#civil-society

#civil-society

In September 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order labeling "antifa"—short for "antifascism"—a domestic terrorist threat. Around the same time, Trump issued a presidential memorandum known as NSPM-7, which identifies "anti-Americanism," "anti-capitalism," "anti-Christianity," and "extremism on migration, race, and gender" as indicators of potential violence. The memorandum directs the secretaries of the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Homeland Security, along with the attorney general, to "investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations" that support antifascist organizing.

Perryman said the stakes go beyond courtroom victories. The real challenge is demonstrating that the public truly holds the power to counter and often stop the White House's seemingly unstoppable march toward authoritarian rule. "The real thing for us was, how are we going to show people that you actually still get to be in charge in your country-the people get to be in charge," Perryman told moderator and host of the podcast Pod Save America, Jon Favreau.

Ukraine is increasingly a country held together, behind the military lines, by women. Those in their 30s millennial women born into an independent Ukraine, raised in economic turbulence and thrust into adulthood on the wave of revolution and war are shouldering huge burdens of responsibility. They are fundraising for the army, or sometimes serving in it. They are running civil society organisations, advocating for their country abroad and becoming activists.

It's easy to take democracy and civil society for granted when it's all you have known. Americans are aware of the repression and brutality in faraway lands. But for most, autocracy is a word: not a threat, not a way of life. If you are born in an unfree state-like my guest, Oleksandra Matviichuk, and I were-it is a different story. We were both born in the Союз Советских Социалистических Республик, known to you as the U.S.S.R., Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Miriam Gonzalez Durantez is contemplating a move into politics, following a gap in the liberal space in Spain after Ciudadanos' decline. She aims to launch a new liberal party.

"Nobody really knows what's happening," one project manager running a Syria-based project told DW about the US cuts in aid funding. "They haven't put a complete stop to it yet so we're just spending the money on a monthly basis and hoping for the best."

The League of Social Democrats (LSD), the last remaining active pro-democracy party in China-ruled Hong Kong, has announced its disbandment due to immense political pressure.

"It's a very big issue that transcends, really, the most basic aspects of freedom and citizens' ability to participate in their governmental processes."

"The attempted intrusion by DOGE - a temporary, un-elected and non-Congressionally approved agency - toward the Vera Institute should alarm every American."

When Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) took over most of the country's capital Khartoum in the early days of the war, the youth-led civil society initiative Hadhreen kept its food kitchens open.