Roots for real change

As the ruling party in the U.S. continues to degrade American society and undermine the country’s allies, the magnitude of the challenge before us can feel exhausting. Yet people here at home do take action every day to protect their neighbors.

And others are doing the same thing abroad. In prior posts, I’ve looked at movements in South Korea, Hungary, and other countries that have managed to block authoritarian power grabs. But in the most memorable examples I’ve described, events had already taken their most dramatic turns by the time I covered them, with national leaders stepping up and the public backing them, quickly leading to reversals of fortune for aspiring or established despots.

But in cases where war and invasion aren’t the prime drivers, successful movements that get rid of would-be tyrants tend to emerge from a more complex series of events than just the dramatic end game in which a leader is arrested, convicted, or removed. So today, I’ll look at two examples of resistance that are at an earlier stage in that process for now, yet are still significant.

In recent months, Albanians have risen up in outrage over plans for Jared Kushner and, by association, Ivanka Trump to acquire and develop ecologically valuable land that’s also part of the country’s national heritage. And in India, just days ago, thousands of students in India who have been protesting for the last several weeks shockingly won all their demands from the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi.

I want to ponder what these two protest-based movements have been doing, how they’re setting the stage for deeper change in each society, and what we might be able to learn from their examples.

Successes at home

Before I consider the Indian and Albanian examples, I want to take a moment to mention some recent events here in the United States. After local organizers in Pennsylvania fought back, ICE was forced to give up plans for two rural detention facilities in that state. Facilities in the planning stages were met with complaints showing the population in detention would far exceed the number of local residents and would unavoidably stress area infrastructure. Miguel Andrade of the Shut Down Detention campaign told WHYY that the $207 million the federal government used to purchase the warehouses “should have been invested in people, not detention.”

All the way back in February, Governor Josh Shapiro told federal officials the state would not issue required permits for potential ICE detention facilities in Berks and Schuylkill counties. At the same time, Bucks County commissioners voted unanimously to block ICE from opening a detention facility in the area. And the vote had bipartisan support, with the lone Republican commissioner saying, “Bucks County is not a county that needs or wants a detention facility.”

Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection likewise came out early, prohibiting DHS from using the sites for detention. The department argued that the facilities would be a threat to the health of the community and local residents. And just last week, the governor’s office confirmed that plans for detention at both sites had been cancelled.

I’ll take another moment to note that the Everglades concentration camp the administration named Alligator Alcatraz has formally been eradicated from the face of the Earth. Closure of the camp happened a month ago, but now control of the site itself has been returned to Miami-Dade, with officials saying the airstrip that had been converted to a camp will return to its role of letting pilots of small craft train for landing and takeoff.

Historically, when concentration camps close, it’s important to undo the physical structure of detention as well, because camps are often resurrected at a later point for similar or worse purposes. Not only closing the camp but returning control of it to municipal authorities is a small but important part of the dismantling of authoritarian power. Now we need an investigation of the abuses that took place there, from both an environmental and a human rights perspective. This is something the Miccosukee Tribe and Florida immigrants’ rights groups have been demanding for some time.

Meanwhile in Albania

Moving on to other places in the world where people are taking on strongmen, let’s start in Albania. Part of the Soviet sphere of influence after World War II, Albania remained communist until 1990. In the decades since, it has struggled with mercenary mafia capitalism preventing actual democracy from taking root in ways that parallel many former Soviet nations and republics.

Recent protests over commercial development of Sazan Island, the westernmost part of Albania and the country’s largest island, are only the newest chapter in a history of pushback against the current government. In the wake of Albania’s 2025 parliamentary elections, separate protests alleging election shenanigans were organized by various political opponents of the regime between last November and May of this year. Actions included everything from calling out specific officials and marching in the street to Molotov cocktails thrown by protesters and violent assaults by police.

In May, many disparate parts of the opposition were fused together or subsumed into a broader protest movement, now known as The Flamingo Revolution. The movement began with a local demonstration near Sazan Island and the site of the planned multibillion-dollar Zvërnec resort that Jared Kushner had cut deals with the government to develop.

After protesters were roughed up, public outrage erupted. Demonstrations expanded to Tirana, the Albanian capital, and became about much more than the deal with Kushner. Protesters are now demanding the resignation of the current prime minister, Edi Rama. They also want constitutional and electoral reforms, with term limits for the prime minister.

They’re likewise demanding reversal of existing statutes on foreign investment and development. Though Edi Rama has been in charge for years now, the main opposition leader, Sali Berisha, is himself a former president and prime minister of the country who also inflicted tremendous damage on Albanian democracy during his rule. As a result, protesters are rejecting both leaders and seeking more fundamental political reform.

Indian student revolt

The Cockroach Janta Party formed in May, mocking the name of the Bharatiya Janata Party—or Indian People’s Party—headed up by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. The party’s formation began as a satirical point about the government response to leaked questions from the national exam for entry to medical school. As a result of the reported leak, the exam was cancelled after millions of students had taken it. (The test had been the end point of a process of grueling preparation many test-takers had worked on for years.)

In the midst of all this and other dissatisfaction among Indian youth, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant compared some activists and unemployed young people to “cockroaches” who go on social media and whine. Thirty-year-old Abhijeet Dipke founded the “Cockroach Janta Party” in response to his comment.

The party began as a joke, but a real movement formed. Dipke came back to India (he had been in the U.S.), and physical protests over the crisis started in June in New Delhi. Officials moved to shut down more than a dozen metro stations and access to mobile data at the main site of the protest in the hope of blocking its effectiveness.

But their efforts backfired, leading to additional demonstrations in several other large cities. (For an even more detailed timeline of the evolution of the protests, see this New York Times tick-tock.)

A well-known activist supported the growing student movement, and began a hunger strike in solidarity. A week ago, in an attempt to break the will of students, police tear-gassed and beat protesters. Afterward, demonstrations expanded even more widely across the country, and authorities tried to detain protesters, as vigils were kept around the clock.

Victory for students

Protesters had long been demanding the resignation of education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, and in recent days, finally succeeded in their quest. Modi had tried to placate his opponents with other, smaller concessions, but proved unable to cajole or break them.

When the government was forced to meet their demands instead, a public announcement was held to resolve the crisis, with government ministers and student protesters present as peer stakeholders at a table. Officials agreed to drop attempts to prosecute protesters and to the students’ charter for exam reform.

After public acknowledgment that education minister Pradhan would go, the leadership of the Cockroach Party called off the protests and celebrated their victory. Commenters noted that it was a sharp reprimand to Modi’s heavy-handed government and a win for popular action and resistance.

This example shows the way that political change takes time to develop, and often begins with specific demands by one community. When leaders who have portrayed themselves as invincible are forced to reckon not only with the wealthy or corporate powerholders—who might be seen as their peers—but instead with everyday people and mass movements, it opens new vulnerabilities that can be exploited to eventually remove the authoritarian from power.

And you can be sure that Modi will not go easily. Nearly as soon as the deal had been made, and student leaders had told their followers to go home, reports began to spread of the arrest of hundreds of protesters. The new round of arrests appeared to take place far from New Delhi, in cities where Modi has a stronger grip on power. The students now face the question of how to respond.

Student groups in the U.S.

The question of state violence is something that has come up again and again in recent years with mass student protests in the U.S. With isolated exceptions, university leadership in the U.S. has deeply damaged democracy through its treatment of protesters who tried to call attention to genocidal actions by the Israeli government in Palestine.

Instead of separating out legitimate concerns about antisemitism on campus from scaremongering and political scapegoating of activists, many university presidents and boards turned on their own students, subjecting them to a whole array of discipline by the universities themselves, and, in some cases, harm at the hands of law enforcement. These harms include prosecution, abuse, and deportation.

Several key administrators simultaneously undermined their universities’ role in independent thought by caving to Trump and his minions, letting the U.S. government strongarm them into claiming things were antisemitic that clearly were not and agreeing to roll back efforts to integrate the academy racially and culturally. Part of the result of all the caving by university leaders is already being felt in falling enrollment from minority communities.

In addition, some campus protesters in the U.S. currently face charges that could result in significant jail time. Just last month, federal prosecutors secured indictments of eight people with ties to the University of Michigan that include felony charges against all of them. The charges appear to lump together activities of permitted protest with vandalism, rolling them up and presenting them as a larger conspiracy.

Student protesters have been targeted both by their own administrators and a government keen to shut down dissent. This inability to organize on campus in some traditional ways has done real harm to the broader student protest movement, though many have nonetheless persisted.

And high school students around the U.S.—in Texas, Virginia, Washington state, and elsewhere, have in some cases received more support for their right to protests than a number of university administrators have offered. In the first half of 2026, thousands had left class to speak out publicly against ICE detention. But some state governments, as in Texas, have been trying to shut that down, too, by investigating school principals, districts, and superintendents.

What we can do

There are a series of ideas worth pondering here. First is that small things can become crucial symbols of larger things. Sometimes it’s simply that the little things come together and add up to one big thing. At other times, the small thing is what finally fuels outrage enough for people to do something about the bigger issues.

So go ahead and join national efforts, but it’s also a great idea to focus on a local crisis, whether it’s a detention facility near you or a policy you want your city or town to change. It’s often easier for people to understand and get informed about—and even get mad about!—something close to home. (Especially if it’s not already automatically slotted into national debates.)

The small thing—like Trump family corruption fusing with local officials’ corruption in Albania, or a satirical protest over government response to a cancelled exam in India—can be the vehicle that allows big issues like ministerial accountability and education reform to take concrete form in the minds of those who might not be tied into existing groups or feel capable of forcing significant change.

And sometimes it’s the small joke, or coming together on social media, that allows a big movement to grow. The New York Times reported that the Cockroach people’s party accounts ended up in some cases eclipsing the social media presence of India’s established parties. Millions of followers on social media is no guarantee of social change. But in this era, one can be a means to reaching the other.

It’s fine to fight for democracy, against the power of ICE, and to tackle the biggest problems we have. But in addition to connecting to national groups, look for something specific: a change you can demand in your town or your state, something you actually care about. If it matters to you, you’ll be more convincing talking to others about it, and it has a better chance of mattering to them, too.

And if you make a specific demand for change, you can open doors to connecting with others making related demands. You never know what will trigger the next Cockroach Party victory or Flamingo Revolution—or what might come after that.

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