The Fight Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Standing Up to Dictators

Summary

From the 2021 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and bestselling author of How to Stand Up to a Dictator, a frontline guide to understanding, defending, and rebuilding democracy in the age of AI, with 10 strategic goals broken down into 100 concrete actions citizens can take right now.

The window for saving democracy is closing. If 2024 was the tipping point for elections, then 2025 and 2026 have taught us what happens when citizens don’t hold the line and Western democracies begin to fall.

It’s time for the fight back.

As Maria Ressa knowingly writes, we face three convergent crises:

• The crisis of truth: Tech platforms and AI have destroyed our information ecosystem, splintering our shared reality.
• The crisis of order: The United States—the nation that built the postwar international system—is now dismantling it, launching military operations without congressional approval, killing its own citizens in the streets, and arresting journalists who document it.
• The crisis of accountability: Institutions have been cap­tured, law weaponized, and those with power answer to no one.

The Fight Back is a field guide to meet this moment, written by someone who survived the dictator’s play­book firsthand. It’s grounded in frontline experience from different continents, with specific frameworks for immediate action in the age of AI. The postwar order is coming apart, and this book tells you how you can shape the world you want.