Defending Democracy Needs More Savvy and Sacrifice From Civil Society
This essay and image were published and produced by Asia Democracy Chronicles
The democratic world has fundamentally cracked, and the sooner we accept that this is irreversible, the sooner we can build something capable of surviving the wreckage.
We are living through a permanent, structural shift in the global political landscape. Authoritarian tactics have evolved into highly sophisticated, legally codified systems of control. Regional human rights watchdogs reveal a terrifying spike in the judicial harassment of Human Rights Defenders (HRDs), weaponized Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs), and cross-border digital crackdowns designed to choke out dissent. Concurrently, traditional funding lifelines that sustained civil society for decades are drying up as international donors back away in the face of hostile local legislation.
This is a “no-return” scenario. The era of the comfortable, grant-dependent, siloed NGO has officially ended.
As captured in Asia Democracy Network (ADN)’s latest annual landscape review report, the current climate demands that we look directly at the signals from the streets to understand the shifting democratic trajectories in Asia. The recent struggles, which have been documented, highlight the need for navigation among democracy advocates.
As democratic backsliding intersects with rapid systemic changes, survival demands that civil society actors urgently change and immediately flatten operations, shed institutional egos, and build an entirely new playbook for resilient resistance.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the youth are leading the way. While formal civic spaces are being systematically choked by state surveillance, a vibrant counter-offensive is igniting across Asia. Despite extreme difficulties, democracy actors – overwhelmingly led by the youth – are trying their best to fight back in multiple countries, with some using culture and the arts to bypass authoritarian gatekeepers entirely.
These actions mirror the core call of the ADN Assembly 2025 outcome document for direct, unconventional citizen action.
The successful youth-led street protests ignited in Bangladesh in 2024 and in Nepal in 2025 proved that, just like in previous generations, the young are not afraid to demand change. The protests in these two countries inspired similar actions across the region as a way of airing public grievances.
On the streets of Indonesia, students and democracy actors, in waves, tirelessly exercised their critical voices in raising the issues of a faltering economy, rampant corruption, and general dismal governance. In Japan, protests escalated against proposed government moves and legislation that would revise the country’s post-WWII pacifist constitution.
Pushbacks, crackdowns, and more pushbacks
In some countries, people have shown determination and exceptional bravery as they continue to call for reform despite the threat – or even in the midst – of violent crackdowns. In Pakistan-administered Kashmir, the Jammu and Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JKJAAC) has refused to be silenced despite being designated a “proscribed organization.” It continues to call for action addressing rising electricity and food costs and controversial legislative changes in the midst of a territory-wide shutdown and the targeting of its leaders and members.
In Myanmar, the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) remains resilient despite airstrikes and other vicious moves by the junta, and despite increasingly being looked over or ignored by much of the rest of the world. In the city of Herat in Afghanistan just this June, people still demanded respect for women’s rights, education, work, and yes, freedom despite knowing they would face harsh retaliation from their country’s Taliban rulers.
At the same time, there have been renewed efforts to raise awareness about important issues through the arts. Visual artists, musicians, content creators, film makers, and other creatives are using all kinds of platforms to shine a spotlight on abuse and rights violations.
The Indonesian documentary “Pesta Babi: Kolonialisme di Zaman Kita (Pig Feast: Colonialism in Our Time)” is one prime example of such efforts. Released this March, it cuts directly through mainstream political noise to lay bare systemic, state-backed wrongdoings. Exposing the raw reality of forced evictions targeting indigenous populations and the brutal environmental devastation wrought by corporate-state collusion, the film accomplishes what a hundred policy briefs could not.
This cinematic weapon underscores a broader regional crisis as well: the systemic exclusion of Indigenous peoples from environmental governance. According to the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP), Indigenous communities act as the primary stewards of biodiversity, yet they face severe criminalization and territorial sovereignty violations by states prioritizing extractive corporate interests. By translating these complex land-rights battles into a visceral human narrative, “Pesta Babi” is galvanizing mass public awareness and solidarity.
Restrategizing for reform
More than ever, though, traditional civil society groups are needed to provide support and enable an ecosystem for reform movements. Yet these groups themselves require serious restructuring in strategy and model of operation and business. Here are some thoughts gathered from various discussions including those facilitated by ADN on how this can be done:
Build a networking ecosystem. There is a realization that to renew their business model to ensure the future defense of democracy, democracy actors must fundamentally change. The traditional, isolated NGO model is an endangered species. Operating as a siloed, single-issue entity is a recipe for extinction in a hostile, resource-scarce environment.
With mounting demands to support the ongoing struggle, civil society must aggressively pivot moving beyond conventional NGO-centric models toward a proactive, networked ecosystem.
Our strategic goal is to achieve a seamless consolidation of democratic forces at every single level. We must build durable resilience by connecting individual, localized sparks of change directly to regional institutional power. Instead of competing against one another for a shrinking pool of traditional grants, for instance, organizations must act as interconnected nodes within a massive, distributed web of defense. When one node is targeted or suppressed, the surrounding network must be agile enough to absorb the shock, redistribute the workload, and protect the affected actors.
Merging and the strategy of sunsetting. Survival demands radical operational flexibility, immediate recalibration, and rescaling. Organizations must open their minds to the possibility of operational mergers among like-minded organizations to maximize resource efficiency and maintain the democratic struggle. The truest test of this new paradigm, however, lies in a radical concept that has been highlighted during regional strategic assemblies: strategic sunsetting, or what Propel Nonprofits describe as “dying with dignity to protect the mission.”
Institutional ego is a luxury civil society can no longer afford. If a specific organization is no longer financially viable, or if its brand has become a lightning rod for state suppression, it must accept its expiration date. Sunsetting gracefully – and deliberately transferring its network assets, secure datasets, and intellectual capital to healthier, more resilient nodes in the ecosystem – is a profound act of strategic courage. The brand may die, but the mission lives on.
Expanding the democratic tent. Democratic resilience cannot be a solo act performed exclusively by civil society organizations; it should involve the people. Building an unshakeable wall of defense means breaking down conventional divisions and actively identifying and integrating new frontiers for citizen action directly into the tent to create a broader, more formidable base of defense.
As movements, we should try harder to advocate with a grounded structural legitimacy and use systemic leverage of institutional champions such as universities, parliamentarianians, and like-minded state-independent rights commissions. This does not mean a top-down approach. The core of building resilience should be from the ground up, involving grassroots and marginalized voices, and with intersectional inclusivity.
True democratic defense requires ensuring that our consolidation strategies deliberately center and prioritize minorities, labor, and the youth, in order to transform abstract democratic ideals into tangible protections for the most vulnerable.
The Asia Dalit Rights Forum (ADRF) highlights a crucial blind spot in mainstream advocacy: social justice cannot be realized without economic justice. For millions belonging to Communities Discriminated on Work and Descent (CDWD) and Dalit populations across South Asia, democracy remains an unfulfilled promise due to deep-seated caste segregation and systemic exclusion from welfare, land ownership, and legal protection. Putting these voices at the center turns human rights into a protective shield.
The Alliance for Democratic Practice – a network of individual democracy champions, practitioners, and advocates – for one, goes beyond the formal organization as a potential enabler; the ecosystem must cultivate a curated network of high-impact individuals. These vetted changemakers act as the vital, agile “sparks” capable of initiating broader movements, and serve as frontline narrative and action leaders when rapid mobilization is required.
Harnessing technology, the strategic substrate. At the core of this entire architecture sits technology to defend and advance democracy. Technology today is no longer an optional tool for digital outreach – it is the very infrastructure where tomorrow’s democratic battles will be won or lost.
As highlighted by the Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats (CALD), civil society must actively navigate the “democratic resilience in the age of AI.” While authoritarian regimes deploy AI-driven surveillance, automated disinformation campaigns, and predictive policing to suppress dissent, democracy defenders must pivot to defensive technological infrastructure.
Authoritarian regimes are writing new algorithms for social control and civic restriction. Democracy defenders cannot fight tomorrow’s oppression with yesterday’s bureaucracy. Guided by the strategic frameworks offered by members and friends of the ADN family, we must write the code for resilience, build the network for survival, and ensure the movement outlives the regimes it fights.
Ichal Supriadi is Secretary General of the Asia Democracy Network.
