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, 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 a first 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 a single overarching thread: 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. Nonviolent democratic resilience and resistance movements draw on two traditions of building people power, mobilizing and organizing, which increasingly need to work in concert. Mobilizing brings out large numbers for moments of mass action; organizing builds durable power for the targeted influence or defense of specific threads of the democratic fabric. Both are powerful, but they have evolved largely in parallel, as distinct crafts with different theories of change and few bridges between them. What is needed is a more integrated strategy that brings together the strengths of both.
2. 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.
3. 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.

• Critically examine existing non-violence training methodologies and approaches: what works, what fails, under what conditions, and which underlying assumptions may need updating for the current moment.
• Surface and share the hard-won strategic knowledge that participants bring from their own contexts, insights that existing frameworks may not fully capture, and make it available across the group.
• Facilitate structured exchange in which practitioners who have navigated sustained authoritarian pressure engage directly with peers in movements developing new approaches, including those from the US, each informing and pressure-testing the other’s work.
• 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.
• Examine how movements and their supporters build the material and human infrastructure for long-term resilience, including funding, training, mentorship, and the wellbeing and mental health of those sustaining resistance under prolonged pressure.
• 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 non-violent 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. 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.