Today, autocratization is the predominant trend of regime development. However, if we focus on autocratization as democratic erosion or decline, such a trend is not matched by an equivalent increase in the number of democratic breakdowns or autocracies. Why (and how) do some democracies survive autocratization, while others do not? Current research on autocratization has recently turned toward studies on democratic endurance. In particular, mostly large-N contributions focusing on structural factors protecting democracy from autocratization onset (democratic resilience) have lately been complemented by numerous small-N contributions exploring concrete actions that can stop ongoing autocratization processes before democratic breakdown (democratic resistance). However, due to its necessarily limited scope, such qualitative evidence on democratic resistance may be subject to internal and external validity issues. Therefore, we systematically advance the research on resistance to autocratization within a comparative framework. Using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, we examine 69 autocratization episodes that began in democracies in the 21st century (2000–23). Our analysis reveals the combinations of institutional, political, social, and external conditions of democratic resistance that impede democratic collapse during autocratization episodes. While the success of individual actions is mainly context-specific, we demonstrate that it is the cooperation across various areas of resistance (unity makes strength) that characterizes the multiple, and cross-nationally robust, sufficient configurations of democratic survival during autocratization processes. Through alternative analytical choices, robustness tests, and integration of sources, we bolster the validity of prior studies on democratic resistance to autocratization and point to further research avenues.

For the Palestinian people, psychic life is just as much a site of struggle for liberation as social life. Palestinians are persistently refused psychological amplitude, characteristics easily granted to those who are never worried they might fall out of what is constituted as the category of the human. Abdaljawad Omar’s writings in English published since October 7, 2023 (as well as writings by other Palestinians, other Arabs, and those of Palestinian descent) offer means of understanding material resistance in relation to the terrain of the psyche. Omar offers distinctive accounts of mourning, loss, and ruins, as well as of how settler colonialism reorganizes experiences of time and relations between past, present, and future. The article reads Omar’s writings against other accounts of mourning and of psychic phenomena that are indebted to psychoanalysis. Omar’s analyses of Palestinians’ resistance to unfreedom and annihilation open up other ways of understanding the psychic vicissitudes of those who suffer, grieve, and struggle to exit a colonial condition characterized by the colonizer’s repeated attempts to break psychic worlds as well as erase bodily life. Understandings of psychic life that do justice to how Palestine is redrawing the world are central to the work of ‘cracking history open’.

After introducing the topic of antifascism on the internet and the issues that scientific publications encounter when facing the web, the first part of this contribution in Contexts and Debates examined the first of three digital history projects connected to this topic, the Atlante delle stragi naziste e fasciste. In this following section, the attention is focused on two more publications: IF – Intellettuali in fuga dall’Italia fascista, a project tied to the issue of mobility for people persecuted by the Fascist regime; and Memorie in Cammino, a project that approaches its content and the user’s interaction with it in an entirely non-linear manner, reconstructing the lives and actions of those who resisted the regime.

This article examines the debated relationship between liberal-democratic politics and states of exception in conditions of emergency. After Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, it is often maintained that today we live in a situation of perennial exceptionalism, where emergency measures have become a regular practice even by governments we name ‘democratic’. In these circumstances, exception is deemed to threaten democracy and hinder individual and collective political agency. Yet, such interpretation remains rigidly focused on the expanded governmental powers ushered by the exception. The article first unpacks how the relationship between exception and democracy has been differently addressed by juridical and biopolitical approaches. Then, it attempts an alternative heuristic: it discusses possibilities of democratic associative practices in emergency by looking at the notion of resistance that Michel Foucault links with power. This route remains unexplored in the literature on the concept of the exception.

Non-profit organisations are under increasing pressure to demonstrate their social impact. This paper examines the experience and behaviour of non-profit organisations in the UK in relation to a demand for social impact evaluations. External resource providers request organisations to present evidence on how resources are used and what organisations have achieved. While most organisations are willing to comply and accept this control, they can also resist through using their discretion in deciding what to measure, how to measure and what to report. Non-profit organisations can proactively and voluntarily use social impact measurement for learning and promotional purposes, and as a way of exerting control over their environment. The analysis develops the concept of strategic decoupling to explain the differences observed between what organisations are asked to do, what they plan to do and what they are doing in practice.

The influence of the state policy agenda though a neo-liberal contracted funding environment is redefining the boundaries of the third sector through a process of hybridisation. Hybridised organisations adapt to possess characteristics and logics of multiple sectors (public, private or community). Increasing hybridity within the New Zealand community and voluntary sector has resulted in a perceived dichotomy separating organisations that adapt to these challenges from those that resist. In this paper, we apply a hybridity lens to seven community development organisations, who have predominantly resisted marketisation and alignment with the state policy agenda, to assess the extent of their hybridity and how this has impacted on their place in the community and voluntary sector and access to funding opportunities available from the state.

This article examines the ceramic art practice manga allpa awana by Amazonian Kichwa women in Ecuador, focusing especially on three elderly women from Sarayaku in Sucumbios, who exemplify how elder women embody the millenary knowledge this art form withholds. This practice is inseparable from the Kichwa cosmovision, which centres the harmonious relational existence within Kawsak Sacha—the living, breathing, and sentient forest. Practising manga allpa awana therefore demands not only artistic skill but also a scientific and relational understanding of the forest. By foregrounding the material, spiritual, and epistemic dimensions of this relational art and science, the authors propose a decolonial rethinking of both “art” and “science,” showing how Indigenous relational knowledge transcends hegemonic approaches to these fields. Furthermore, the practice challenges an external colonial model that seeks to homogenise and erase the multiple worlds of the pluriverse. In this light, safeguarding manga allpa awana constitutes a central pillar of Indigenous resistance for the protection of territories, biodiversity, planetary life and futures of liberation.

Although Franco’s dictatorship in Spain was rooted in the repression of the labor movement and the working class, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed political and social changes that enabled the anti-Franco unions to achieve better conditions for workers. However, domestic workers were denied these improvements due to their exclusion from the formal labor system. This exclusion kept domestic workers in the informal sector and ensured their continued feminization and precarity. This article contributes to debates on the level of coercion in non-productive work by examining labor discipline in the Spanish domestic service during the 1960s and 1970s. It follows Marcel van der Linden’s proposal to focus on three defining stages of labor discipline: entry, work and exit. Although the working conditions and identities of Spanish domestic workers in the 1960s and 1970s have been studied, coercion and resistance have rarely been put at the center of analysis. Doing so introduces Spanish domestic labor into the study of coerced work, showing how it was affected by global features such as migration, feminization, all-day work, and control over workers’ bodies. This paper sees labor discipline as dialectically constructed, shaped by both adherence to and negation of established norms. Therefore, it is important to study both how domestic workers complied with rules set by employers and how everyday forms of resistance challenged labor discipline and thus contributed to its refinement. Some of these forms of resistance (petty theft, change of employment) caused confrontation, while others (marriage) fell within accepted moral and legal boundaries. The article is based on a wide range of sources, including surveys and reports by Catholic working-class organizations, letters sent by domestic workers to the Elena Francis radio advice program, and court records and newspaper reports about domestic workers’ theft. These sources make it possible to analyze labor discipline from different perspectives, showing variation in mistresses’ coercive measures, domestic workers’ attitude towards coercion, and autonomous practices against household discipline. While this paper focuses specifically on the intersection between class and gender in late Franco Spain, it contributes to labor and coercion studies in other geographical and historical contexts.

I argue that attempts to integrate marginalized epistemic standpoints into dominant frameworks risk treating them as resources for mainstream appropriation. Using a queer activist slogan from the AIDS crisis as a representative example, I warn that because knowledge forged in resistance is often oppositional and always situated, incorporating it into dominant frameworks can dilute its meaning or harm its creators. This points to a deeper tension within standpoint theory: emancipatory projects that seek to engage marginalized imaginaries can reproduce the very hierarchies they aim to dismantle when they fail to recognize these standpoints’ own priorities, limits, and forms of gatekeeping.