Jonathan Stray (@jonathanstray180913)

Human Rights | Bridge EU

Bridge EU aims to provide strategic support to bridge the gap between recent social and human rights challenges and policies across Europe.

Building on the Fight Oligarchy Tour: It’s Time to Reboot America

A Call for a Big-Tent Movement

Their Side Is Organized; We Need to Be Organized, Too

Trump and his far-right acolytes wield their power to disinvest from public services, terrorize our neighborhoods with ICE agents, and ensure that opposition to genocide becomes a fireable, and deportable, offense. In the face of these grim and terrifying developments, it could scarcely be more urgent that we learn lessons from movements and organizing traditions that confronted repression, surveillance, and powerful opposition in the (recent and distant) past. We’ve put together a reading list of key books to help inform ongoing efforts to build and sustain durable organizations, and forge effective strategies, for both short term survival and long term social transformation. What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe. “Anyone trying to rebuild an effective U.S. labor movement needs to read Class Struggle Unionism by Joe Burns. He lays out the fundamental principles that UE has tried to uphold for the last 85 years. For a union to be worthwhile to the working class, it needs to know which side it is on and it has to recognize that the fight itself is what allows workers to gain the knowledge and power they need.”—Carl Rosen From two co-founders of the largest tenants union in the country, this deeply reported account of the resurgent tenant movement centers poor and working-class people who are fighting back, staying put, and remaking the city in the process. A collection of essays from the Stop Cop City movement on the fight for police abolition and for a liveable planet for all, with gripping reporting from activists on the ground and rousing articles from renowned radical academics. In this remarkable collaborative work, leading scholar-activists Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie surface the often unrecognized genealogies of queer, anti-capitalist, internationalist, grassroots, and women-of-color-led feminist movements, struggles, and organizations that have helped to define abolition and feminism in the twenty-first century. This guide, based on the collective experience of organizers and workers in non-unionized workplaces, is a critical tool to help you and your coworkers organize for justice at work.  Drawing from over twenty years of activism on local and national levels, this striking book offers an organizer’s perspective on the intersections of immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition. At a political moment when Liberatory Harm Reduction and mutual aid are more important than ever, this book serves as an inspiration and a catalyst for radical transformation of our world. Even the River Starts Small is a collection from the movement to stop construction of the Line 3 pipeline through northern Minnesota, featuring anonymous writing, art, and photos spanning nearly a decade, and including reflections on many of the diverse experiences that made up this grassroots resistance. “Tracing revolutionary uprisings from 1989 to 2019, this book is a map of resistance and resilience in the face of tremendous odds. The case studies, as well as the introductory essay, lead us through situations where the victory of capitalism over humanity was anything but assured. And yet the book is not a wistful history about what could have been. Rather, it is a strategic assessment of near-victories to prepare us for the fire next time.” —Tithi Bhattacharya As isolated individuals, debtors have little influence. But as a bloc, we can leverage our debts and devise new tactics to challenge the corporate creditor class and help win reparative, universal public goods. Individually, our debts overwhelm us. But together, our debts can make us powerful. What does the politics of solidarity look like in practice, and how can left-wing organizations grow—in numbers and power—while remaining accountable to the broader movements of which they are a part? An oral history and critical genealogy of “accountability,” the complex abolitionist concept that pushes us to ask: just what do we mean by “community?” Environmentalism from Below takes readers inside the popular struggles for environmental liberation in the Global South. These communities—among the most vulnerable to but also least responsible for the climate crisis—have long been at the forefront of the fight to protect imperiled worlds. This volume—the Socialist Register’s first-ever reader—grapples with the question of whether political organization is a necessary part of the struggle by the working-class to overthrow capitalism. In pieces published over the course of publication’s entire history contributors, from Ralph Miliband to Jean-Paul Satre, examine various aspects of this theme. The Socialist Challenge Today presents an essential historical, theoretical, and critical perspective for understanding the potential as well as the limits of three important recent phenomena: the Sanders electoral insurgency in the United States; the Syriza experience in Greece; and Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom. This book surveys revolutionary socialist ideas and engages a gallery of contentious political thinkers, offering an indispensable assessment of the place of revolutionary collectives in this radical tradition. A trenchant history of community organizing and a must-read for the next generation of organizers seeking to learn from the successes, failures, and contradictions of the past. In an era of stark racial injustice, Aaron Dixon dedicated his life to revolution, founding the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968 at age nineteen. In My People Are Rising, he traces the course of his own radicalization, and that of a generation. SNCC: The New Abolitionists influenced a generation of activists struggling for civil rights and seeking to learn from the successes and failures of those who built the fantastically influential Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.  Detroit: I Do Mind Dying tracks the extraordinary development of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers as they became two of the landmark political organizations of the 1960s and 1970s. It is widely heralded as one the most important books on the Black liberation movement. A landmark account of a key radical feminist organization, offering lessons for today’s women’s liberation movement. Boston Female Liberation member Nancy Rosenstock expertly weaves together the reflections of her fellow-activists, describing how they became feminists, recounting the breadth of their organizing work, and linking their achievements and experience to contemporary struggles against sexism. In this rousing and insightful participant's account, Hal Draper recounts the now iconic events of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. From the impromptu speak out atop a police car after the administration decided to clamp down on students “distributing communist literature,” to the inspiring Student Strike that shut down the entire campus, Draper's narrative captures the energy and dynamism of each twist and turn in the struggle, and offers invaluable analysis along the way. From the dawning of the industrial epoch, wage earners have organized themselves into unions, fought bitter strikes, and gone so far as to challenge the very premises of the system by creating institutions of democratic self-management aimed at controlling production without bosses. During the first two decades of the twentieth century the ideas of revolutionary syndicalism developed into a major influence within the trade union movement. Committed to destroying capitalism through direct industrial action and revolutionary trade union struggle, the movement raised fundamental questions for activists across the world. In this thorough, concise, and accessible introduction to Lenin’s theory and practice of revolutionary politics, Paul Le Blanc gives a vibrant sense of the historical context of the socialist movement (in Russia and abroad) from which Lenin’s ideas about revolutionary organization spring. What emerges from Le Blanc’s partisan yet measured account is an image of a collaborative, ever adaptive, and dynamically engaged network of revolutionary activists who formed the core of the Bolshevik party.

The Great Realignment: Why the New Right Is Here to Stay

The re-election of Donald Trump has illustrated in spectacular fashion the extent to which politics all over the world is in a state of continual flux. Old political configurations and parties are under unprecedented strain, with new forces, particularly on the hard right, challenging the status quo everywhere. Rejecting stale analyses based on moralistic panics about 'populism' or social media, political commentator Steve Davies shows how we are going through a deep-seated process of realignment rooted in underlying structural trends. We are transitioning, he argues, from an era where the key political division was over the economic structure of society to one where the primary division is between a vision rooted in national identity and sovereignty, and an essentially post-national cosmopolitanism. This change upends the ideological and electoral alliances that have structured our political systems for decades. No-one who wishes to truly understand the crises currently roiling the political status quo can afford to miss this stunning panoramic analysis of how this process works and how it is playing out across the world, from the USA and Germany to Argentina and India, and beyond.

From Fragments to Force: A Call to Unite the Pro-Democracy Movement

There is no shortage of organizations, campaigns, and visionary individuals working to defend and renew American democracy.

Bridges & scruples

For your own sanity, you have to remember that not all problems can be solved. Not all problems can be solved, but all problems can be illuminated. —Ursula Franklin

The Return of the Cutting-Off Way

Structural changes are driving us towards a more chaotic world, defined by "neither peace nor war, but conflict."

On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and a former White House senior advisor, a deeply reported manual for how individuals can resist America's slide away from democracy, based on original interviews with more than 100 dissidents, activists, and theorists across the world. The United States has crossed into a new and unfamiliar realm--one in which daring to challenge the state carries real danger. Ordinary Americans now face a government that feels more like foreign autocracies, with a White House stretching the powers of the presidency beyond recognition. The sitting president wields fear as a weapon, punishes political enemies, intimidates sitting members of Congress, bends private businesses to his will, and disappears student protesters off the streets. Based on their acclaimed The New Yorker essay "So You Want to Be a Dissident: A Practical Guide to Courage in Trump's Age of Fear," Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin and former White House senior advisor Ami Fields-Meyer deliver a guide to courage in America's age of fear. On Courage is a captivating collection of stories and lessons from the front lines of the fight for the future of the free world that invite action and rouse hope. Step into the room where the world's new dissidents--ordinary people, in the U.S. and around the world, who never aspired to be activists--are writing the playbook for courage, risk, and resistance in the age of authoritarianism and unprecedented digital surveillance. On Courage simplifies the calculus of activism by making more accessible than ever the fundamentals of taking political risk. It's a handbook that is equal parts practical and spiritual, a valuable resource and a powerful message for anyone, anywhere, who feels the walls of history closing in on them.

‘A Bible-sized blind spot’: congressman sounds alarm on rising Christian nationalism

In his new book, congressman Jared Huffman argues that theocratic insurgency has only grown more powerful after Donald Trump returned to the White House

Public support for the <i>cordon sanitaire</i> : Descriptive evidence from Spain

Reactions to the rise of far-right parties that advocate democratic backsliding, and the dilution of socially liberal democratic norms present a dilemma for existing political parties. How should existing political parties respond to this challenge? A commonly adopted strategy is to apply a cordon sanitaire which excludes radical right-wing challengers from the government-forming process. Do voters support this policy? Leveraging data from Spain – where the mainstream right has accommodated the radical right-wing party, VOX, via numerous governing coalitions – I rely on individual citizens’ views on how parties should respond to rise of the far-right party, to answer this question. Empirically, the results show very low-level support for the cordon sanitaire in Spain. Indeed, the modal position of the electorate, regardless of their ideological position, is to treat the party just like any other. These results are not conditioned by the propensity of individuals to identify VOX as indeed being a “radical right” party. These descriptive findings suggest that whilst radical right-wing parties may present an inimical threat to democratic norms, citizens do not necessarily view the means of squashing this threat to be one of strategic exclusion. This likely explains why the mainstream right has been able to institutionalise VOX as a political ally: where strategic exclusion is not expected, the mainstream right need not fear violating an expectation that does not exist.

Public support for the <i>cordon sanitaire</i> : Descriptive evidence from Spain

Reactions to the rise of far-right parties that advocate democratic backsliding, and the dilution of socially liberal democratic norms present a dilemma for existing political parties. How should existing political parties respond to this challenge? A commonly adopted strategy is to apply a cordon sanitaire which excludes radical right-wing challengers from the government-forming process. Do voters support this policy? Leveraging data from Spain – where the mainstream right has accommodated the radical right-wing party, VOX, via numerous governing coalitions – I rely on individual citizens’ views on how parties should respond to rise of the far-right party, to answer this question. Empirically, the results show very low-level support for the cordon sanitaire in Spain. Indeed, the modal position of the electorate, regardless of their ideological position, is to treat the party just like any other. These results are not conditioned by the propensity of individuals to identify VOX as indeed being a “radical right” party. These descriptive findings suggest that whilst radical right-wing parties may present an inimical threat to democratic norms, citizens do not necessarily view the means of squashing this threat to be one of strategic exclusion. This likely explains why the mainstream right has been able to institutionalise VOX as a political ally: where strategic exclusion is not expected, the mainstream right need not fear violating an expectation that does not exist.

It’s Not Polarization; It’s the Radicalization of the Political Right

Polarization has become the master concept for diagnosing contemporary democratic crises. The notion denotes three features: symmetry between parties, politics as an opinion space where positions diverge, and mutual repulsion between opposing camps. Yet none of these capture current realities. Across democracies, the central dynamic is not two poles drifting apart but the transformation of the political right into authoritarianism, norm breaking, and openness to political violence. Social democratic and center-right parties tend to respond in the opposite way from what “polarization” implies: by accommodating rightward. Attempts to salvage the polarization frame with modifiers (“asymmetric,” “affective,” “sectarian,” “pernicious”) concede these realities but risk hollowing out the concept’s definitional core. These limitations reveal a deeper misdiagnosis: when one party turns antidemocratic and illiberal, incivility and conflict are inevitable—but they are symptoms, not the root problem. Misdiagnosing them as the central issue leads to viewing civility and compromise as remedies, thereby risking the legitimation of authoritarian actors. This article proposes an alternative lens: the radicalization of the political right. Developed in the study of extremism, the radicalization framework better captures asymmetric change, identity-driven politics, and the mainstreaming of illiberalism. It foregrounds identity fusion, threat narratives, elite entrepreneurship, and escalation. Concepts are never politically innocent and persisting with “polarization” risks both misdiagnosing and normalizing authoritarian threats.

It’s Not Polarization; It’s the Radicalization of the Political Right

Polarization has become the master concept for diagnosing contemporary democratic crises. The notion denotes three features: symmetry between parties, politics as an opinion space where positions diverge, and mutual repulsion between opposing camps. Yet none of these capture current realities. Across democracies, the central dynamic is not two poles drifting apart but the transformation of the political right into authoritarianism, norm breaking, and openness to political violence. Social democratic and center-right parties tend to respond in the opposite way from what “polarization” implies: by accommodating rightward. Attempts to salvage the polarization frame with modifiers (“asymmetric,” “affective,” “sectarian,” “pernicious”) concede these realities but risk hollowing out the concept’s definitional core. These limitations reveal a deeper misdiagnosis: when one party turns antidemocratic and illiberal, incivility and conflict are inevitable—but they are symptoms, not the root problem. Misdiagnosing them as the central issue leads to viewing civility and compromise as remedies, thereby risking the legitimation of authoritarian actors. This article proposes an alternative lens: the radicalization of the political right. Developed in the study of extremism, the radicalization framework better captures asymmetric change, identity-driven politics, and the mainstreaming of illiberalism. It foregrounds identity fusion, threat narratives, elite entrepreneurship, and escalation. Concepts are never politically innocent and persisting with “polarization” risks both misdiagnosing and normalizing authoritarian threats.

Three Days, Six Bridge Strikes: Russia's Kyiv Campaign Moved From the Grid to the Crossings

Coral's Russia-Ukraine and "Trump Kyiv Diplomacy" clusters are large and old, so I went to the reporting instead. The new thing is narrow and checkable: since...

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BRIDGE is a European Commission initiative that brings together projects from Horizon Europe with a focus on smart energy systems, in particular Smart Grid, Energy Storage, and Digitalisation Projects.