Taking Action What We Can Learn From Resistance

When do people offer resistance... or fail to do so? This longread examines how people in authoritarian societies shape their behaviour. When do they adapt and what pushes them to rebel? What do they perceive as too great risks and what are opportunities? To what extent are they prepared to adjust their previous ideas about right and wrong? Based on examples from the period around the Second World War, as well as from later times, we look for the small, everyday things people need to negotiate in an authoritarian system and the things we can learn from them. In this way, resistance takes on a current dimension as well as an historical one.