PILnet Co-Executive Director Andrej Nosko warns that fast-evolving authoritarian tactics threaten democracy, including in the United States, and calls on nonprofits to become more agile and resilient, with PILnet supporting them through free legal assistance, risk assessment, and global partnerships.
I was both shocked and thrilled to hear Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney at Davos this year quote two authors who shaped my early adult life. My first real job was working for the Forum 2000 Foundation, founded by Vaclav Havel, the first president of independent Czech Republic after the Velvet Revolution toppled Communism in Czechoslovakia. Hearing a reference to Havel’s The Power of the Powerless filled me with pride. Yet Carney’s invocation of Thucydides’ tragic Melian Dialogue—“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”—felt like a cold bucket challenge gone awry, a stark reminder of power imbalances in our fracturing world.
Growing up in Communist Czechoslovakia, Havel’s words hit home. Autocratic systems, as he described, are permeated with hypocrisy and lies. I recall secretly listening to Radio Free Europe with my father under a blanket, muffling the static so neighbors wouldn’t hear. He warned me never to speak of it outside our home, for fear of reprisals. The threat was real: my late father-in-law, a talented young medical student, was expelled from university and blacklisted nationwide after a dorm mate reported him for tuning in with friends. These stories aren’t ancient history—they’re blueprints for today’s authoritarian tactics.
The Diagnosis: A Fatal Backsliding
For over twenty years, PILnet has operated in the trenches of this transition, with original offices in Budapest, Moscow, and Beijing. We have seen how the repression infrastructure has evolved. It is no longer just about arresting activists or closing offices; it is about stealth tactics using commercial means. Authoritarians are weaponizing the law and technology to restrict public participation and hollow out the rule of law, not least through rapidly scalable digital tools and AI-driven surveillance and manipulation on social media with nearly zero marginal cost.
These tactics thrive on speed, scalability, low financial outlay, and invisibility: quickly deploying copy‑paste repression tools such as “foreign agent” laws alongside opaque, commercially built, AI-powered technologies that operate seamlessly in digital spaces. They inherently outpace democratic institutions, which depend on slower, more transparent, consensus-based processes.
The world has shifted into a mixed reality where democratic backsliding in the US is no longer an unimaginable hypothetical, but a real threat. A V-Dem report starkly warns that out of the 45 countries that are on the path of becoming autocracies, 27 were democracies, only nine remain democracies by 2024. Therefore, two-thirds of the changes are fatal for democracies, and once backsliding begins, reversal is rare. In the US, the path is clear and won’t stop itself, the timing and the current opportunity is crucial.
Consequently, nonprofits can no longer depend on resource-intensive approaches that assume a supportive political environment; instead, we must adopt a strategy of agile, nimble, decentralized, and even messy adaptation, prioritizing speed and low coordination costs to match the scalability of the infrastructure we are up against.
The New Playbook for Nonprofits
Nonprofits can’t rely on traditional playbooks requiring intensive coordination, extensive resources, and a stable, supportive political environment that no longer exists or can no longer be relied on as given. Michael Ignatieff stresses that we can do more than just survive, but we need to understand where we are: consoling oneself through honest acceptance of reality, even if painful, confronting limitations, and taking responsibility without excuses.
The goal is to remain in the fight long enough to translate rare strategic opportunities into openings. The tactics must reflect the change:
- Survival is not cowardice: It is a strategic necessity. We must focus on serving stakeholders rather than maintaining the traditional “form” of a nonprofit organization.
- Decentralization and speed: Authoritarians win when they can target a single point of failure. We need solutions that allow for low coordination costs and rapid scalability, prioritizing resilience and low-key impact over visibility. We need to learn from the ancient martial arts philosophy to use an authoritarian’s strength, momentum, and weight against them, using “minimum effort for maximum efficiency.” Focus on leverage, balance disruption, and technique over brute force, while maintaining resilience and the smallest possible field of engagement.
- Cross-sectoral coalitions: The legal industry plays a key role in either supporting or resisting these shifts. PILnet has experience working with a network of lawyers and the private sector to find allies who have not yet “given in” to the pressure and who have both the creativity and skills required to support nonprofits.
Transnational solidarity: Because repression is globalized, our resilience must be too. We must use agile, decentralized, international networks to share lessons, provide solidarity, and apply pressure across borders. There is still an opportunity for remaining democratic pockets as a “holdout” for civic democratic resilience. It’s not coincidental that authoritarians attack these democratic institutions from inside as well as from outside.
PILnet’s Unique Role and Offer for US Nonprofits
PILnet supports US nonprofits facing democratic backsliding by leveraging our global pro bono network to deliver free legal assistance, risk mitigation, and resilience-building tools drawn from two decades of hard-won experience from the frontlines in high-risk environments.
- PILnet brokers pro bono legal assistance: For over two decades, we’ve helped nonprofits worldwide navigate shutdowns, foreign agent laws, and surveillance states through creative survival strategies: rapid decentralization, low-cost scaling, and pro bono lawyer-led proactive risk mitigation. PILnet matches nonprofits with specialized lawyers for operational needs such as compliance, employment, tax law, and regulatory threats (at no cost), while screening for expertise and quality and facilitating ongoing partnerships. This operations support helps nonprofits manage their exposure, for example, via financial de-risking and exclusion and technological platform disintermediation. This support makes organizations more nimble and resilient, and frees up more of their resources to focus on their missions and serving their constituencies. PILnet further supports nonprofits in their programmatic work by supplying experienced private-sector legal volunteers to provide them with comparative legal research or support their advocacy work by drafting amicus briefs or legal filings.
- PILnet provides comprehensive legal health checks: To bolster resilience amid democratic backsliding of nonprofits in particular risk, PILnet provides tailored legal risk assessments to scan for vulnerabilities and risks in governance, compliance, tax status, employment practices, data privacy, and other regulatory risks. By identifying gaps early, nonprofits can devise proactive legal risk management strategies. They can enhance agility and craft survival and defensive strategies that prioritize holding ground over perfection, ensuring they endure long enough to seize rare strategic openings while serving stakeholders and upholding core values.
- PILnet empowers nonprofits through capacity-building tools and resources: PILnet fosters lawyer-civil society collaborations to advance missions amid backsliding, prioritizing survival values over formal structures. PILnet supports transnational coalitions and empowers nonprofits via workshops and tailored tools (e.g., Global Nonprofits Guide for cross-border navigation).
The nonprofit’s objective must be to hold ground and slow the losses. We need to be focused less on the traditional form and ways of operating, and recognize the invisible threats of creeping authoritarian tactics of suppression using digital and commercial means. The timing is crucial: In the US’s unique moment of backsliding, PILnet offers tailored support: strengthening proactive risk management strategies, fostering agile cross-border and cross-sector alliances, and ensuring you stay in the fight. Messy and adaptive outlasts outdated rigidity. Goal: survive, hold ground, endure the storm—and emerge stronger, better prepared, not for the last battle, but for a continuous struggle for rights and values.
Diagnosis must precede treatment. By realizing exactly what game we are playing, we can develop the strategy and tactics needed to endure. The “Power of the Powerless” only works if the powerless remain connected, creative, and—above all—present.