This opening session introduces the purpose, structure, and methodology of the Survival Dialogues, along with the co-hosting organizations and shared agreements for engagement.

Participants will explore the current global political landscape through the perspectives of a scholar, a grassroots leader, and a civil society advocate. These insights will offer a clear framework for understanding the rise of authoritarianism and its impacts across communities, movements, institutions, and legal advocacy. The session will also highlight practical strategies that have proven effective in resisting authoritarianism.

The session creates space to reflect on “survival” as both a political and lived practice, grounding analysis in real-world experience and embodied knowledge.

Through collective learning and exchange, participants will begin building a shared foundation for the dialogues ahead. A brief somatic grounding practice will open the space, modeling the integrated approach that will guide the series.

Learning objectives: 

By the end of the session, participants will be able to:

• Understand the purpose and approach of the Survival Dialogues

• Analyze key impacts of rising authoritarianism

• Identify effective strategies for resistance

• Reflect on survival as a political and lived practice

• Build connections for ongoing exchange and collaboration

This session examines Hungary under Viktor Orbán as a key example of the modern authoritarian playbook—and the forms of resistance that can challenge it. Often described as a “laboratory of illiberalism,” Hungary illustrates how democratic systems can be reshaped from within, using legal and institutional tools to consolidate power while maintaining the appearance of democracy.

Participants will explore how strategies such as constitutional redesign, institutional capture, court-packing, and electoral manipulation have been used to entrench political control. The session will highlight how law itself can be instrumentalized to weaken checks and balances, restrict civic space, and legitimize repression under a formal legal framework.

At the same time, the session will examine how resistance emerges under these conditions. Drawing on the Hungarian experience, it will highlight the role of grassroots organizing, independent journalism, election protection efforts, and coalition-building in challenging authoritarian dominance and creating openings for change.

The session will also explore how authoritarian rule is sustained through narratives, polarization, and the construction of “internal enemies,” and what it takes for that legitimacy to begin to fracture.

Finally, participants will engage in comparative reflection, connecting Hungary to other contexts such as El Salvador and South Korea to identify shared patterns and adaptive resistance strategies across different settings.

Learning objectives
By the end of the session, participants will be able to:

• Understand Hungary as a key example of contemporary authoritarianism

• Identify core strategies used to consolidate power, including legal and institutional tools

• Analyze how law is used to legitimize repression and weaken democratic safeguards

• Recognize patterns of civic space restriction and attacks on civil society

• Examine how narratives and “internal enemies” are constructed to sustain authority

• Draw lessons from resistance strategies across different contexts

• Apply insights to movement lawyering and advocacy strategies

This session explores xenophobia as a central feature of rising authoritarianism, reflecting a broader logic that constructs certain populations as “enemies” to be controlled, excluded, or expelled.

Focusing on South Africa, the session examines the relationship between law, space, and survival within a historical context shaped by apartheid, dispossession, and spatial segregation. While the Constitution guarantees dignity, equality, and transformation, many communities continue to face evictions, exclusion from urban space, and xenophobic enforcement practices. The session highlights the gap between formal rights and lived realities.

Through case studies and practitioner insights, participants will explore how law can function both as a tool of protection and a mechanism of exclusion. The session creates space to reflect on what it means to practice law in contexts where survival—rather than the full realization of rights—shapes daily life.

A transnational lens will connect the South African experience with other contexts, including the United States and Indonesia, where migration has become a key site of authoritarian politics. Participants will examine how anti-migrant policies, border enforcement, detention, labor precarity, and exclusionary narratives are used to redefine belonging, alongside grassroots strategies of resistance, protection, and solidarity.

Learning objectives
By the end of the session, participants will be able to:

• Understand how xenophobia functions within contemporary authoritarianism

• Analyze the relationship between law, exclusion, and survival in South Africa

• Situate current legal struggles within South Africa’s historical and constitutional context

• Examine how law can both protect and marginalize communities

• Reflect on the role and limits of movement lawyering in contexts of precarity

• Identify practical strategies and challenges from case-based examples

• Draw connections across global contexts and resistance efforts

This session offers a critical analysis of Palestine, grounded in the understanding that ongoing practices constitute genocide under international law. Drawing on recent legal and political analyses, it situates current mass violence within longer histories of colonial dispossession and examines its economic dimensions, including the global networks of profit and complicity that sustain it.

The session will explore Gaza not only as a site of extreme violence, but as a turning point that exposes a broader crisis in the global moral and legal order. In this context, participants will examine the limits of international law and the structural impunity reflected in institutions' inability or unwillingness to respond effectively.

Centering Palestinian voices and experiences, the session will critically assess international law as both a tool for accountability and a system shaped by power asymmetries and selective enforcement. It will also examine the role of states, corporations, and financial systems in sustaining conditions of dispossession and control.

Participants will engage with a wider landscape of legal and economic mechanisms, including sanctions regimes, financial restrictions, banking exclusions, and military supply chains, as well as more informal or indirect forms of coercion that shape everyday life and constrain political agency.

At the same time, the session will highlight the strategies Palestinians have developed to survive and sustain life under these conditions, including informal systems of mutual aid, access to resources, and financial circulation.

Learning objectives
By the end of the session, participants will be able to:

• Analyze Palestine through the lens of genocide and colonial dispossession

• Examine the broader implications for international law and global governance

• Assess patterns of impunity and the limits of existing legal frameworks

• Understand the role of economic and financial systems in sustaining dispossession

• Draw connections to other contexts of violence, extraction, and territorial control

• Identify possibilities for solidarity, accompaniment, and collective action

• Engage with Palestinian experiences of survival, resilience, and resistance

This session explores how authoritarianism operates through surveillance, digital control, and the growing concentration of power in large technology companies. It examines how states and tech actors converge in practices of monitoring, criminalization, and data extraction, reshaping the conditions under which movements, communities, and civil society organize and resist.

The session will open with the experience of CAJAR (Colombia), reflecting on decades of surveillance, persecution, and criminalization of movement lawyers and human rights defenders, as well as the strategies developed to sustain their work over time. From this foundation, the discussion expands to the broader landscape of digital surveillance and technological power.

A digital security expert will examine how surveillance technologies are used by both states and private actors, and what this means for dissent, civic space, and democratic life. The session will also highlight practical strategies for protection, adaptation, and resistance.

A transnational dialogue will bring in experiences from countries such as India, Egypt, and Uganda, highlighting how activists and organizations are navigating repression, surveillance, and restrictions on civic space.

By connecting these experiences, the session fosters collective reflection on personal, organizational, and digital security, while strengthening the exchange of concrete protection strategies across contexts.

Learning objectives
By the end of the session, participants will be able to:

• Identify patterns of repression targeting movements across contexts

• Analyze how surveillance and concentrated tech power shape civic space

• Learn from strategies used to resist and navigate repression

• Strengthen approaches to personal, organizational, and digital security

This session examines how justice systems operate under rising authoritarianism, focusing on both their potential as sites of contestation and their structural limitations.

For social movements, courts have always been spaces of tension. They can offer avenues for protecting rights and challenging abuses, but they are also shaped by exclusion, criminalization, and unequal access to justice. In authoritarian contexts, these tensions intensify.

Participants will explore how courts are being reshaped through processes such as judicial capture, court-packing, political pressure, and executive interference. At the same time, the session will examine how law itself is increasingly used to concentrate power, criminalize dissent, and legitimize repression.

Grounded in experiences from countries such as India, Poland, and Tunisia, the session will analyze how courts respond under pressure—including moments of resistance, accommodation, and institutional fragility. It will also address current challenges, such as the sidelining of judicial decisions and the erosion of judicial independence.

By bringing these experiences into dialogue, the session aims to support a more grounded and strategic understanding of how movements can engage with courts as part of broader efforts to confront authoritarianism.

Learning objectives
By the end of the session, participants will be able to:

• Analyze the role of courts under authoritarian pressure, including both potential and limits

• Identify key patterns such as judicial capture, court-packing, and executive interference

• Learn from diverse experiences of judicial response across contexts

• Assess how courts can be used strategically within movement lawyering

This session starts from a central premise: authoritarian power depends on containing dissent. Repression is not incidental—it is a core strategy for maintaining control. At the same time, movements and communities continue to resist, adapt, and sustain collective action.

The session examines both sides of this dynamic: how civic space is restricted and how resistance takes shape in response.

Participants will explore how repression operates through the criminalization of protest, police violence, militarized security, attacks on journalists, and surveillance of activists and organizations. These practices are reinforced through legal, political, and administrative frameworks.

Drawing on examples from Argentina and Colombia, the session highlights how public space becomes a site of control through policing, administrative measures, and targeted enforcement against specific groups. It will also examine the use of so-called “less-lethal” weapons and their role in producing harm and fear.

The session situates these trends within a broader global contraction of civic space, including the use of “foreign agent” laws, counterterrorism frameworks, and funding restrictions. It will also address the increasing criminalization of solidarity, including repression of Palestine-related advocacy.

At the same time, the session explores how movements sustain themselves under these conditions, highlighting strategies for protection, collective care, and long-term resilience.

By bringing these experiences into dialogue, the session supports a more grounded understanding of repression and the strategies that enable movements to persist.

Learning objectives
By the end of the session, participants will be able to:

• Analyze repression as a core feature of authoritarianism

• Identify how civic space is restricted across contexts

• Examine how public space is controlled and selectively enforced

• Understand the criminalization of solidarity and its impacts

• Engage with strategies for protection, care, and resilience

• Assess law as both a tool of repression and a site of struggle
  

This closing session builds on the core themes of the Survival Dialogues—repression, shrinking civic space, institutional breakdown, and the many ways authoritarianism constrains life and political possibility. It turns to a forward-looking question: how do communities continue to live, organize, and create under these conditions?

The session begins from a shared conviction: even as institutions fail or are captured, communities continue to build. In the spaces between and beyond formal structures, people sustain networks of care, solidarity, and collective survival—creating meaning and possibility in the midst of uncertainty.

Grounded in experiences shaped by occupation, dictatorship, racial segregation, displacement, and political persecution, the session approaches survival not simply as endurance, but as a collective and political practice. It recognizes that authoritarianism targets not only rights and institutions, but also memory, culture, relationships, and the capacity to imagine futures.

The session will explore how movements sustain themselves through care, mutual aid, cultural expression, and solidarity. It understands hope not as optimism, but as something practiced—built through struggle, memory, imagination, and the refusal to give up on one another.

Centering voices from communities actively resisting and rebuilding, the session creates space for reflection, connection, and shared learning across contexts—an offering in support of continued struggle and collective possibility.

Learning objectives:
By the end of the session, participants will be able to:

• Understand survival as a collective and political practice

• Reflect on how communities sustain resistance under conditions of violence and repression

• Identify the role of care, culture, and collective memory in sustaining movements

• Analyze how communities create spaces of protection and belonging

• Share strategies for sustaining hope, connection, and political imagination

• Strengthen transnational solidarity and ongoing collaboration