AEI Launches a New People-Powered Training Platform
Published on July 1, 2026
Democratizing training for nonviolent resistance
By Jamila Raqib and Alia Braley
At a time when democratic institutions are under attack, authoritarianism is resurgent, and communities around the world are confronting severe and overlapping crises, there is at least one reason for hope: people are organizing.
They are organizing in neighborhoods, workplaces and places of worship, experimenting with alternative ways of meeting their communities’ basic needs, mobilizing in demonstrations, and, in many cases, refusing to cooperate with oppressive systems.
The challenge people face today is not a lack of courage, creativity or commitment to the causes they care about. Across the globe, ordinary people continue to take extraordinary risks in their struggles for freedom and justice. The problem is that movements today face increasingly sophisticated opponents while often lacking access to the strategic knowledge and training necessary to meaningfully shift power.
Authoritarian governments, entrenched elites and other powerful actors are today employing digital surveillance, disinformation campaigns, institutional capture and forms of repression that are often harder to identify and counter than the blunt-force tactics of earlier eras. Meanwhile, many movements continue to rely heavily on improvisation and intuition. But even as experimentation and adaptation have always been central to movement learning, operating based on trial and error alone is not enough to counter the coordinated threats posed to freedom and justice in the world today.
How movements have learned from one another
The history of nonviolent struggle is, in many ways, the history of people learning from one another. Long before the internet, activists exchanged ideas through books, stories, trainings and personal networks. Mohandas Gandhi acknowledged learning from methods used in the U.S. colonial resistance and the Russian revolutions. In fact, noncooperation and collective action are so innate in human behavior that we can trace examples going back to ancient Egypt and earlier.
At the Albert Einstein Institution, we have spent more than four decades studying nonviolent resistance movements throughout history and around the world. Our organization was founded on the idea that effective nonviolent action depends on strategic thinking, itself based on a clear understanding of how power works in society, and that this knowledge can be built upon and shared. Many practitioners in this field describe having a “lightbulb moment,” where their understanding of how power operates in society fundamentally shifts in ways that help them become effective strategists of nonviolent struggle.
One of our most widely circulated publications, “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” which outlines this understanding of power, spread through informal activist networks long before social media made information-sharing faster and cheaper. Copies were carried across borders, translated by volunteers and reproduced in pocket-sized “smuggling” editions, sometimes with fake covers, finding their way into struggles from Indonesia to Serbia. In some countries, simply discussing these ideas was grounds for arrest.
In 2015, we learned of a group of young Angolans who had gathered to discuss the book and consider how they might apply it to their own society. The government treated even this act of collective learning as a threat: 17 people associated with the group were arrested and prosecuted. International media described them as “the book club that terrified the Angolan regime.”
Why would a discussion group provoke that kind of response? Because the ability of ordinary people to analyze power, develop strategy, and learn from one another can alter the trajectory of a political struggle — a fact recognized by both the activists and the regime that feared them.
The need to fill gaps in the educational infrastructure
The Angolan case also reveals something about movements today. Increasingly, struggles are not organized around a single charismatic leader or centralized organization. People are organizing through networks, affinity groups, local chapters and decentralized communities of practice. This has been enabled by the rapid evolution of information technologies, where digital networks have lowered the cost of coordinating and spreading knowledge that once required centralized hierarchies to manage.
This shift is both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity is that knowledge can now spread faster and more broadly than ever before. New insights about nonviolent resistance are being generated constantly, in communities around the world experimenting with new tools and methods, and among a growing number of researchers that are building a valuable body of evidence and case studies.
The challenge is that the educational infrastructure for movements has not kept pace. Much of this knowledge remains siloed: movement learning isn’t documented or shared adequately across regions and struggles, and academic findings rarely make their way into the spaces where movements actually train. The core existing literature on civil resistance can also seem overly-conceptual and be difficult for activists to apply. In-person and live online trainings are on offer by a handful of organizations including our own, but this support doesn’t scale to meet global demand. Also, in many contexts, such training is expensive, logistically difficult, or risky to bring in. As a result, movements frequently end up confronting problems that others have already grappled with, and lessons learned in one struggle may not reach the next.
The case for a people-powered training platform
In response to these changing realities, this month, we launched the People-Powered Training Platform: a new online learning platform designed to make education in nonviolent action accessible to anyone who wants to learn individually or lead a training in their community.
The platform offers free courses in video format on the fundamentals of civil resistance as well as deeper dives into topics like community wellness in movements and how to prepare for democratic transitions once the initial phase of a struggle ends. The platform is not simply a library of video material, but rather its purpose is to support group learning through facilitator guides and training materials that groups can use to learn together.
The most effective movement learning rarely happens through passive consumption of information. It happens when groups wrestle with ideas together, challenge assumptions, apply concepts to their own circumstances, and build a shared strategic understanding. That’s why every course includes group exercises designed to connect theory to practice, and encourages participants to think critically about their own movements, opponents, opportunities and challenges. We are trying to bridge a gap that has long existed in movement education: the distance between understanding a concept and knowing how to apply it.
The purpose of a “masterclass” for people-powered change
The platform is not intended to tell movements what to do. There is no universal blueprint for social change as every struggle unfolds within its own political, cultural and historical context, and effective strategy requires local knowledge, judgment and ownership. Activists are the experts on their own circumstances, and no online resource can replace local relationships or judgment. The goal is not to prescribe strategies or offer ready-made answers, but to expand access to tools, frameworks, historical examples and learning processes that help people make better decisions for themselves.
This reflects a broader vision of how knowledge should circulate within movements. We think of this platform not as a static educational product and more as an evolving commons for movement learning — a kind of “masterclass” model for people-powered change, where the field’s collective wisdom can be gathered, refined, shared and continuously expanded.
The courses launching today are only the beginning. Future additions will include case studies, research explainers, strategic planning tools and learning pathways focused on specific contexts, such as democracy defense and climate activism, built with contributions from practitioners, researchers and activists around the world.
An invitation to build together
If opponents are adapting, movements must be able to adapt, too. If new challenges emerge, new forms of learning need to emerge alongside them.
No platform, website or training program can replace the creativity, courage and local knowledge of the people organizing for change. But we hope that the People-Powered Training Platform becomes part of the infrastructure that helps movements learn from one another, think more strategically, and act more effectively together. Because while the challenges facing our societies are immense, so too is the capacity of ordinary people to meet them.
The platform is now freely available at training.aeinstein.org. We invite organizers, educators, researchers and activists everywhere to explore it, use it, critique it and help shape what comes next.