AEI’s Jamila Raqib Address at Amnesty International Conference in Boston

October 4, 2025
Speech Delivered by Jamila Raqib

Thank you for bringing us together for this important conversation at a time of such great urgency, when so much feels like it’s on the line.

It’s a strange thing to be here, at Amnesty International, talking about authoritarianism in the United States. Not because this country was ever a perfect democracy but because Americans are waking up to the fact that this latest assault on democracy, what we’ve been witnessing in recent months, is more aggressive and more dangerous.

The title of this panel is Know Your Rights, Defend Your Rights, which implies, rightly so, that in facing this crisis, knowing our rights isn’t going to be enough. And defending them is going to require more than a legal strategy or an electoral one -  showing up to vote every four years or two years.

Because we know that democracy is more than just our legal or electoral systems. It’s not just our courts or the constitution, or Congress. It’s all of these things. But it’s also us. All of us here and out there. Because when our formal systems are weakened or attacked, then we, the people, become the most powerful line of defense.

Much of my work over the past twenty years has been with groups in countries, usually far away, who were fighting dictatorships, occupations or carrying out struggles for human rights and climate justice, or to advance the rights of women and Indigenous groups.

Now, our work is finding an audience here at home from people who recognize that what we’re witnessing in our country follows an authoritarian playbook we’ve seen before - throughout history and around the world. And that we have a playbook too.

I want to spend the time I have to share some observations and insights from that anti-authoritarian playbook, one that has been distilled from centuries of what people have done to resist and defeat attacks on their communities and political systems, all without using violence.

The first point I’d like to make is that acting quickly matters.

Our study of coups and other authoritarian power grabs shows us that these violations are successful not because people support them but because people fail to act or take too long to act because they’re afraid or confused.

The authoritarians know this, that’s why they carry out their violations in ways that foster this sense of fear and confusion. It’s part of the reason that coups are carried out at night, so people wake up to a new reality they feel powerless to resist.

We saw this a few weeks ago when the administration tried to deport 76 children who came to the United States as unaccompanied minors from Guatemala. They did this at 3 in the morning on a holiday weekend, waking the children up and putting them on three planes, one of which took off, but which was forced to turn around after a judge temporarily blocked the deportation. It’s shocking and cruel, but again, it’s part of the strategy. Which means our strategy must be to resist passivity and confusion by having capacities and networks in place to act quickly.

The good news is that we are developing these networks, these rapid response capabilities. People are getting activated in every corner of our country. They recognize that what they do, or don’t do, in this moment, matters. They want to act. They feel a sense of urgency - we all do.

And this brings me to my second point. And that’s that acting quickly matters, but how we act also matters.

A lot of our global movements, when they’re faced with a crisis, often default to marches and rallies. Which are important - they communicate that people reject these policies. But it’s a real mistake to think that if enough of us go in the streets and stay there long enough, our success is inevitable. You may be familiar with the work of our colleague, Erica Chenoweth, whose work says that struggles that are able to mobilize 3.5% of the population are very likely to succeed. But some people have taken the 3.5 number to mean that all we need to do is get 12 million people in the streets and we can defeat authoritarianism.

But we’ve seen huge mobilizations globally that do little to change policies and systems. Numbers are important, but just as important is the quality of the participation.

Our movements need to be disciplined and well-trained. That means understanding the risks involved - how to withstand repression, the need for nonviolent discipline - to make sure people aren’t provoked into violence or other unwise behavior.

All this takes advance planning and preparation and training.

Effective action also means that we have to move beyond symbolic actions that show we reject these policies to methods that withdraw our cooperation and build alternative power. My colleague and mentor Gene Sharp developed a list of 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action.

The list includes the methods we associate and even equate with nonviolent action, like marches and rallies, but they also include social, political, and economic noncooperation, things like strikes and boycotts, refusal to assist government agents, and disguised disobedience in cases where the risk of open refusal is too high.

It also includes a category of methods known as nonviolent intervention, actions like alternative communications systems, and economic systems, mutual aid, guerilla theatre, and reverse strikes, which is one of my favorites - where instead of stopping work like in a regular strike, people do work that they’re not expected to do, or even paid to do, in order to bring attention to the government’s failure to address a need in the community. And sometimes they send a bill for the work.

The methods of noncooperation and intervention is where we should be focussing because this is where our movements can build power, not just to conduct resistance effectively or to disrupt, but also to transition to a more just system.

So how do we select actions and then sequence them as part of a larger strategy? This brings me to my third point:

We must understand our contexts.

Action that’s effective stems from an understanding of our local contexts. That means that before we jump into action, especially action that’s risky, we pause to understand our landscape and our opponents. It means asking questions like:

Who are the groups - what we would call the “pillars of support” - whose cooperation, obedience, and assistance is needed to carry out the harmful policies, and how vulnerable are each of them to persuasion? How vulnerable are they to social or economic pressure?

It means developing campaigns around the issues that are most important to our communities.

We’re talking today about defending democracy but for a lot of our communities, this isn’t a very compelling narrative. Our existing system has let too many people down. Democracy is also a bit too abstract as a concept.

Creating more compelling campaigns, campaigns that people will want to join, to give their time, their energy, their resources to, means that we need to translate the national level harm we’re seeing being systematically carried out and connect it to the lives of everyday Americans - their social values, their economic livelihoods, the health and wellness of their families and communities.

Because if we think of Gandhi’s Salt March or the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the issues that were selected were not the most important or the most severe issues that the society faced. They were ones that were concrete, representative of the wider injustice, they affected a lot of people and maybe most importantly, they targeted the weakest points of the opponent’s policies.

Which means they were achievable, and when they were achieved, they set the movement up for a success that shook people out of their perceived powerlessness, and built their confidence to make bigger demands.

So these are just a few insights I wanted to share in the context of this discussion, the need to act quickly and with urgency, to take action that draws from the large repertoire of diverse actions available to us, and to make sure our action stems from a good understanding of our landscape.

And I’ll just conclude by saying that ultimately, the need to build power is central to everything we do. And again, this is power not just in numbers but in capacity, alternative institutions, skills. Today people are organizing in decentralized groups: through their churches and places of worship, gardening and reading clubs, unions, and schools and professional groups and neighborhood associations. And they’re looking to carve out roles for themselves. These groups are pockets of power and they could be transformed into organizing hubs, if they were supported by a decentralized training infrastructure of resources that could help them design and carry out action, even if centralized leadership doesn't emerge or is disrupted.

And actually what’s needed, beyond dealing with this immediate crisis is something longer term: a civil resistance muscle - education and literacy about nonviolent action and movement work that is embedded in our public education and educational institutions. So that we can defend our rights, our communities, and our political systems not just in this moment, but in years to come. Because an engaged and informed citizenry is our best and most resilient forms of democratic defense.

In closing I’ll just say that it’s a moment of crisis but also a moment of opportunity. Movement building isn’t easy. I’m paraphrasing Dr. King when he said that there’s no neat row of buttons we can push to get the outcomes we want. There’s a rigor to this process that we simply can’t skip if we’re to have a chance of being successful against powerful and sophisticated opponents. But ultimately, what happens next is up to us, what we do or what we refuse to do, and that should offer grounds for real hope for all of us.

I’ve been really struck by what my fellow panelists have shared - not just about what people are facing but the courage and creativity and effectiveness they’re showing. It should remind us all that we’re not powerless in facing this crisis, and we’re not starting from zero.
There’s a lot of insight and information we can draw from not just to get inspired but to figure out what we ourselves can do.

 
And we need to document and celebrate these incremental successes because they build hope and hope in these circumstances isn’t just a nice idea, it’s a strategic necessity. I look forward to continuing the conversation.

-Jamila Raqib