Democracy Across the Frontlines: How Can Democracy Movements Collaborate To Build Resilience Across Borders?

The conditions for democratic resilience are deteriorating. Authoritarian actors are increasingly organized through transnational coordination, sharing tactics to undermine democratic institutions and norms through legal and institutional means that are harder to resist, and they are increasingly employing new digital tools for surveillance and disinformation across borders. These authoritarian tactics are operating at a speed and in conditions in which existing approaches to building pro-democracy movements and civil resistance have not yet fully adapted. The research shows that nonviolent action movements are succeeding at lower rates than a decade ago. The frameworks, assumptions, and strategies that guided successful movements in the mid- to late 20th century, therefore, need to be rethought, revised, and updated for the conditions democracy movements now face.

In this context, from October 21-25, 2026, Salzburg Global is convening its second Democracy Resilience Forum, bringing together diverse leaders — including from civil society, foundations, universities, the media, the legal profession, and youth movements — who are engaged in frontline democratic organizing and institutions that sustain it, together with others with relevant experiences and expertise. The aim is to strengthen the exchange of strategies, tactics, and resources needed to build greater resilience within democratic movements and to better protect democratic systems and societies around the world. The Democracy Resilience Forum, running across 2026 and 2027, and incorporating sessions of the Salzburg Global Pathways to Peace Initiative and American Studies Program, is a focused multi-year initiative to build durable, cross-sector and cross-border alliances of those leading and building pro-democratic movements around the world to develop strategies for safeguarding democratic systems amid rising authoritarian aggression and erosion from within. 

The program will have global representation, and it will also have a deliberate focus on ensuring that the leaders of US democracy movements are connected to their global counterparts. Despite their resources and scale, US democracy movements have often operated separately from the experiences of those movements that are resisting democratic backsliding elsewhere. Coalitions are forming across sectors, and movement energy is significant and growing. Yet there is much to gain from the strategic depth, training, and cross-border connections developed by frontline actors in other countries under sustained pressure, just as the approaches of US movements – including their speed, scale, and experience – can offer value in return. The October session will therefore seek to connect US movements with this wider field of practitioners, and that field with them, as an important step toward the global network the Forum is designed to build.

Fellows of the April 2026 session of Salzburg Global’s Democracy Resilience Forum, Democracy on the Frontlines: How Can Democracies Defend Themselves? identified urgent needs that the October session of the Democracy Resilience Forum seeks to address. At root, they converge on two overarching threads. The first one pulls toward sharper distinctions between resisting entrenched autocracy and resisting democratic backsliding, and between strategic nonviolence and the wider field of civil resistance. The second one pulls towards the need for stronger, more coherent connection – between traditions of practice, between democracy movements across borders, and between the strands of nonviolent action within countries.

1. Resisting an entrenched autocracy may not be the same task as resisting a democracy eroding from within. Under a consolidated authoritarian regime, a society may broadly oppose the government yet be held in check by fear and by the belief that change is impossible; in a backsliding democracy, competitive elections still matter, polarization often runs high, and the contest may be less over the government than over a divided society whose loyalties remain in play. The tactics used by those doing the eroding can look similar across both settings, yet the tactics of those resisting may need to differ: what mobilizes or persuades in one context could entrench the regime in the other. What is needed is to examine how far these contexts diverge, and to calibrate strategy to the context a movement faces, not one borrowed wholesale from the other.
2. Civil resistance, as the term is commonly used, is predominantly nonviolent but can shade into unarmed violence at its edges. Strategic nonviolence points to something narrower and more disciplined: the deliberate practice of nonviolent action chosen because it works and sustained as a matter of strategy. Yet the two are often treated as one, which blurs what may be distinctive about strategic nonviolence and holds it back from being recognized, resourced, and built up as a field of its own. What is needed is to examine whether strategic nonviolence should be understood as a distinct, practically oriented field, and if so, to identify what would build and sustain it.
3. Nonviolent movements build power through two distinct crafts, each with its own logic. Organizing builds durable power: it recruits and develops people one relationship at a time, cultivates leaders, and binds them into lasting structures directed at particular threads of the democratic fabric, defending or contesting specific institutions, constituencies, and terrain over time. Mobilizing builds visible power: it brings large numbers into the open in a single moment, through protest, boycott, or strike, to demonstrate the scale of opposition and raise the cost of backsliding. What is needed is for the two to work in concert: to map where they overlap, where they diverge, and how each can strengthen or undercut the other, so that organizers and mobilizers can build a coherent strategy together without pulling one another apart.
4. A key use of the power movements build, whether through organizing or mobilizing, is acting on the pillars of support: the businesses, security services, civil servants, and others whose cooperation keeps a backsliding regime running and whose withdrawal can leave it unable to function. Two broad approaches to shifting them sit in tension. One is quiet, persuasive, defection-oriented work, often done by more institutionalist groups, that reaches out to insiders who may be ready to break away. The other is public pressure through mass action: protest, boycott, strike, and other extra-institutional means. Research on eroding democracies suggests the quiet approach shifts loyalties more reliably, while mass action helps most when it aims at clear, specific goals, but can backfire, hardening the regime's coalition and deepening polarization if it is framed poorly or pushes the pillars back toward the regime instead of away from it. What is needed is to work through this tension, so that the two can be discussed, refined, and sequenced to reinforce each other, and to test whether the same balance holds under entrenched autocracy or a different one is required.
5. The challenges facing democratic movements today are increasingly global, even when they are experienced locally. Leaders working on the front lines of democratic resilience movements across different countries and contexts are facing rapidly advancing democratic backsliding, civic fragmentation, disinformation, and state repression, and often confront similar patterns and pressures. Yet opportunities for democratic movements to learn directly from one another remain limited. Those who have spent years resisting authoritarian consolidation have much to offer their counterparts elsewhere, just as movements in the United States are developing approaches shaped by the distinctive landscape of American democracy, its federal architecture, scale, and depth of civil society. What is needed is a space for sustained exchange across borders, where democratic actors can share lessons, test ideas, and build relationships that transform isolated experience into collective capacity.
6. Within the United States, the strands of democratic movement building — civic action and grassroots mobilization, communities of care and mutual aid, base-building and community organizing, electoral campaigns, and legal action at the state and local level — are each integral to a broader effort to sustain democratic resilience. However, lawyers, electoral advocates, institutional defenders, grassroots organizers, and movement builders who share the same fundamental interest in democratic resurgence tend to coordinate episodically, in specific campaigns and local coalitions, rather than as part of a durable, strategically coherent ecosystem. What is needed is greater alignment across these strands of work, enabling coherence, mutual support, and collective strategic impact.

• Draw on practitioners who have worked under both entrenched autocracy and democratic backsliding to map how the two contexts diverge, and establish which nonviolent tactics carry across them and which have to be rethought.
• Critically examine existing nonviolence training methodologies and approaches: what works, what fails, under what conditions. Reach a shared view on whether strategic nonviolence warrants building as a distinct field, and what the initial steps to build and support it would be.
• Bring organizers and mobilizers into direct conversation to examine where their crafts reinforce one another and where they work at cross-purposes, and develop concrete ways to sequence and combine them within a common strategy.
• Work through cases of quiet outreach and mass public pressure to discern when each shifts a regime's pillars, when pressure proves counterproductive, and how the two might be combined, including how the mix shifts under entrenched autocracy.
• Identify complementarities across different approaches to democratic defense ranging from grassroots organizing and civic action to legal strategy, electoral work, and institutional defense, and the ways these can be integrated more effectively.
• Gather practical approaches to sustaining movements under prolonged pressure, funding, training, mentorship, and wellbeing, that participants can adapt, alongside peer relationships for ongoing support.
• Lay the groundwork for ongoing collaboration by building connections, developing shared goals and frameworks, and identifying opportunities for lasting partnerships and joint work beyond October.

The session will engage approximately 40 frontline leaders drawn from across the global democratic-resistance ecosystem, each bringing hard-won experience of defending democracy, justice, equity, and the rule of law in their own national context, and each present as a source of strategy in their own right. Participants from the United States will also join, reflecting the session’s aim of connecting US movements with this wider field, with US participants coming as much to learn from it as to contribute to it.

Participants will include grassroots organizers and civil society leaders; scholars of civil resistance; lawyers and institutional defenders of democratic systems; youth movement leaders; and movement funders and support organizations. 

The highly participatory format mixes curated conversations, structured peer exchange, and informal interaction. The session will also include structured engagement with nonviolent action training methodologies, brought by leading practitioners from a range of traditions and contexts. Designed as critical examination, the training will ask participants to engage directly with these approaches, set them alongside the methods they bring from their own contexts, and collectively assess where each still meets the moment and where it needs to be rethought. 

In collaboration with the Journal of Democracy, the leading publication on the theory and practice of democracy, some of the lessons drawn from Salzburg Global’s Democracy Resilience Forum will be showcased in a new online column produced in partnership with CANVAS, the leading trainer of nonviolent democratic activists around the world.

The session is forward-looking and substantive, featuring divergent views and the voices of both established and next-generation leaders. It is off-the-record and held under the Chatham House Rule.