

At the same time, Gen Z faces its own responsibility. Change will not come overnight. Democracy does not work on frustration alone or produce instant results. It requires participation, taking to the streets, organizing, and the slow, often unsatisfying work of building power that lasts longer than a protest cycle or a viral moment.

Young people are fed up. They are also uniquely positioned to decide whether this moment of global disillusionment leads to a democratic collapse or a democratic reset. The rest of us would be wise to stop bemoaning them and start building with them.

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Scott Warren is a Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently leading an initiative focused on exploring, researching, and convening a pro-democracy conservative agenda in the US, organizing convenings focused on bridging long-term and short-term fixes for democratic reform, and exploring ways the US can learn from global efforts to improve democracy (including helping to run Democracy Without Exception).

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These attacks create new challenges for nonprofits working to protect human rights at home and abroad, and an urgent need to find new ways to push back.

In that vein, allow us to present a little-known multilateral organization—the Financial Action Task Force (FATF)—for consideration.

What is the Financial Action Task Force?

The FATF serves as the standard-setter for global regulatory policy on anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (together known by the acronym AML/CFT). FATF was originally created in 1989 with a focus on money laundering; following 9/11, it expanded to include countering terrorist financing, which gave it increased relevance and influence. Today, FATF’s core membership comprises 37 countries and two regional organizations, with more than 200 jurisdictions committed to adopting FATF standards—demonstrating an extensive global reach. FATF undertakes periodic Mutual Evaluations of member countries to assess their technical compliance with and effectiveness of their implementation of FATF recommendations, and the overall health of their AML/CFT regulations and financial system.

FATF’s Mutual Evaluations process revolves around the 40 FATF Recommendations that national governments are expected to implement and uphold. The recommendations are intended to serve as the basis on which all countries should model their domestic AML/CFT regulations. Through the Mutual Evaluations process, governments share information with FATF assessment teams on steps they have taken to address identified AML/CFT risks. Nonprofit groups can also submit input, focusing on the impact of AML/CFT regulations on their work. FATF assessment teams then conduct in-country visits in which they meet with government authorities, financial institutions, the private sector, and nonprofits, before publishing Mutual Evaluation Reports, which score countries on FATF Standards and outline any areas of concern. Countries are then mandated to report on their progress in addressing identified concerns, which creates additional opportunities for accountability and dialogue with cross-sectoral stakeholders.

Countries that score poorly in their Mutual Evaluations may be placed on a list of “jurisdictions under increased monitoring” or a list of “high risk jurisdictions subject to a call for action”—colloquially known as the FATF grey and black lists, respectively. Crucially, placement on these lists can trigger significant economic consequences, including reduced inward foreign investment, increased compliance and borrowing costs, delays in international financial transactions, declines in GDP, financial de-risking (when commercial financial service providers decide it is too risky to continue business relationships and services), and reputational damage that undermines other areas of international cooperation. For example, in 2018, Pakistan was placed on the FATF grey list, making it more difficult for the country to access funding from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and contributing to a downgrade of the country’s creditworthiness.

As a FATF member, the United States participates in the Mutual Evaluations process, and its next Mutual Evaluation is this year. FATF assessors are scheduled to conduct their on-site assessment this spring, with results expected to be published later in the year.

Why FATF Matters for Nonprofits

What makes FATF an appealing tool for nonprofits is Recommendation 8. It states that countries should adopt a “risk-based approach” toward oversight of the nonprofit sector, in order to uphold financial integrity within the sector without disrupting legitimate nonprofit activity. The most recent version of Recommendation 8 recognizes that over-regulation of the nonprofit sector as it relates to AML/CFT has caused serious harm, including delays to “life-saving humanitarian assistance and comfort to those in need.”

In other words, Recommendation 8 says that the nonprofit sector is not inherently high-risk for terrorist financing, and that governments cannot subject the sector to blanket restrictions that are not grounded in evidence or actual risk profile. Authorities also cannot weaponize their AML/CFT infrastructure to suppress nonprofits and consolidate political control.

Sadly, many governments fail to adhere to Recommendation 8. For example, in Nicaragua, more than 1,500 nonprofits had their assets seized and were closed down by the government in 2024, purportedly because of financial reporting failures. Ahead of India’s Mutual Evaluation in 2023, Amnesty International documented India’s weaponization of CFT regulations to repress civil society. In 2025, Front Line Defenders pointed to criminalization as a leading threat to human rights defenders globally, who increasingly find themselves subject to asset freezes, travel bans, criminal investigations, and professional disbarment on baseless counter-terrorism grounds.

These dynamics are not accidental. Instead, they exemplify intentional, state-led misapplication and weaponization of international AML/CFT standards.

Global Concerns Coming Home

The United States’ upcoming Mutual Evaluation is occurring at a time of unprecedented domestic crackdowns on nonprofit organizations. In 2025, threats from the administration came in the form of National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (“Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence”); proposed legislation targeting non-profit tax exempt status; Executive Orders designating certain U.S.-based groups as “domestic terrorist organizations;” and the White House’s “Strategy to Counter Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.”

A leaked memo from the Office of the U.S. Attorney General adopts a broad view of what constitutes a “domestic terrorism threat,” including in that definition people who harbor “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment.” The memo directs the FBI, in cooperation with state and local law enforcement, to conduct criminal investigations and prosecutions of civil society. These measures pose clear threats to protected freedoms of speech and assembly, and raise concerns that a diversion of resources toward a politically motivated crackdown on civil society leaves the United States and its financial institutions vulnerable to actual AML/CFT threats.

At the same time, the administration has significantly expanded Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorist designations, with a focus on transnational criminal organizations operating in the Americas. This significantly raises the legal risk for peacebuilding and humanitarian service providers (both U.S.-based and international organizations) operating in areas where newly designated organizations are active, compromising their ability to serve already vulnerable populations.

In December, the Charity & Security Network submitted an NPO Shadow Report to the FATF assessment team for the United States that outlined these concerns, urging the team to meet with nonprofits who are under pressure during their in-country visit, and encouraging them to rate the United States as only partially compliant with Recommendation 8.

The Opportunity that FAFT Creates

The fact that the Trump Administration has remained in FATF, despite leaving 66 other international organizations at the start of this year, signals that it views the institution as strategically important. Unlike other multilateral bodies, the United States cannot unilaterally exit FATF or elect not to participate in its own Mutual Evaluation without risking serious economic consequences. This situates FATF as something of a unicorn in the multilateral space: an international organization with teeth.

Therein lies the opening for American nonprofits. The upcoming Mutual Evaluation represents a rare opportunity to work with a multilateral body to address shrinking civic space, amplify civil society concerns, and move toward productive cross-sectoral cooperation on areas of legitimate AML/CFT priorities. Domestic democracy and human rights organizations should seize this moment to document how the Trump administration is using the United States’ AML/CFT architecture not to address actual security threats, but to crack down on legally protected, legitimate nonprofit activity. They should consider publicizing their findings as a means of influencing the Mutual Evaluation process, and explore ways to work with global civil society to engage FATF directly both before and after the assessment team releases the results of the Mutual Evaluation.

If they do, the Mutual Evaluation of the United States can raise awareness of urgently needed protections for domestic nonprofits, and help safeguard some semblance of shared norms in multilateral spaces. As the Trump administration turns its back on human rights institutions, FATF offers a rare opportunity to elevate freedom of association, assembly, and expression in a multilateral institution the administration can’t easily ignore.

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Sarah Gardiner is a consultant with the Charity & Security Network. She has previously held leadership positions within Oxfam America and Front Line Defenders, focusing on global civil society resiliency and protections for human rights defenders. Poorvika Mehra is a policy economist specializing in AML/CFT regulations and the humanitarian impact of sanctions. She is currently the Howard S. Brembeck Fellow at the Charity & Security Network.

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The United States has always had an insular streak. No less than George Washington said the nation should remain “detached and distant” from European politics and foreign entanglements. Present-day commentators frequently complain of gaps in the American public’s knowledge of foreign affairs. Historically, American exceptionalism has pervaded the nation’s politics, and its geography—bordering two mighty oceans—separates it from much of the world. Under these circumstances, international affairs is often treated as a boutique concern: the US education system does not emphasize foreign languages or world history, and opportunities like study abroad are cost prohibitive for too many young people, even among university students.

However, the current crisis of democracy and rule of law in the United States has parallels abroad from which US activists can learn. Opportunities to do so should be more accessible, not just to people at large national nonprofits or elite universities, but also to less resourced activists in places outside Washington, DC and New York. Such opportunities should be continuing and intensive, not abbreviated and sporadic. Foundations and other institutions should devote resources to making them so.

Breaking Down Walls Between Democracy Activists

Professionals working to expand global democracy have long recognized the importance of building networks of solidarity and best practice among civil society organizations—but funding and political obstacles often prevent US activists from participating.

For more than eight years, I worked at a Congressionally appropriated international grantmaker called the National Endowment for Democracy, or NED. The NED provides grants—often relatively small ones, from the mid-five-figures to low six-figures—to civil society and independent media around the world, including some of its most repressive countries. During my time at NED, the organization spearheaded research into how the world’s dictatorships were learning from one another. My colleagues were insistent that the world’s democracies should do the same: our central belief was that the more pro-democracy activists focused on individual country contexts at the expense of international learning, the less effective they would be.

The NED has a program, the Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellows, which brings small cohorts of international activists and scholars to Washington for a few months so they can learn from each other. Since 2001, the program has seen more than 360 fellows from over one hundred countries. Their sense of solidarity is deep: according to one former fellow, a Zimbabwean activist, “even though we may come from different regions and speak different languages, we share a common struggle—the struggle against the abuse of power.” Unfortunately, American fellows are rare: when they are considered at all, they are often scholars focused on democracy in other countries, not the United States. This is a reflection of NED’s Congressional origin: domestic work is verboten under the 1986 law which established the organization as a bipartisan, taxpayer-supported mechanism for promoting democratic norms and governance, insulated from the many competing priorities of the US government’s executive branch.

While the NED is not the biggest fish in global democracy and international exchange, similar rules constrained its primary partners (the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, the Solidarity Center, and the Center for International Private Enterprise) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID)—which was such an important funder that its abrupt destruction now poses a systemic risk to the sustainability of global civil society. Many former USAID staff have long grasped the value of having an international perspective on domestic democracy and civil society—but only recently have they been free to reflect openly on how lessons from abroad apply at home.

When I was bound by these limits while working at NED, I only rarely interacted professionally with activists focused on democracy and civil rights in the United States. At conferences, I found myself wishing that American activists were present to hear how peers elsewhere described their experiences with rising authoritarianism. It would, I thought, make the threat more tangible and immediate—and it would build credibility for US democracy support and foreign aid, which some critics on the activist left allege to be pedantic and paternalistic at best, and imperialist or extractive at worst, involving unwelcome lectures from a country whose own democracy has never been perfect. It’s now more clear than ever that democracy activists in the United States should listen to those who have been on the frontlines fighting 21st century authoritarianism. They could learn a lot.

If It’s No One’s Job, It Doesn’t Get Done

The United States needs more programs like the NED’s Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellowship, but explicitly inclusive of American activists working in urban and rural areas of all fifty states. Opportunities for international travel and exchange are expensive; that fact alone acts as a gatekeeper, excluding bootstrap, grassroots, US-based activists who are doing important work on lean budgets. They may or may not belong to a formally registered organization; many cannot afford basic equipment like organizational laptops or phones. Their office space might be a WeWork, or a garage, or wherever they happen to be standing. Getting to Chicago, Washington, New York, or Los Angeles is often beyond their means—to say nothing of international conferences abroad. They need structured, funded opportunities to engage with global counterparts. And because democracy issues have become such a political third rail, they need it from nongovernmental sources not beholden to partisan agendas. Philanthropy is one such source.

It would be nice to fly activists to a well-touristed locale for an extended stay, but it’s not necessary. There are many alternative approaches, which some organizations like D-Hub are facilitating: exchange programs which have activists embed in peer organizations abroad, small group international workshops with structured multi-day agendas, or something as simple as funded travel to international conferences. Some models might send Americans overseas, while others would bring international activists to US cities. If travel to the United States is an obstacle for international participants, meetings could instead be held in nearby North American cities like Toronto or Vancouver. Alternatively, the COVID-19 pandemic proved that a great deal can be accomplished remotely when necessary; US participants could gather in-person for a series of extended virtual conversations with counterparts abroad. This might also reduce demands on participants’ time, which is in short supply and mostly dedicated to work in their communities. All of these options have different price points, benefits, and downsides; the point is that the logistics are not prohibitive.

Unfortunately, ideas like these fall through gaps in the programmatic strategies of local, state, and national philanthropists. Donors like to see projects with tangible impact, which makes many suspicious of projects which center exchange and convening. Many national philanthropists prioritize programs combating authoritarianism at the federal level, forgetting that state and local governments act as canaries in the coal mine and laboratories of autocracy. Some argue that local foundations are better placed to support such programs—but local foundations are often wary of programs that, on the surface, seem political and might alienate donors or draw the ire of lawmakers. The result is a sort of Spiderman meme in which no one takes initiative.

Who should fund international exchange opportunities for local democracy activists? Spiderman decides.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville described the importance of voluntary associations—civil society—to political life in the United States. Edmund Burke called these “little platoons” which encouraged civic pride and activism. Today’s little platoons are essential to preserving democracy in the United States—the people powering their work should have more opportunities to learn from counterparts abroad.

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Dean Jackson is a contributing editor at Tech Policy Press and a senior fellow at the University of Pittsburgh’s Communications Technology Research Lab. He runs a newsletter, Unreal Birds, which you can subscribe to here.

These moves raise a recurring question: will voters punish President Trump for his democratic infringements? Those watching the administration’s norm-breaking up close often assume that the answer is yes—that Americans will ultimately check the administration’s autocratic moves at the polls.

Yet a wealth of comparative research shows that in polarized contexts, expecting voters to punish autocratic behavior is risky. In some instances, a small share of voters punish anti-democratic actions by staying home or crossing partisan lines. But most remain loyal to their political camp. Rather than betting on voters prioritizing democracy over entrenched ideological and political identities, opposition leaders should focus on reshaping the dominant political cleavage, by de-emphasizing existing lines of polarization and leaning into the issues that make the incumbent vulnerable.

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Blame Polarization

The problem is not that American voters do not care about democracy. Polls have shown again and again that most support democratic norms. For example, Gallup survey data shows that eight in ten U.S. adults reject the use of political violence, and the same fraction agree that elected leaders should compromise with their political opponents to get things done. About two-thirds “agree” or “strongly agree” that democracy is the best form of government. While not overwhelming, this share is large enough that—if voters oriented their political choices accordingly—it would be difficult for openly anti-democratic candidates to consolidate power. The same is true in many other countries. Across the Americas, for example, voters recognize common democratic transgressions, such as packing the courts with loyalists, and they generally disapprove.

So why do voters fail to punish leaders who undermine democracy? The answer lies in how partisan identities shape political behavior. In a backsliding democracy, people who voted for the incumbent face a choice: stick with the government that is eroding democracy but best represents your political identity and preferences, or vote for an opposition that claims to be more democratic but likely stands for values and policies you may not agree with.

When social and political cleavages run deep, most voters stick with their political camp. For example, in survey experiments conducted across Turkey, Venezuela, and the United States, even voters who recognized that their “side” had committed democratic violations chose co-partisans over opposition candidates running on a pro-democracy platform. Left-leaning voters in Venezuela, for instance, were reluctant to punish Hugo Chavez’ anti-democratic behavior if doing so meant voting for a right-wing candidate. Another study focused on the 2020 Polish presidential election found a similar pattern: citizens disliked attacks on core electoral institutions, but this disapproval did not lead them to change their voting behavior. The same dynamic was evident during the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign, when President Biden’s and Vice President Harris’ pro-democracy appeals largely failed to resonate beyond those already supportive of the Democratic Party.

There are several explanations for this pattern. For one, researchers have found that when societies become deeply polarized over issues of identity, including questions related to immigration, ethnicity, and religion, it is particularly difficult for voters to cross political divides to punish anti-democratic politicians. There is also evidence suggesting that some voters may be motivated to stick with anti-democratic incumbents if they believe they will see economic gains.

Adding to the problem is that polarization leads people to assume the worst about the “other side”: if they think their opponents will also break democratic norms, they are more likely to accept and defend anti-democratic behavior from their own political coalition.

Finally, some voters may choose not to withdraw their support from a norm-breaking incumbent because they view anti-pluralistic actions as consistent with their idea of democracy. For example, they may view efforts to politicize the state bureaucracy or judiciary as an attempt by a legitimately elected leader to crack down on an unaccountable, elite-dominated “deep state” and defend the will of the people. One study of Polish citizen attitudes, for instance, found that parts of the Polish electorate are only weakly committed to liberal democratic norms and espoused more majoritarian or law-and-order understandings of democracy. They were, as a result, less concerned by candidates who threatened elements of liberal democracy.

Implications for Defending Democracy

If anti-democratic behavior by incumbents rarely drives voters to back the opposition, what does?

Comparative evidence suggests that incumbents who challenge democratic norms can and do lose at the polls, yet only under specific conditions, and often for reasons other than their autocratic behavior.

One such condition is blatant overreach. When incumbents launch clear and dramatic attacks on elections or other core democratic institutions, backlash becomes more likely. The 2019 Istanbul mayoral rerun election illustrates this dynamic. When the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) ordered a repeat of the race it had narrowly lost, many voters saw the decision as a direct abuse of the party’s control over electoral administration. In the rerun, the AKP suffered its biggest electoral defeat in almost two decades. One study found that the AKP lost in large part because political moderates moved away from the AKP, some AKP supporters stayed home, and opposition turnout increased. This episode suggests that clear and dramatic norm violations can produce backlash.

The problem is that democratic erosion usually unfolds more incrementally, through transgressions that fail to generate a broad voter response. Even sudden shocks tend to fade quickly. After the January 6 insurrection, for example, Gallup data showed that the Republican party lost around 11 percent of its support. Yet even this modest decline evaporated within weeks, and by February 2021, the party already stood at 93 percent of its pre-election support. Any drop in support for Trump had disappeared entirely within less than five months. In sum, concerns about executive overreach have to be front-of-mind for key swing constituencies when they go to the polls, which is often not the case.

Besides blatant authoritarian overreach, another factor that causes voters to turn against autocratic incumbents are unpopular policies or poor economic outcomes. For instance, after India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party lost its parliamentary majority in 2024, many voters cited high inflation, unemployment, and falling income as key reasons for withdrawing their support. In Turkey’s 2024 municipal elections, the AKP suffered significant electoral losses in cities due to the government’s perceived economic mismanagement.

Incumbents may of course try to avert this risk by misrepresenting the state of the economy or shifting public discourse to other, more polarizing issues. Opposition party strategy therefore also matters. Opposition parties have been most successful at defeating autocratic incumbents when they have turned out more people than the ruling party, often by mobilizing previous non-voters while making government supporters less eager to vote. For instance, in the 2023 Polish parliamentary elections, the opposition won over few supporters of the ruling party but succeeded in generating record turnout, and 64 percent of voters who had not voted in the previous election opted for the opposition coalition.

The Polish case underscores another lesson: particularly in the early phases of democratic erosion, opposition parties are considerably more successful at defeating autocratizing incumbents when they form electoral coalitions, especially those that are ideologically diverse. Jennifer McCoy and Ben Feldman find that opposition parties that form coalitions are victorious in 50 percent of elections, compared to 23 percent of elections if no alliance is formed.

These coalitions matter because they aggregate votes. But they also help reshape the dominant political cleavage in ways that cut into the incumbent’s support base. Coalitions succeed not by persuading voters to abandon their own political camp for the sake of democracy, but by forming new political camps around an issue that the incumbent government is vulnerable on, such as corruption and personal enrichment, or rising cost of living.

The U.S. two-party system makes a Polish-style electoral alliance difficult, even as it reduces the risk of opposition fragmentation. But the broader lessons still hold. First, in a polarized society, democracy defenders cannot rely on the majority of voters prioritizing democratic norms over partisan allegiances. They have to offer a clear alternative cleavage that resonates more strongly than abstract appeals to democratic decline, and pour their efforts into making that cleavage politically salient to many voters. They also need to prioritize mobilizing new or disengaged voters, including by making the case that elections do matter to their lives.

Finally, defenders of democracy have to build coalitions across the cultural and identity lines that underpin the autocratic government. In a two-party context, this may mean elevating ideologically and culturally diverse candidates and voices to expand the opposition party’s reach. The goal is to shift the political choices available, rather than hoping that democratic values eventually trump partisanship.

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Saskia Brechenmacher is a Senior Fellow in the Democracy, Conflict and Governance program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her research focuses on gender, democratic erosion, and civic mobilization in the United States and globally.

From Good Intentions to Losing Hope

Growing up in a struggling Zimbabwe, I saw the U.S. as a global force that carried the heavy responsibility of helping the world take better care of its people. I didn’t always agree with the methods, but I usually supported the intentions. I remember being in college in Zimbabwe after the 2002 presidential elections, when the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party lost to President Robert Mugabe and his ruling party cronies amidst widespread allegations of rigging. We daydreamed—naively, of course—that the U.S. might come to the aid of Zimbabweans and free us from Mugabe’s grip.

That we entertained such an idea now feels absurd, but it reflects how we saw the U.S.—both its people and its government: powerful, righteous, and capable of helping vulnerable people defend their basic freedoms.

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But now, from an African vantage point, Trump’s actions—the deportation of undocumented immigrants, punitive tariffs on myriad countries, tearing up treaties he views as burdensome, and the complete dissolution of USAID and international aid—make clear that we’ve entered a new era in which the U.S. no longer cares to shoulder global struggles, but instead claims to focus on securing its own peace and prosperity.

For African democracy champions and activists who once looked to the U.S. for help against authoritarian leaders, this shift is profound. For me and my compatriots, any lingering hope that the U.S. might intervene to save Zimbabweans from a 45-year one-party state has evaporated.

The changes have been dramatic enough that even my uncle Shepherd, in rural Muchenje, divorced from most international news, has asked whether USAID programs—the ones that saved him from starvation during the 2008 food crisis—will continue. These fears are widespread across a continent heavily dependent on U.S. funding for health care and humanitarian aid. Most HIV/AIDS programs in Africa, for example, have historically relied on U.S. support. So when the U.S. cuts aid, it feels like an attack on not only African governments, but on African people.

Emboldening Africa’s Autocrats

Africa’s less-than-democratic governments have seized the moment. Many of Africa’s current leaders—corrupt, unaccountable, and focused on enriching themselves—have long resented U.S. pressure for good governance. Now, with Washington appearing to retreat, they are emboldened. Trump’s tariffs and aid cuts have become a convenient shield for leaders eager to blame every economic failure on the U.S., while looting even more from their own people.

Meanwhile, many Africans struggle to see through the veil of pan-African rhetoric that our leaders deploy to mask their own failures. Those leaders convince people that foreign powers are plotting recolonization, while they themselves accumulate wealth with impunity.

Trump’s erratic policies have made that job easier. Despots paint the U.S. as a hostile, destabilizing force—an image that’s steadily gaining traction. China now appears to many in Africa as a more sensible partner, despite its destructive and often illegal resource extraction practices that devastate environments and communities across the continent, especially in places like Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Entire villages are uprooted, water sources are poisoned, and vast stretches of land are degraded—all under a “Look East” policy born from broken relations with the U.S.

Few countries have felt the sharper edge of Trump’s approach as directly as South Africa. I’ve lived here since 2007, escaping Zimbabwe’s economic collapse for steady employment, and I’ve watched the relationship deteriorate rapidly. Trump has accused the South African government of land seizures and attacks on white farmers, even resettling some in the U.S. under the auspices of calling them refugees.

This rhetoric and action has sparked intense anti-U.S. sentiment. South Africans are now fiercely defending their government—not because they love it or because the government is delivering real results, but because they see Trump’s claims as false and inflammatory, an attempt to stir up racial tensions. These past few months have shifted South African perceptions of America dramatically. It’s unclear how easily South Africans will forget, especially with the U.S. still accepting white farmers and with the Trump Administration attempting to exclude South Africa from the G20.

Differentiating Americans from Their Government

But in this moment, another challenge has emerged, one that many Africans wrestle with in the Trump era: how to differentiate between the actions of the U.S. government and the views of the American people. On social media, where the loudest and most extreme voices dominate, it is easy for Africans to mistake Trump’s rhetoric—or that of his most hard-line supporters—as representative of all Americans. This projection is understandable, but often inaccurate.

Fortunately, most Africans know better. We have lived through enough shifts in U.S. foreign policy to understand that the tone and priorities of Washington swing dramatically depending on who occupies the White House. And we know that beyond government-to-government relations, many Americans—scholars, doctors, activists, church groups, philanthropists, students—continue working with African communities out of genuine solidarity and empathy.

Moreover, American cultural influence remains deeply woven into the fabric of African life. In our homes, we still watch American movies and reality TV shows, dance to American music, and follow American celebrities who visit the continent, even as political tensions rise. CNN and other American outlets shape our understanding of global events. Young Africans still dream of scholarships to Harvard, of acting careers in Hollywood, of becoming the next international music star like Tyla. These aspirations endure regardless of who is in power in Washington.

No other global power—certainly not China or Russia—exerts such cultural pull, partly because language and cultural barriers make it hard for their influence to take root in the same way. And through NGOs like World Vision, Amnesty International, and CARE, Americans continue to impact lives across Africa, even as U.S. government aid is cut. Yet these NGOs now face greater scrutiny in countries like Zimbabwe, where paranoid governments view them as tools of Western regime change, hindering the life-saving work they are here to do.

I hope the American people know this: despite our frustrations with your government, most Africans do not confuse Trump’s policies with America’s longstanding values. We recognize the difference. The U.S. government may be stepping back, but the American people have not disappeared from Africa’s story. We see the Americans who risk their lives delivering aid in dangerous corners of the continent. We feel the warmth and generosity that has long shaped people-to-people relations between our continents. That enduring connection is a reminder—to both continents—that political rupture need not become permanent. Many Africans are simply waiting—hoping—that when the Trump era ends, a new U.S. government will rebuild the partnerships that his administration has strained.

A Reckoning for the Continent

If Trump’s America First posture has made anything clear, it is that Africa can no longer reliably count on the U.S. It. is taking a step back from providing HIV/AIDS treatment in countries like Tanzania and Uganda, threatening to cut similar support to South Africa for political reasons, and shirking support to prevent famine in Sudan.

These are potentially devastating cuts, but this moment demands a different response from African leaders: they should treat the U.S. retreat as a wake-up call. If the U.S. is no longer willing to shoulder global responsibilities, then African governments must show—through governance, transparency, and genuine service to their citizens—that they can. America First may be an American policy, but its ripple effects demand an African reckoning.

For decades, our leaders have claimed the language of nationalism without delivering real results to their people. If Trump’s foreign policy has inadvertently revealed anything to our continent, it is that African leaders can no longer hide behind U.S. support while not delivering for their own citizens. The future of the continent depends less on the U.S. posture, and far more on Africans’ willingness to confront our own failures and chart a path that genuinely serves our citizens.

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Themba Mzingwane (@Mzithemba) is a Zimbabwean national who has lived in South Africa for the last 16 years. He is originally from the rural village of Chikawa. Themba has been published in the Huffington Post as well as the Daily Vox and other South African and Zimbabwean outlets.

The reason building coalitions in the United States is so difficult right now is that we are more politically polarized than at any time since the onset of the Civil War. But this political fragmentation plays right into the hands of would-be authoritarians. How can we overcome this polarization and build a broad-based coalition to protect democracy? We offer three lessons that we’ve identified from other countries on how to build coalitions here at home: (1) unite early; (2) be brave and decisive; and (3) choose a big tent.

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Turkey: Unite Early

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won power in Turkey almost 23 years ago, when many viewed him as a reformer. Yet over time, his party grew more powerful, and Erdogan turned to more authoritarian tactics, such as banning public protests and arresting key opposition leaders. Although the pro-democracy opposition has been relentless in pushing back on Erdogan’s burgeoning authoritarianism, he remains in power. What has the opposition gotten wrong? They were initially splintered and waited too long to unify.

Turkey, like the United States, is deeply polarized. Turks of all political persuasions live in echo chambers, leading them to maintain social distance from and distrust individuals who disagree with them politically, which creates a dangerous opportunity for populist and authoritarian leaders like Erdogan to push their extreme agenda. This polarization left the Turkish opposition deeply splintered—divided between left-wing, right-wing, and pro-Kurdish parties. Erdogan himself accelerated this polarization by chipping away at Turkey’s secular underpinnings, championing Islamic values that some elements of Turkish society had long shunned, and alienating religious minorities.

Ironically, it has been Erdogan’s push for more power that has helped unite the opposition. In 2017, he championed constitutional reforms that transformed Turkish democracy from a century-old parliamentary system to a presidential system, and then used his newfound powers to abolish a host of laws, regulations, and institutions. Then in 2018, Erdogan’s ruling coalition proceeded to pass a new electoral law that permitted alliances between political parties—a reform designed to further cement his power. However, a month before the 2018 parliamentary elections, the opposition co-opted the new law and built a bigger electoral tent when four wildly divergent Turkish parties came together to run on a unified slate called the National Alliance.

Although the National Alliance energized millions of pro-democracy voters and made significant parliamentary gains, it still lost to Erdogan’s party. While the Turkish opposition is still innovating, waiting 16 years after Erdogan’s initial election to mount a cross-partisan coalition put them at a huge disadvantage. That gave Erdogan a decade and a half to consolidate power and allowed Erdogan to take advantage of political and social cleavages among the opposition, making it incredibly difficult for them to come together and find common ground.

The lesson is clear: civil society must organize early. In both Turkey and the United States, democratic backsliding started slowly, but has accelerated over time. According to Freedom House, the United States has been in democratic decline for at least 15 years, but it is only now, at a moment of acute and rapid democratic backsliding that people are belatedly recognizing the very precarious predicament the United States is in. California’s efforts to counter Texas’ mid-census partisan gerrymandering is an example of the importance of acting early and decisively; while retaliatory redistricting could start a dangerous race to the bottom, Turkey’s experience shows that if pro-democracy actors wait for one side to tilt the playing field too far in any one direction, it is incredibly difficult to regain ground.

South Korea: Be Brave and Decisive

On December 3, 2024, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol unexpectedly declared martial law because of so-called “anti-state” activities on the part of the opposition party.

The invocation of martial law brought back painful memories for South Koreans, who remember what it was like to live under military rule. As a result, the response to Yoon’s imposition of martial law was swift, decisive, and thorough. Within two hours of Yoon’s declaration, 190 of the 300 members of the South Korean National Assembly, including members of Yoon’s own political party, unanimously voted to nullify the imposition of martial law. This is all the more impressive considering that in order to access the National Assembly building, which had been blocked per Yoon’s decree, legislators had to scale fences, climb walls, and face off with special forces troops in combat uniforms. The troops supposedly had instructions to arrest legislators and prevent them from reaching a quorum.

By the following morning, protestors descended on the National Assembly and Gwanghwamun Square, near the Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul, and called for Yoon’s impeachment or resignation, recognizing that the end of martial law was insufficient to protect Korean democracy. By December 5, several unions called for general strikes until Yoon was removed from office. Spurred on by public sentiment, 10 days later the National Assembly impeached Yoon and removed him from office—a decision that was finalized in April 2025 by a unanimous Constitutional Court decision. Crucially, about a dozen members of Yoon’s ruling party joined the opposition in voting in favor of impeachment.

South Korea’s relatively recent experience with military rule and the painful memories that people still hold helped spur legislators and protestors to take dramatic, decisive, and brave actions. Moreover, recent South Korean protest movements—including when widespread public dissent led to the impeachment of another South Korean president, Park Guen-Hye, in 2016—gave pro-democracy South Koreans muscle memory to reactivate. For coalitions in the United States to be successful in this moment, we need to rediscover our own muscle memory gained from the collective action that defined much of the 20th century, including the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, and the fight for LGBTQ+ rights.

Brazil: Build A Big Tent

Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing politician and defender of Brazil’s 20th century military dictatorship, was sworn in as Brazil’s president in January 2019. Not long after assuming office, Bolsonaro started verbally attacking democratic institutions—trying to intimidate Supreme Court justices, claiming he wouldn’t follow the Court’s orders, and threatening to cancel the 2022 elections. In response to these attacks, former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who had been convicted and jailed on corruption charges, launched an electoral campaign to reclaim the office. Lula’s and Bolsonaro’s messages could not have been more different. Bolsonaro spent his tenure polarizing the country by exploiting culture issues and convincing the electorate that minority groups were trampling on the rights of the so-called “good citizens.” Lula, meanwhile, espoused a message of hope and a willingness to engage in consensus building.

Lula narrowly won the 2022 presidential election, in part because he established a large and diverse coalition, which included far left, center left, and center right political parties. Moreover, he won over many moderates, who otherwise may not have voted for him, in part by naming Geraldo Alckmin, a center-right leader whom Lula had defeated in the 2006 presidential election, as his running mate. Lula’s choice to name Alckmin as his running mate is reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln’s decision to assemble a “team of rivals” in his attempt to reconcile political factions in the midst of the U.S. Civil War. Brazil—and America’s own history—teaches us that having political purity tests is a mistake. You need a big tent.

The people and coalitions under that big tent must be trained and prepared to deal with volatile situations, such as when Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, or when Bonsonaro’s supporters ransacked the Brazilian National Congress building and presidential offices on January 8, 2023, refusing to accept that Bolsonaro had lost the election. That means U.S. civil society needs to do things it hasn’t thought about in a generation: increase physical and online security for organizations and their staff; give members of pro-democracy coalitions deescalation training should they find themselves in volatile situations; and form meaningful alliances with law enforcement. For many groups such alliances can be fraught, given historical and current tensions between communities and law enforcement, but they can limit the potential for political violence and increase the possibility that law enforcement will provide support in the event it’s needed.

The examples of Turkey, South Korea, and Brazil highlight some of the key characteristics of successful coalitions, at a time when we in the United States are trying to build stronger alliances to protect democracy. Despite the current level of polarization, there is some data to suggest that a diverse, broad coalition is beginning to emerge, as evidenced by the increased size and geographic spread of protests over the last eight years. Building the big tent that this moment in American history requires means we need to not only learn the lessons of our past, but also internalize the lessons of the present from other countries: get out of our echo chambers, unite quickly, be brave and decisive, and broaden the coalition.

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Debra Perlin is Vice President for Policy and Donald K. Sherman is Executive Director and Chief Counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization focused on building an ethical, accountable, and transparent democracy.

The Trump Administration is by no means the first or only government to deploy authoritarian tactics. However, the United States’ outsized global influence has enabled President Trump to popularize existing methods and model new approaches for the autocratically-inclined to integrate into their repertoire. Across both his terms, we find numerous instances of world leaders strategically utilizing President Trump’s language or mimicking his techniques to advance their own interests. Though President Trump’s direct involvement in these cases varies, many examples suggest that the president and his allies are not simply emboldening the world’s aspiring autocrats, they are enabling them.

Exporting the Trump Dictionary

Much of President Trump’s global influence flows from his rhetoric, with foreign leaders increasingly borrowing his language to drive populist support and stifle criticism. As his rhetoric has shifted to respond to new concerns within his base, so too have other leaders’ attempts to mirror it.

President Trump’s popularization of the phrases “Make America Great Again,” “America First,” and “fake news” quickly led them to be embraced by other world leaders. Building on President Trump’s ability to amass popular support through “MAGA,” leaders have emphasized placing their countries’ needs first, promising to make their own countries “great again.” Earlier this year, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke of how he has utilized the slogan “Make India Great Again,” or MIGA, noting, “one thing that I deeply appreciate and I learned from President Trump is that he keeps the national interest supreme…and like him, I also keep the national interest of India at the top of everything else.” In Japan, the country’s far-right Sanseito party ran on a “Japanese first” campaign that skyrocketed their presence in parliament from one seat to 15 following elections in July. The party’s leader,Sohei Kamiya, stated that “Trump policies are for protecting U.S. national interest and are good examples that Japan should follow.”

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Similarly, President Trump’s dismissal of unfavorable media coverage as “fake news” has become an increasingly popular turn of phrase for authoritarian-leaning leaders seeking to control domestic narratives. In the Philippines, former President Rodrigo Duterte often disparaged independent media outlets as “fake news,” most prominently lashing out against Rappler in 2018 for being a “fake news outlet” and “throwing trash and shit all along“ after the outlet published reports critical of his government. That same year, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni dismissed reports that his political rival, Bobi Wine, was tortured by saying that the allegations were “fake news.” Reportedly to President Trump’s delight, some governments have also passed “fake news” laws, allegedly intended to prohibit the spread of “false information,” but in practice used to restrict critical discourse. In July, Kyrgyzstan became the latest country to pass such legislation, which prescribes fines for disseminating false information and continues a pattern of authorities attempting to silence the press.

President Trump’s newer rhetoric is likewise being mimicked by foreign leaders. In his current term, the president has set his sights on dismantling the “woke” agenda, a term used to describe progressive policies and values he and his acolytes find objectionable, such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). As the president once proclaimed, “[O]ur country will be ‘woke’ no longer.”

This promotion of an “anti-woke” movement has already inspired other politicians hoping to replicate President Trump’s electoral success in their own countries, or curry favor with the American administration. Argentine President Javier Milei has leaned into an anti-woke narrative, railing against “sick wokeism” in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year. His efforts to align himself with the Trump Administration worked, helping him secure the moniker of President Trump’s “favorite president” and a $20B bailout from the United States that had been predicated on President Milei’s party’s success in legislative elections.

In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has aligned itself with the Trump Administration and its priorities. After meetings with U.S. officials, Beatrix von Storch, Deputy Chair of the AfD, commented that the AfD and the Trump Administration share various viewpoints, such as being “against woke culture.” The AfD has reportedly maintained regular engagement with the Trump Administration and its allies, with recent media reports suggesting the party accepted an invitation from members of the House of Representatives for meetings in Washington in December.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Increasingly, the Trump echo chamber has moved beyond rhetoric and into action, at times resulting in devastating consequences. For instance, President Trump has repeatedly made allegations of election fraud, most famously following the 2020 U.S. presidential election and more recently after the November 2025 off-cycle polls. In a strikingly similar series of events, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro claimed that his opponent, current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, could only win the 2022 election through fraud. Echoing the January 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol, Bolsonaro’s supporters attacked the country’s presidential palace, Congress, and Supreme Court on January 8, 2023, following his defeat.

Elsewhere, political parties are alleging fraud in elections to diminish public confidence in the electoral process or outcomes they deem unfavorable. Peru’s right-wing presidential candidate, Keiko Fujimori, claimed that there were “signs of fraud” in the 2021 elections, asserting, without evidence, that there was a “clear intention to boycott the popular will.” Six weeks after the presidential election and following Fujimori’s attempts to challenge the results in court, her opponent, Pedro Castillo, was declared the winner. As Honduras neared elections in November 2025, both the incumbent party and opposition leveled fraud charges against each other. President Trump added fuel to these claims by making his own, alleging officials were “trying to change the results.” These allegations are gaining traction with some voters, who after more than a week are still awaiting official results.

Among the earliest and most surprising moves of President Trump’s second term was the attempt to end birthright citizenship. Months after the president’s initial attempt in the U.S., far-right Chilean presidential candidate José Antonio Kast, who ran on an anti-migrant campaign, stated that he would look into that country’s birthright citizenship regulations and proposed that children obtain the nationality of their parents at birth. Kast also recently encouraged migrants to leave willingly or face the threat of expulsion, a proposal that resembles the Trump Administration’s “self-deportation” policy.

One of the most controversial actions in President Trump’s second term has been the move to target perceived critics under the guise of tackling “waste, fraud, and abuse” in government expenditure. Under the purported policy, the administration dismantled the U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID) and canceled more than 5,000 foreign assistance programs, many of which it characterized as “antithetical to American values.” To further justify these terminations, the President signed an executive order that called for investigations into government-funded civil society organizations, claiming they spent funds on “grants with highly political overtones.”

Various foreign governments welcomed USAID’s closure, using it as an opportunity to validate their previous claims that the Agency funded “political” organizations in their countries through its support to independent media and civil society organizations promoting accountability. For example, Trump ally President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador praised the decision, claiming that “while marketed as support for development, democracy, and human rights, the majority of [USAID] funds [were] funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements.” Earlier this year, Hungarian politician András László noted on social media that “[t]he Hungarian government has decided to closely follow the politically corrupt USAID funding scandal revealed by DOGE and Elon Musk.” In March 2025, László met with Peter Marocco, then a Trump administration official closely involved with USAID’s demise, after Marocco had terminated all USAID contracts in Hungary. Marocco reportedly requested information on previous USAID programs operating in the country.

Other foreign governments used the downfall of USAID to justify crackdowns on perceived critics. In February 2025, Serbian police raided the offices of four civil society organizations, three of which previously received USAID funding, even though the police did not have warrants. Rationalizing the raids, Serbian officials clung to the idea that USAID was a “criminal organization,” suggesting its grant recipients may have been involved in money laundering. The state prosecutor who called for the raids reportedly “requested assistance from the U.S. Justice Department” in its investigation, though it is unclear if that support was granted.

President Trump’s second term may prove to be an inflection point for global democracy. From dismissing “fake news” to stoking accusations of election fraud, the president has normalized language and approaches that help likeminded leaders accelerate democratic erosion and utilize authoritarian tactics in their own countries. Reversing this trend will require engaged citizens and civil society organizations to organize diverse coalitions to counter authoritarian learning with democratic learning, coordinating across borders, and demonstrating that democracy can still deliver.

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Diane Furstenau is a democracy and human rights specialist, who has been managing civil society and advocacy support programs for over a decade. Diane previously served as a Senior Program Manager covering Freedom House’s democracy, rights, and governance programs in Africa.

Farha Tahir is principal at FT Global Advisors, a consulting practice specializing in strategy development for democracy and human rights organizations. She has worked in roles supporting democracy and human rights in think tanks, nonprofits, philanthropy, and government.

Over the past five years, I’ve worked with human rights defenders (HRDs) around the globe, helping to ensure their safety, accountability for crimes against them, and continuing resources for their vital work. I’ve worked with defenders in Central America, West Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia who face retaliation for their efforts to promote and defend fundamental rights and freedoms. As I walked home from a recent community meeting, where we talked about the risks of documenting ICE raids in my Boston-area neighborhood, I reflected on similarities between my recent conversations with U.S. activists and past exchanges with HRDs around the world. As civic space shrinks within the United States, human rights work becomes more dangerous and more closely resembles hostile environments in closed political contexts.

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Protection Gaps For U.S. Defenders

The United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Defenders defines an HRD as “individuals or groups who act to promote, protect or strive for the protection and realization of human rights and fundamental freedoms through peaceful means.” Although virtually everyone I know engages on issues of democratic resiliency, community protection, and human rights within the United States meets the UN definition of a HRD, hardly anyone I know identifies that way. And while there has been significant discussion about threats to the organized non-profit sector, there has been comparatively less attention paid to threats against specific rights defenders in the United States, particularly those operating at the local level, outside of official, organizational structures.

So far, institutions are not meeting the moment and stepping up to support American HRDs with the urgency and resources the current moment demands. At least one major funder has announced that it will pre-emptively cease funding U.S.-based non-profits due to political risk, raising concerns that other donors, including those more specifically focused on support to at-risk activists, may follow suit. Activists have also called out gaps between funders’ stated commitments to protection and their actual investments to protect HRDs, particularly as it relates to cross-border work in support of migrant justice.

Of course, it is not unsurprising that HRD protection is under-resourced in the United States. HRD protection networks are under-resourced globally. Prior to the second Trump administration, I spent many hours with donor country representatives and philanthropic leaders urging increased budget allocations for HRD protection. I spent even more time with policy makers and implementers inside and outside of the United States urging a shift from silo-ed approaches toward HRD protection and toward holistic strategies to integrate HRD protection within priority areas, including climate justice, anti-corruption, migration, and good governance.

Alongside many dedicated and talented colleagues, I advocated for Congress to pass the Human Rights Defenders Protection Act, which would have elevated HRD protection to a place of strategic national security importance. In all of these exchanges, colleagues and I emphasized that meaningful progress on any human rights objective is not possible without resourcing and protecting those on the front lines of critical battles for a just, inclusive, and peaceful society.

While networks and resources to support HRDs in the United States are growing, most American civil society organizations in this space focus on influencing national actors and miss opportunities to leverage the power of international solidarity and protection networks. For example, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders regularly releases statements and reports highlighting individual cases of HRDs under threat, in an effort to increase positive diplomatic pressure—but American organizations rarely engage this mechanism. At the same time, the international community—including UN member states that have traditionally served as champions of human rights issues broadly and of individual HRDs—has been largely silent regarding the rapidly deteriorating state of human rights in the United States.

What we’ve learned from global experience is that attacks on individual HRDs often have a chilling effect on populations more broadly, causing people to self-censor and turn a blind eye to eroding rights. HRDs often serve as leaders and connectors within their communities—if they are forced to halt their work due to threats or intimidation, the community as a whole suffers. The Business and Human Rights Center, among other organizations, have extensively documented the knock-on effects of how attacks on individual HRDs stymie advocacy efforts and set back progress on broader human rights campaigns. Causes as varied as environmental justice, sustainable development, countering corruption, and transparent and accountable systems of government suffer the consequences - to the detriment of us all.

Steps To Strengthen Protection

Under the second Trump administration, human rights work in the United States has become more dangerous, and risks to individual defenders are only likely to increase. Donors, civil society organizations, and HRDs themselves should take several steps to strengthen protections:

• Embrace the Terminology: Americans who fit the HRD description should consider using that label. Many of the HRDs I’ve worked with outside of the United States did not originally self-identify as HRDs, choosing instead to describe themselves as activists, humanitarians, journalists, peace-builders, or even engaged community members. But I’ve spoken with many individuals who have come to closely identify with the label, finding comfort in the connection it gives them to others around the world, and the ability to contextualize their own struggles within a global movement for human rights. Identification as a HRD can also confer legitimacy, increase positive visibility, and strengthen connections between at-risk defenders and protection mechanisms.

• Go Global: Successful HRD protection campaigns frequently involve both domestic and international advocacy. International advocates are often able to speak more freely than their domestic counterparts. Integration of HRD protection into foreign policy agendas also keeps individual cases top-of-mind for domestic policy makers, who face pressure from local and global interlocutors. Knowledge that the world is watching can help increase pressure for better treatment for HRDs in detention, respect for due process, and protection for a HRDs’ family and friends. As U.S. national institutions become less responsive and accountable to at-risk defenders, U.S. civil society should explore advocacy options at the multilateral and international level. Brilliant advocates have laid a strong foundation via engagement with the Inter-American Human Rights Commission on issues of migrant justice, and with the Universal Periodic Review process at the UN Human Rights Council. Now is the time to build on these tactics. Could international diplomatic observers attend hearings and trials of Americans facing national security-related charges for acts of peaceful protest? What signal would it send for UN Special Rapporteurs engaged on HRD protection to request a fact-finding mission to the United States? How can activists engage civil society partners outside of the United States in solidarity on domestic human rights issues?

• Embrace Flexibility: HRDs often emphasize the need for flexible, responsive funding mechanisms and the importance of collective protection mechanisms that go beyond legal, physical, and advocacy support for any one individual. This is particularly important for individuals acting outside the formal structure of a registered non-profit or organization. Indeed, Americans operating in loose community structures to document abuses by federal immigration authorities are facing some of the most pressing protection concerns. Funders should expand resources for domestic protection networks that already exist and work with local partners to co-design models of community protection. In addition to grant-making focused specifically on protection, funders can also integrate security assessments, digital safety, and legal audits into existing areas of programming, including migration, environmental justice, and reproductive and gender-affirming care.

• Beyond Funding: Budgets are tight, and HRDs are continuing their vital work with fewer resources. But meaningful support for HRDs is more than large-scale grant-making. Funders should consider how they can assist HRDs in the United States via connections to their global counterparts for peer learning, exchanges, and provision of respite and wellness resources. Funders who have decided to halt or significantly reduce operations in the United States should consider how to use their comparatively lower risk profile to speak out in support of HRDs.

Wherever they work, HRDs are part of a global movement in support of fundamental rights and freedoms. Ultimately, supporting HRD protection in the United States is important for both the durability of U.S. democracy and protection of international human rights norms.

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Sarah Gardiner is a human rights advocate focused on civic space and human rights within the context of countering terrorism. She has held leadership roles at Oxfam America, Front Line Defenders, and other organizations. She is a member of the Truman National Security Project.

Here are a few of our recent favorites:

• In Just Security, Naomi Roht-Arriaza asks whether the US is becoming a captured state, comparing recent developments to South Africa, El Salvador, Sri Lanka and Guatemala

• In Foreign Policy, Amanda Sloat looks at strategies for Europe to support democracy in the US

• In The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook, Scott Nakagawa examines the 2020 uprising in Belarus—what it achieved and lessons for other anti-aithoritarian movements

• In The New York Times, Andreas V. Georgiou, a former official in Greece, writes about what happens when a government manipulates data and the consequences for democracy

• Finally, for both humor and valuable lessons from the Philippines, check out Maria Ressa on The Daily Show

Insightful activists and analysts are adding to the body of knowledge every day, and we appreciate their work.

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