This is a new kind of war, waged by a new kind of citizen.

The failure of the Russian forces to subdue Ukraine quickly has astonished experts, officials, and journalists worldwide. It shouldn’t. The Ukrainian resistance is just the latest example of the new attitudes and abilities of 21st century citizens.

While social media has been getting a lot of attention in this “TikTok War,” the real story is the growing determination and capacity of ordinary people. Around the world, ordinary people are fundamentally different from people of generations past. They have dramatically higher levels of education, far less deference to authority figures, and much greater facility with technology.

These trends have changed citizenship itself. We need to understand this shift so that societies, especially democratic ones, can figure out how to adapt, both in war and peace.

The war in Ukraine is instructive, in at least four ways.

First, citizens now have the ability to make their own media; Ukrainians, under attack, are mass-producing reality TV. Thanks to footage produced by thousands of people and viewed by millions, the war has a constantly unfolding cast of characters. Ukrainian farmers towing Russian vehicles, a soldier moonwalking in a field, people joyriding on a captured Russian tank, and a little girl singing “Let It Go” in a Kiev bomb shelter have become relatable, inspiring figures in the conflict. Seemingly every time Ukrainians have success on the battlefield, they upload videos of burned tanks and downed planes.

Perhaps most poignant are the videos of Russian POWs—young, hungry, and confused—being fed by their captors and allowed to call their mothers. These conversations, in which they tell their parents they are OK and aren’t sure why they ended up in a war, may be the best hope for affecting Russian public opinion. The Ukrainian hotline set up for Russians trying to get information on their loved ones on the front lines has also produced heartrending recordings. These videos expose the one thing Putin can’t easily hide: Russian deaths on the battlefield.

All that citizen-made media has been fuel for a second major trend of 21st century citizenship: crowdsourced community organizing.

Nonviolent protests have sprung up around the world, both on the internet and on the streets, including in Russia and in occupied Ukrainian cities. The capacity of citizens to make this civil disobedience visible has rallied millions of others to their cause. People are filming the crowds that slow Russian convoys, and mapping protests around the world in precise geo-located detail, so that others can join in.

This organizing happens rapidly and shows advanced collective thinking. People aren’t simply protesting the war, they are focusing on specific priorities and pressuring Western governments to move on them: singling out Russian oligarchs, denying SWIFT access to Russian banks, banning Russian oil, and shaming international corporations into halting their Russian operations. Community organizers call this “finding winnable issues.” Many of these economic sanctions are unprecedented, and it seems unlikely that Western governments and businesses would have taken all of these drastic steps if not for large-scale public pressure.

In addition to pressuring governments, many citizens are also sidestepping civil society institutions. They are supporting Ukrainians not just through traditional means like donating money to the Red Cross, but by using networks like AirBnB to send money directly to Ukrainian families. This is international aid without institutional intermediaries.

It isn’t just the aid that is do-it-yourself. The warfare is DIY, too.

The contributions of Ukrainian citizens to the war effort includes all generations: grandmothers making Molotov cocktails, mothers brandishing assault rifles, young couples getting married at the front, schoolchildren sewing camouflage nets.

Some of the combatants aren’t even in Ukraine: a small army of hackers is helping to disrupt Russian technologies, interfere with defense communications, and broadcast news about the war to Russian citizens. In an interview with Politico, Ukraine’s deputy digital minister Alex Bornyakov reported that there are 300,000 people worldwide contributing to these efforts.

“We don’t have a chain of command or any structure at all,” Bornyakov said. “So, [Russia] can’t fight it. It’s impossible to disrupt it or break it down. You can’t bomb it or cut off connections or take down a top person—because there is no top person.”

Of course, such warfare isn’t entirely new. For thousands of years ordinary people have taken up scythes and muskets against invading armies; for hundreds of years there have been propaganda campaigns; for decades people have been able to see in real time events happening on the other side of the world.

But the war in Ukraine is revealing how much things have advanced in the last 20 years: the full flowering of a gigantic global network of person-to-person connections; the blurring of the lines between professionals and amateurs; the ability of almost everyone to make their experiences visible and immediate to millions of other people.

Five years ago, the American writer and democracy advocate Eric Liu wrote that “We are in the midst of a profound global Great Push Back against concentrated, monopolized, hoarded power.” Today in Ukraine, we are witnessing not just the decentralization of power—along with knowledge, skill, and authority—but the ability of the “crowd” to wield those decentralized resources in coordinated ways.

The changes in citizen attitudes and capacities are not all positive. Just like previous generations, 21st century citizens can be selfish and unwilling to compromise, saddled with bias and racist assumptions, and fundamentally misinformed. There is no guarantee that the crowd will wield power in ways that are wise, equitable, or just.

But these dangers are unavoidable when people are empowered. And the best way to reckon with them is to seize the related opportunities that this change in citizenship creates for democracy.

We are already seeing what is possible when democratic governments support, inform, and collaborate with 21st century citizens. Countries like Colombia, Iceland, Taiwan, and Brazil have been leaders in democracy innovation: reforms and practices that strengthen relationships between people, give them a meaningful say in decisions, and support their volunteer efforts. Many of these ideas, like participatory budgeting and citizen’s assemblies, create situations where people can learn about an issue, talk with people who have different views, and make decisions together. (Some Ukrainian cities have also been hotbeds of this kind of democratic experimentation.) Others, like crowd-resourcing, inspire and coordinate volunteer efforts to solve public problems.

The desire of citizens to connect, be heard, and get things done seems universal. Even in Russia, the “demand for democratic input” in governance has been on the rise.

Governments should adapt to the shift in citizenship by explaining these potential democracy innovations to their citizens, offering different democracy options and working with citizens to implement them, and measuring their impacts.

Putin’s regime seems more like a criminal institution than a political or military one. And it still may be effective enough to win the war, because of the overwhelming Russian advantage in traditional military resources. But even if the Russian military is victorious on the battlefield, it seems unlikely that the Russians can occupy, let alone govern, Ukraine for long.

Whenever peace comes to Ukraine, and the rest of the world, we need to appreciate the new realities of what citizens want and can do. The greatest hope for democracy, justice, and peace is for leaders and institutions to interact more productively with the people they serve.

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Humorous protest is a very sophisticated—and even tricky—tool to deploy against authoritarian regimes. As Hannah Arendt wrote in On Violence: “The greatest enemy of authority … is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.” But laughter has political advantages as well as limitations, as I have discovered while studying its impact in Serbia and in my home country, Thailand.

Serbia offers a striking example of how humor can be used to resist an oppressive government. In the 1990s, this southeastern European nation faced numerous crises stemming from the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, including wars with newly independent neighboring countries, international sanctions, surging domestic crime rates, and the fearsome rule of Slobodan Milošević, the president of Serbia and, later, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Many civic groups took to the streets to challenge the rule of Milošević, who retained strong support among rural Serbians. A heavy NATO bombing campaign in 1999 and mounting international pressure had weakened Milošević’s authority.

Members of the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) or Red Shirt cheer for news report of the by-election at Lumpini park in Bangkok, Thailand, July 2010. About 200 UDD members took part in the gathering to show their unity and to defy the country’s security act. Photo by Apichart Weerawong/Associated Press.

But it took the subversive humor of the Otpor movement (the Serbian word for “resistance”) to finally oust Milošević. Otpor did satirical street theater, parodic protests, and carnivalesque events—all of which were fun and easy to participate in. One of their most famous street skits was “Beating of a Barrel.” In the middle of Belgrade’s busy pedestrian streets, activists placed an empty petrol barrel with an image of Milošević on it. They invited passersby to hit the barrel with a stick they provided. Soon people were lining up to beat the barrel to show their resentment toward the regime. These actions conveyed a critical message to the Serbian public: Milošević was not to be feared, he was no longer legitimate as a leader, and there was a political alternative to him.

As the confrontation escalated, Otpor ratcheted up the ridicule. When the regime baselessly accused Otpor of being a terrorist organization, the activists didn’t respond by defending themselves with words, but instead dressed up in theatrical military uniforms and paraded around toting toy rifles. The crews walked through the streets ignoring traffic signs. Afterward, they proclaimed ironically, “This is a terrorist act because we didn’t obey the traffic sign. This is the kind of terrorists we are.”

Otpor also organized rock concerts and parties (sometimes joined by celebrities) to encourage people across Serbia to imagine a different Serbia without wars, poverty, and political instability. In October 2000, the persistent nonviolent campaigns waged by Otpor and other opposition parties helped remove the weakened Milošević from power. Leading activists from Otpor continued their nonviolent crusades, transferring knowledge of nonviolent protest strategies to other movements in countries such as Ukraine, Georgia, Lebanon, Iran, the Maldives, Burma, and more recently Egypt.

A member of the UDD or Red Shirt puts makeup on her face as a dead person at Lumpini park in Bangkok, Thailand, July 2010. Photo by Apichart Weerawong/Associated Press.

A decade later, humorous tactics showed up in Thailand, an unlikely spot because it’s a place where anti-elite jokes and gossip are considered weapons of “the weak.” But in 2010, a loosely-organized movement emerged that used humor to shake up a society that has been politically and economically dominated by the monarchy, army, and aristocratic elites for decades. Since the early 2000s, an alternative, democratic political party has gained increasing support. It was led by Thaksin Shinawatra, a Thai businessman who served as the country’s prime minister for five and a half years before being overthrown in a 2006 military coup. The party’s supporters, from the rural North and Northeast of Thailand, where inequality hit hardest, are sometimes known as the Red Shirts.

The political establishment saw this as a threat, mobilizing their partisan supporters—who became known as the Yellow Shirts—to the street, increasing the bitter political polarization that still grips Thailand today. In 2010, pro-establishment government forces cracked down on the anti-establishment Red Shirts, raising fears that the protesters would morph into an armed underground guerrilla group. Others worried that the government’s new draconian laws prohibiting public assembly would silence all opposition.

Out of this frightening moment came a group named Red Sunday. Led by Sombat Boongnamanong, a social activist, freedom fighter, and former theater performer, Red Sunday’s activities were intended to create a friendlier public face for opposition activities that wouldn’t run afoul of the government. They fused everyday activities (such as dining, donning certain outfits, shopping, and exercising) with political protest. In this way, Red Sunday’s demonstration did not look exactly like a conventional protest, except that they often used the color red.

An unidentified Belgrade boy holds a plastic toy gun mocking police officers in Belgrade, Serbia, May 2000. Members of the pro-opposition student group Otpor, or Resistance, gave out flowers to policemen and appealed for their restraint in the worsening government crackdown on political opponents. Photo by Darko Vojinovic/Associated Press.

One of Red Sunday’s most memorable skits was an aerobic dance at the biggest public park in Bangkok in July 2010. Around 400 participants dressed in red sports outfits and ghost makeup intended to remind the public of the crackdown that had taken place few months ago. Like other park visitors, they gathered for a group aerobic dance routine popular among Thais. But theirs was unusual. The “instructor” led them in dancing to Red Shirt songs and in different silly steps that made the multigenerational crowd laugh and captured the attention of passersby. At other times, protesters would dress as ghosts, walk downtown, and hop on the monorail, reminding other passengers of the regime’s repressiveness. Protesters also would meet up for a picnic in a public park, go shopping at the mall en masse, or ride bicycles through Bangkok streets.

Red Sunday’s small acts of defiance carved out a space for political activism in a time of repression and despair, and normalized the act of resistance for Thailand’s middle class, which has traditionally supported the political establishment. The regime would have appeared ridiculous if it had cracked down on a bunch of aerobic dancers. This tactical advantage, called the “dilemma action” because of the bind it places the leadership in, is particularly useful for activists trapped under authoritarian—and unimaginative—rule. Red Sunday’s playful actions paved the way for the resurgence of the anti-establishment movement, which won an important electoral victory in 2011.

The experiences of Serbia and Thailand show how humor can be deployed differently, and toward different ends. In Serbia, Otpor used humorous protest actions in a systematic way, with a well-crafted strategy of nonviolent defiance, with hundreds of local chapters across the country attracting broad-based support. As a result, as the number of humorous events increased, their impact was multiplied. In contrast, Thailand’s Red Sunday was an ad hoc group working on a smaller scale.

Serbian children play with flour around an activist of the anti-government group Otpor, or Resistance, during a protest action entitled “Let’s spice up the food,” meant to bring awareness of the importance of Yugoslav national elections in September 2000 in Belgrade. Photo by Darko Vojinovic/Associated Press.

More importantly, while Otpor used humor offensively, Red Sunday used it defensively. Otpor wanted to step up the political momentum to topple Milošević and transform the Serbian political landscape. Red Sunday’s humor, on the other hand, sustained nonviolence as a movement when the Red Shirts were on the brink of becoming militarized, a transformation that could have undermined their long-term goals by provoking another government crackdown.

But the two campaigns also had a lot in common. Both helped reduce fear among the populace and induced participation in protest activities. They also drew media attention to protest movements, increasing publicity and political momentum. And they reversed the effects of repression by exposing the incongruity between a regime’s claims and the reality of its rule.

Finally, both demonstrate how humorous protest can offer a space for utopian enactment: encouraging people to imagine other political possibilities through parties, concerts, and festivals. This ability to imagine is extremely crucial for social change. People can be politically submissive if they think there is no alternative and change is not possible.

For activists, there are no limits to the supply of humor—after all, it comes from deep within our different cultures—but there are limits to how it can be used. Joking “with” others rather than “at” others is important, as is knowing what crosses the line and violates norms, and what does not. Jokes do not fly if they are out of context. Activists who know what, culturally, triggers laughter can use that knowledge to their advantage, even against the most seemingly omnipotent governments.

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A decade later, in 1930, in his most famous and dramatic campaign—the salt satyagraha—Gandhi again used mass protest to make visible the illegitimacy of British rule. This time the tool was mass civil disobedience. Gandhi asked Indians to defy the salt tax, the government monopoly on the production and sale of salt. Disobeying this tax was too innocuous to justify violent state repression. But when undertaken on a mass scale it also proved impossible to ignore. Moreover, the salt tax disproportionately burdened the poor and became an evocative symbol of British disregard for Indian lives and interests.

Gandhi began the salt satyagraha by leading a group of his closest associates in a thrilling 25-day, 240-mile march. Each day the suspense around Gandhi’s imminent arrest and popular unrest excited public attention. The campaign culminated in nationwide boycotts and demonstrations with thousands upon thousands of arrests. Moreover, graphic accounts of the brutal beating of unarmed protestors circulated in the global media, turning public opinion against the British and bringing Gandhi and satyagraha to the world’s attention.

In the century since, satyagraha has become better known as nonviolent direct action or simply nonviolence, and it has spread globally, establishing itself as a potent force in the U.S. civil rights movement, the anti-authoritarian struggles of the 1980s and 1990s such as the “people power” movement in the Philippines and Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution,” and the Arab Spring of 2011. And yet, for all its success, what exactly nonviolent action is, and how it works, has become less and less clear, an ambiguity that could hamper its usefulness in a landscape increasingly characterized by intense economic and political polarization.

Rev. Ralph Abernathy, left, and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., right, are taken by a policeman as they led a line of demonstrators into the business section of Birmingham, Ala., on April 12, 1963. Courtesy of Associated Press.

When we picture nonviolent protest today, we tend to imagine vast crowds occupying public spaces, marching, waving signs, chanting slogans, confronting state authority. For Gandhi, however, nonviolent protest required something more than the peaceful mobilization of large numbers of people. Its aim was not just to pressure the state but to move political opponents to rethink their positions and commitments. And to do that, Gandhi believed that protestors had to display and demonstrate disciplined fearlessness and a willingness to sacrifice. It was this kind of commitment that would work to persuade a political opponent by “opening his ears, which are otherwise shut, to the voice of reason.”

But is such a process of political persuasion truly possible? Ironically, nonviolence’s global popularity has increased alongside a decline of conviction in the power of nonviolent persuasion. Both the meaning of the word “nonviolence” and the concept of nonviolence itself have become ambiguous in the years since Gandhi’s great successes.

Nowhere is this clearer than India, where nonviolence is so closely associated with Gandhi himself that it’s difficult to ask serious questions about it. For the left, nonviolence is associated with Gandhi’s Hindu-nationalism and his gradualistic approach to caste and economic reforms. In this context, nonviolence seems conservative, even reactionary. From the right, nonviolence is seen as weak, emasculated nationalism. And even Gandhians themselves insist that nonviolence is a way of life that would be disfigured by treating it as a political tactic. Thus, the wider argument about what Gandhi represents in India has obscured questions about the value and meaning of nonviolence there.

Globally, nonviolence has become defined as a set of universal and portable political techniques, but its goals have changed significantly over time. The first generation of activists shaped the nonviolence of the civil rights movement in the U.S. and the anti-nuclear protests in the U.K. They successfully built up a repertoire of protest techniques that captured and developed core elements of Gandhi’s original project. Successful nonviolent direct action came to be defined by two key aspects: disruption and discipline.

Disruption on a mass scale is without doubt the most celebrated feature of nonviolent resistance. Non-cooperation and large-scale civil disobedience, by using tactics like the mass boycott, can draw attention to unjust laws. Consider the bus boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins of the civil rights movement, which so effectively exposed the indignities of segregation. In both cases, the symbolic elements were tied closely to practical experiments in interrupting day-to-day activities.

In this iconic image published in The New York Times on May 4, 1963, a 17-year-old high school student is attacked by a police dog in Birmingham, Ala.
Photo by Bill Hudson/Associated Press.

Over time, we have learned that nonviolence can draw participation from large numbers of people more effectively and efficiently than armed movements ever could. By either withdrawing participation and popular consent or criticizing and defying specific institutions and laws deemed unjust, successful nonviolent campaigns can puncture the legitimacy and authority of the state as such.

For protests to be nonviolent, however, disruption itself has to be disciplined. Protestors have to show restraint, often through a willingness to sacrifice and suffer. This includes everything from the discipline of walking and marching for weeks to stoically resisting the provocation and violence of police and vigilante groups. Instilling this kind of discipline and restraint were the main focus of the nonviolent training sessions and the codes of conduct that both Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. insisted upon when they embarked on large-scale campaigns. The need for discipline also informed the preference for silence, prayer, and song over fiery speeches and the shouting of slogans in nonviolent protests.

In Gandhi and King’s view, disciplined action would dramatize injustice and awaken moral conscience. For Gandhi discipline showed self-mastery; for King it showed dignity. For both men these moral ideals were key to the political and strategic success of the protests, which could force a recalcitrant opponent or public to stop and look critically at themselves, to ask whether their commitments and practices match their ideals. While confrontation, intimidation, or coercion might force opponents to reckon with protesters, only nonviolence had the potential to convert opponents.

The more confrontational the tactic—when the threat of provoking violence was at hand—the more crucial it was for nonviolent protest to maintain discipline. This unique combination would confuse and off-balance state responses to insurgent protest, as was powerfully demonstrated during Gandhi’s salt satyagraha and King’s Birmingham campaign.

Nonviolence entered a new era after King’s assassination, when radical social movements gained traction, and the importance of discipline and restraint dramatically declined in the late 1960s. To my mind, this has been the most fundamental but overlooked shift in the theory and practice of nonviolence. Partly out of confidence, partly out of impatience, radical protest instead celebrated what were considered to be more confrontational, transgressive, and authentic expressions of dissent and opposition. The nonviolence of Gandhi and King, with its emphasis on restraint, suffering, sacrifice, and persuasion, was increasingly characterized as a principled commitment to nonviolence but not a strategically successful one.

Nonviolent theorists and activists, including the influential Gene Sharp, today advocate for a more narrowly conceived “strategic” nonviolence. They celebrate the disruptive, confrontational, militant aspects of the history of nonviolence. And in so doing, what counts as nonviolence has expanded, most often in the direction of more elastic definitions, to the point where anything short of armed rebellion seems to count as nonviolent.

Clearly, collective programs of disruption have proven especially effective at undermining state legitimacy and toppling authoritarian regimes. This was the core lesson of the successive protest strategies of the velvet revolutions from Eastern Europe to Tahrir Square. And extreme or confrontational tactics, like those pioneered by AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in the 1980s and ’90s, can draw attention to injustice and build solidarity within a movement.

But in turbulent political times, when the primary goal of protest might well be to overcome polarization by reaching out to and persuading fellow citizens, disruption may prove much less useful. In India today, for example, Gandhian-style nonviolent marches still take place but they’re paradoxically used by political parties to intimidate and provoke. Whether these are genuinely nonviolent is rarely discussed. Even Anna Hazare’s famous fast against corruption broke most of Gandhi’s explicit rules because it was coercive.

In a time of escalating inequalities and resentments, we need to find a politics that enables us to relate to fellow citizens with dignity. To do this we should recover the lost traits of nonviolent discipline and restraint, remembering that nonviolence cannot simply be a symbolic or rhetorical gesture. The details of the organization and enactment of protests create a space for the difficult work of persuasion to take place, creating potential for a shared democratic political life. At its best, this disciplined nonviolent action can incite a reluctant populace to engage in acts of moral re-evaluation, repairing some of our divisions.

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