The Cockroach Republic — Part 5: Can the Cockroach Survive Its Success?

The movement at a crossroads

Five months later

On October 16, 2026, Abhijeet Dipke was detained and then arrested on his way to a march called Lehra Do Tiranga, wave the tricolour, in central Delhi. The next day he was granted conditional bail; under its terms, he must ensure that there is no breach of the peace for a year. Two of the movement’s co-convenors, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, were in judicial custody after they and a dozen others climbed a locked gate into Jantar Mantar, which had been de-notified as a protest site, and waved the national flag there. Dipke said the movement would gather, restrategise and decide how to move forward once they were released (The Week).

The same report captured a second development that may matter more. The Congress party’s student wing called its own march to Jantar Mantar to demand the Chief Election Commissioner’s resignation, Delhi Police granted the Congress permission for a rally at Ramlila Maidan on November 1, and Congress leaders claimed credit for the Election Commission’s decision to share readable electoral rolls. The cause the cockroaches had carried into the streets was being picked up, and claimed, by the country’s main opposition party.

Five months earlier, the movement was a joke on Instagram. Since then it has gathered tens of millions of followers, forced a minister’s resignation, won concessions from the government and the Election Commission, and become the most visible youth movement India has seen in a generation. It now faces a founder bound to keep the peace, a protest site closed to it, an opponent that has hardened, and an ally that may swallow it. The question is no longer whether the cockroach can survive repression. It is whether it can survive its own success.

This essay argues that the movement’s fate depends less on its enemies than on its own choices, above all on whether it can turn virality into organisation while staying independent of the parties. Social movements rarely die from repression alone. More often they die from the gap between how fast they grow and how slowly they build: they win a moment, then lose the decade.

What the movement has won

Before asking whether the movement can last, it is worth being precise about what it has already achieved, because its gains come in three different currencies.

The first currency is concrete. A Union minister resigned, the first in this government’s tenure to go under public pressure. The government agreed to drop police cases against protesters, the Supreme Court quashed them, and the families of students who died after the leaks were promised compensation. Fast-track courts were announced for exam-leak cases (Khaleej Times). These are the kind of gains that can be listed on a placard, and most movements never win any of them.

The second currency is procedural. The Election Commission ordered a review of its voter-roll software involving an independent technology expert, eased re-enrolment for omitted voters, and agreed to give political parties searchable electoral rolls for the first time in years. The movement cannot claim sole credit for these changes; the opposition had pressed for some of them for two years, and a newspaper investigation into the Commission’s internal disagreements added pressure. But the changes came in the weeks when young protesters were on the streets, and procedural reforms of this kind tend to outlast the moment that produced them.

The third currency is psychological, and it may be the most valuable. Political scientists distinguish between internal efficacy, the belief that one can understand and influence politics, and external efficacy, the belief that the system will respond. A generation that grew up watching protest after protest fizzle had good reason to doubt both. The cockroach movement gave millions of young Indians the experience of acting together and seeing power move. It broke what the first essay of this series called pluralistic ignorance, the private belief that one’s grievance is shared by nobody. It gave a generation a political vocabulary, ironic and self-mocking, that it could use without abandoning family or faith. And because political attitudes formed in the late teens and early twenties tend to last, those experiences may shape how this cohort votes and organises for decades.

There are indirect gains too. The national conversation shifted. In the August Mood of the Nation survey, 47% of respondents said democracy was under threat (The Wire), and analysts now describe the youth vote as a genuine uncertainty for the 2027 state elections and the 2029 general election. Political parties of every stripe have begun courting young voters with an urgency they did not show a year ago.

These are real achievements. But each currency is vulnerable in its own way. Concrete concessions can be quietly reversed when attention moves on, and the five-point exam reform charter the government agreed to discuss has not visibly advanced. Procedural gains can be claimed by others, as the Congress party is already doing. And psychological gains are perishable: a generation that learned in 2026 that protest works could learn in 2027 that it does not, if the movement collapses or is absorbed. What has been won will last only if something is built to defend it.

The skeptics’ case

There is a strong case that the cockroach movement has already peaked, and it deserves to be made in full.

The first argument is about the nature of online movements. From the start, sympathetic observers warned that the movement might prove fleeting even as its rise revealed a deep well of youth frustration (World Politics Review). In late August, the risk-analysis firm RANE forecast that the movement would face greater government resistance, organisational constraints and difficulty broadening its appeal (RANE Worldview). The right’s student wing dismissed it from the beginning as a bid for online fame without roots on the ground. A follower count is not a membership. Twenty million people who tapped a button in May are not twenty million people who will knock on doors in 2027.

The second argument is about structure. The sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, studying protest movements from Tahrir Square to Gezi Park, observed that digital tools allow movements to scale with astonishing speed while skipping the slow work that builds the capacity to negotiate, adapt and change tactics. She called the result a tactical freeze: a movement that can fill a square but cannot decide what to do next. The cockroaches show some of the symptoms. Their founder is personally central, his arrest disrupts everything, and decisions appear to flow from a small circle. Erica Chenoweth’s research shows that the success rate of non-violent campaigns has fallen sharply since 2010 (Pax et Bellum), and she attributes the decline partly to states’ savvier responses and partly to movements that mobilise quickly online without building deep organisation underneath.

The third argument is about India’s own history. The country’s recent past is a graveyard of youth movements that won a moment and lost the decade. The anti-corruption movement of 2011 filled the streets, then split; its most durable product was a political party that eventually lost its own founding city. The protests after the Delhi gang rape of 2012 helped win tougher laws but left no lasting organisation behind. The long sit-in against the citizenship law in 2019 and 2020 ended without its demand being met. As The Wire’s analysis warned at the start, alienation expressed without collective structures tends to end in exhaustion (The Wire).

The fourth argument is about capture. The movement’s founder previously worked as a communications strategist for the Aam Aadmi Party (The News). Its October campaign targets an official whom the Congress party had been attacking for more than a year. Congress leaders now claim its victories, and Congress’s student wing now leads marches on its issue. A movement that becomes, in the public mind, the youth wing of the opposition loses the very thing that made it powerful: its claim to speak for young people across political lines, including many from families that vote for the BJP.

The fifth argument is that the new target may be unwinnable. Forcing a minister out over a leaked exam was a contained demand on a government that could afford to concede it. Removing a Chief Election Commissioner is a different order of task, constitutionally and politically, as a later section explains. A movement that stakes everything on an impossible demand risks teaching its supporters that protest fails after all.

The skeptics may be right. But their case describes risks, not destiny. The same history that is full of movements that faded also contains movements that endured, from the campaign that won India’s Right to Information Act to the farmers who forced the repeal of three laws. What separated the two groups was not the size of their crowds. It was what they built underneath them.

Bonds with bodies

If one finding stands out from a century of research on social movements, it is that durable movements rest on relationships, not just on numbers.

The sociologist Doug McAdam showed this in his study of Freedom Summer, the 1964 campaign that sent volunteers into Mississippi to register Black voters. Among hundreds of applicants, what predicted who actually went, and who stayed in activism afterwards, was not the intensity of their beliefs. It was their ties: membership in organisations and friendships with others who were going. Mark Granovetter’s distinction between weak ties and strong ties helps explain why. Weak ties, the acquaintances and casual connections that social media multiplies endlessly, spread information quickly and widely. Strong ties, the close bonds of friends, families and teams, are what sustain people through risk, boredom and defeat. Online movements are built of weak ties. They spread like fire and burn out like it too.

The movements that endure have usually found a way to convert the first kind of tie into the second. The farmers’ protest of 2020 and 2021 is the clearest Indian example. It was led by a coalition of dozens of farmer unions, many of them decades old, organised in the Samyukt Kisan Morcha. Villages sent their members to the protest sites in rotation, so that no one was exhausted and the sites were never empty. Community kitchens fed protesters and passers-by alike, and the sit-ins became small, self-governing towns. The movement held for more than a year and won. In Nepal, the Gen Z uprising of 2025 is often described as a Discord revolution, but the youth organisation at its heart, Hami Nepal, had spent years doing disaster relief on the ground before it ever organised online. The digital mobilisation sat on top of offline bonds built through service.

The cockroach movement has more of this than its critics allow. More than 350,000 people signed up in its first days, beyond the millions who merely followed (GDELT, via Wikipedia). It held protests in dozens of cities, ran clean-up drives in cockroach costumes, and drew Sikh service volunteers, parents and veterans to its sit-in. Its Fix Schools campaign, in which volunteers audited government schools, was a genuine attempt at constructive action, and it drew enough attention to provoke attacks and police action (Al Jazeera). These are the seeds of an organisation. They are not yet an organisation.

The Harvard organiser Marshall Ganz, who trained organisers for Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers and later for the Obama campaign, describes what turning supporters into an organisation requires. Leadership must be distributed, so that the movement does not depend on any single person and can survive arrests. Teams must be small enough for members to know and rely on one another, with clear roles and regular meetings. And every team must be led by someone who is developing the next leader. Ganz calls it a snowflake: a structure of linked teams in which leadership spreads outward rather than being concentrated at the centre.

For the cockroaches, this would mean converting followers into members, members into local teams, and teams into a federation with elected local leaders, so that the movement could continue even if its founder were silenced. It would mean using service, school audits, clean-up drives and help for students facing exams, not only as good works but as the shared activity that turns acquaintances into comrades. Gandhi understood this. He paired every campaign of protest with what he called a constructive programme of spinning, sanitation, education and village work, because he knew that protest mobilises people while constructive work holds them together between protests. A movement of cockroaches needs its own constructive programme.

Why the second fight is harder

The movement’s first campaign was, in retrospect, almost ideally designed to win. Its grievance, a leaked medical entrance exam, touched millions of families regardless of their politics. Its target, an education minister, was a political appointee whom the government could replace without conceding anything about its own legitimacy. Its demand was concrete and achievable. The second campaign, against the Chief Election Commissioner, has almost none of these advantages.

The first difficulty is constitutional. Under Article 324 of the Constitution, the Chief Election Commissioner can be removed only in the same manner and on the same grounds as a judge of the Supreme Court, which in practice means impeachment by a special majority in both houses of Parliament. The framers designed the office to be insulated from political pressure, and that insulation does not distinguish between pressure from the government and pressure from the street. A demand for resignation, in other words, is a demand that the officer himself, or the government that appointed him, can simply refuse.

The second difficulty is legal and empirical. In May 2026, the Supreme Court upheld the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls, while ruling that the Commission cannot itself decide questions of citizenship (Reuters, via ARY). The scale of the alleged harm is contested. Congress leaders say the revision has put the right to vote of more than 130 million Indians at risk (The Week); the Commission says it removed duplicate, deceased and fraudulent entries and that anyone wrongly deleted can apply to be restored (Dawn). A campaign built on a disputed number is vulnerable in a way that a campaign built on a cancelled exam is not.

The third difficulty is partisan. The integrity of the rolls was the opposition’s cause long before it was the movement’s, and the opposition is now reclaiming it, with marches, rallies and claims of credit. The more the campaign looks like the Congress party’s campaign, the less it can draw on the young people from BJP-voting families whose presence made the NEET protests so hard to dismiss.

The fourth difficulty is the state’s posture. Having conceded once, the government has hardened. Jantar Mantar has been de-notified as a protest site, the movement’s leaders have been arrested, and the founder is under a bond to keep the peace. The cheap concession has already been made; what remains on the table is expensive.

None of this means the movement should abandon electoral integrity, which is arguably the most important issue it has taken up. It means it should change the shape of the demand. A campaign for the commissioner’s resignation is personal, partisan and, in all likelihood, unwinnable. A campaign for verifiable standards is none of those things: an independent audit of deletions, publication of deletion data with reasons in a form anyone can check, re-enrolment camps in every district, and a reform of the appointment process agreed across parties. Such demands are measurable, so progress can be shown. They are winnable in stages, so morale can be sustained; the readable rolls conceded in October are exactly such a stage. And they speak to every voter, because a wrongly deleted name in a BJP-voting household is as much a loss as one in any other. The movement’s strongest position is not against a man. It is for a standard that no party could openly oppose.

The party question

Sooner or later, every successful protest movement in a democracy faces the same temptation: to become a party. The cockroaches have so far resisted it. In August, Dipke told Reuters that forming a political party was not a solution in India at the moment, though he would consider it if a majority of supporters wanted one; analysts suggested that while the movement was unlikely to damage the BJP badly in the 2027 state elections, it could become a bigger factor by 2029 if it turned itself into a party (Reuters, via Aaj News). Others have not waited. A lawyer in Panipat applied to the Election Commission to register the Cockroach Janta Party as a political party under his own leadership, sidelining the founder altogether (WION). Even the cockroach itself could not survive the transition: the Election Commission no longer allots animals as election symbols.

The recent history of movements that became parties is sobering, and it points in several directions at once.

India’s own precedent is the Aam Aadmi Party, born in 2012 from the anti-corruption movement. It achieved what no youth movement had managed before, winning Delhi in 2013, sweeping 67 of its 70 seats in 2015 and later taking Punjab. But the transition split the movement that produced it. Its figurehead, Anna Hazare, stayed out of party politics, and several of its founding intellectuals were expelled within three years. In February 2025, the party lost Delhi, and its leader lost his own seat. Becoming a party gave the movement power. It also spent its moral capital, turning a cause that belonged to everyone into a party that belonged to some.

Bangladesh offers a starker warning. The students who toppled Sheikh Hasina in 2024 formed the National Citizen Party, which once predicted it would win half the seats in parliament. In the February 2026 election, contesting as part of an alliance led by Jamaat-e-Islami, it won six of the thirty seats it fought (bdnews24), while the established Bangladesh Nationalist Party won a sweeping majority (Al Jazeera). Bringing down a government and building a party that can win one turned out to be entirely different skills.

Nepal offers the counterexample, but its lesson is subtler than it looks. After the Gen Z uprising of 2025, the movement did not found its own party. Its energy flowed into an existing young party, which won a historic landslide in March 2026 (The New York Times, via Hawaii Tribune-Herald). Sri Lanka followed a similar path, when the energy of the 2022 Aragalaya protests helped carry an established opposition coalition to power two years later. And this month, Serbia’s students are testing a third model, fielding an electoral list of professors, teachers and experts rather than turning their movement directly into a party (AP, via NY1).

The pattern across these cases is consistent. Founding a new party from a protest movement is the hardest road to power and the likeliest to fail. Movements usually win electorally by channelling their energy through an existing vehicle, or by staying outside electoral politics and holding every party to account. For the cockroaches, the second path looks wiser for now. A party would immediately make the movement one competitor among many, invite accusations that it was a front for the opposition from the start, and force it to take positions on dozens of issues that would divide its broad base. A pressure group, by contrast, can keep its coalition intact, set the agenda for all parties, and reserve the option of contesting later, once it has built the local organisation that any party would need. If it ever does take the electoral road, the sequence matters: first campus and municipal elections, where organisation can be tested and leaders developed, and only then the state and national stage.

A resilience doctrine

Nearly every pressure a government can apply to a movement works best against movements that are centralised, partisan, undisciplined, opaque or exhausted. A movement that wants to last can therefore be designed to be the opposite, and the lessons of 2026 suggest what such a design would involve.

The first element is legal resilience. Every major city needs a standing panel of lawyers on call during actions, and every participant needs to know their rights on arrest under the Supreme Court’s guidelines in the D. K. Basu and Arnesh Kumar cases, and the constitutional requirement that anyone arrested be produced before a magistrate within twenty-four hours. Cases must be tracked and pursued to quashing, as the July cases were, because pending cases can complicate the police verification that government jobs require, and many of the movement’s supporters want exactly those jobs. Criticism of judges should stay focused on their remarks and rulings, given the reach of contempt law. And the movement’s name and identity need legal protection, through a registered trust or society and a trademark. The Panipat registration attempt shows how easily a brand without an owner can be taken.

The second element is digital resilience. The movement has already lived through a withheld account, a hacked page and a downed website. It needs redundancy across platforms, secure administration of official accounts, a single verified channel for statements announced in advance so that forgeries and deepfakes can be dismissed instantly, and training in privacy for members, above all for the women who drew the worst of the harassment. It also needs a plan for the next internet shutdown, which means meeting points and phone trees that do not depend on the network.

The third element is non-violent discipline. The movement’s moral authority rests on the images of July: linked arms, the anthem, protesters stopping stone-throwers in their own ranks. That authority can be lost in an afternoon. Large actions need trained marshals, legal observers, medics and a liaison with the police, and every participant should take a public pledge of non-violence before joining. Acts of civil disobedience, such as climbing into a de-notified protest site, are part of the tradition the movement claims, but they work only when they are chosen deliberately, announced openly and accepted with their consequences, as Gandhi’s were. Above all, the movement should stay away from the places where confrontation is being invited. Nothing would serve its opponents better than a scuffle at a Ramlila ground.

The fourth element is inclusion. The movement’s strength in the NEET phase was its breadth: urban and small-town, devout and secular, from BJP-voting and opposition-voting families alike. That breadth is also its best defence against attempts to divide it. It requires leaders who visibly reflect the country, including Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim and women leaders; communication in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi and other languages rather than English alone; immediate solidarity when its most vulnerable members are targeted; and a respectful posture towards faith, so that no young person feels forced to choose between devotion and dissent.

The fifth element is transparency. A movement accused of being engineered or funded by others answers best by publishing its accounts, accepting only small domestic donations with receipts, and having its finances audited independently. It should also publish its decision-making rules, so that supporters can see how choices are made and disagreements can be settled without splits.

The sixth element is pacing. Movements burn out when they ask too much for too long. The cockroaches should alternate periods of mobilisation and rest, time major actions to parliamentary sessions and avoid examination weeks, look after the mental health of their volunteers, and celebrate partial victories so that supporters can see that effort produces results. The farmers held out for more than a year by rotating their people. A movement of students and young job-seekers will need its own rotation.

A pressure group’s toolkit

If the movement chooses, for now, to remain a pressure group rather than a party, it will need ways to exert pressure that do not depend on filling a protest site. India’s own history offers a model. The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, a small organisation of workers and farmers in rural Rajasthan, spent a decade in the 1990s holding public hearings at which villagers compared official records of public works with what had actually been built. Its slogan was simple: our money, our accounts. That patient campaign grew into a national movement and, in 2005, into the Right to Information Act, one of the most consequential laws of modern India. It never became a party. It changed the rules for everyone.

The cockroaches could build a similar toolkit, beginning with a ladder of demands. A movement that asks only for things it cannot get teaches its members that protest is futile; a movement that climbs a ladder of demands, each one measurable and winnable, teaches them the opposite. On exams, the ladder might run from publishing the status of the five-point charter, to an independent and accountable examinations authority, to a law guaranteeing transparent recruitment calendars for government jobs. On elections, it might run from published deletion data, to district re-enrolment camps, to an appointments process agreed across parties.

The second tool is the institutional track. Alongside the street, the movement can file requests under the Right to Information Act for data on exam leaks and roll deletions, support public interest litigation, brief sympathetic legislators from every party to ask parliamentary questions, and make formal submissions to the Election Commission. Institutions respond to evidence and procedure in ways they rarely respond to crowds, and every answer obtained becomes material for the next campaign.

The third tool is electoral leverage without a party. Before the 2027 state elections in Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere, the movement could ask every candidate, of every party, to sign a short public pledge on exam integrity, recruitment and roll transparency, and publish who signed and who refused. It could issue report cards on legislators’ records on youth issues. Above all, it could run voter registration and re-enrolment drives, helping young people and wrongly deleted voters file the forms to get onto the rolls. Nothing would answer the charge that the movement is a partisan front more effectively than helping citizens of every political stripe to vote. Nothing would answer the deletions more directly either.

The fourth tool is evidence. Working with academics, data journalists and statisticians, the movement can produce research on exam leaks, recruitment delays and the electoral rolls that is rigorous enough to withstand hostile scrutiny. Exaggerated numbers are easy to refute and costly to a movement’s credibility. Careful numbers become hard for anyone to ignore.

The fifth tool is the constructive programme described earlier: school audits, help desks for exam candidates, clean-up drives and service in times of crisis. These activities keep members engaged between protests, recruit people who would never attend a rally, and demonstrate, against the charge that the young are lazy and useless, that this generation builds things. A movement that began by accepting the label of a pest can make no better reply than to become indispensable.

Lessons from elsewhere

Set the cockroach movement beside the great youth and protest movements of the past century, and the difference between those that lasted and those that faded turns out to have little to do with size, passion or even repression. It has to do with four things.

The first is organisation beneath the mobilisation. The American civil rights movement is remembered for its marches and speeches, but it ran on churches, colleges and organisations such as the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The Montgomery bus boycott lasted 381 days because Black churches organised carpools that let tens of thousands of people get to work without the buses. Its legislative victories, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, were the product of that infrastructure as much as of moral witness. Egypt’s young revolutionaries of 2011, by contrast, filled Tahrir Square and toppled Hosni Mubarak in eighteen days, but they had built no organisation of their own. The elections that followed were won by the best-organised force in the country, the Muslim Brotherhood, and within two and a half years the army had taken power again.

The second is demands that can be won and recognised. Hong Kong’s protesters of 2019 had five clear demands, and they won one of them, the withdrawal of the extradition bill. But they faced a state that did not need their consent, and by 2020 a national security law had dismantled the movement and jailed many of its leaders. Clarity of demands is necessary; it is not sufficient against an unconstrained state.

The third is a channel into institutions. Chile’s 2019 uprising, driven by students and young people, produced a national referendum in which nearly four in five voters backed writing a new constitution, and in 2021 the country elected a former student protest leader, Gabriel Boric, as president. The story did not end neatly. Voters rejected two successive draft constitutions. But the movement’s energy found institutional channels, and it reshaped Chilean politics for a generation. Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya and Nepal’s Gen Z uprising found their channels in electoral vehicles that could carry their energy into government.

The fourth is discipline and breadth. Serbia’s Otpor! succeeded in 2000 because it combined relentless humour with rigorous non-violent training and a broad coalition with the opposition parties, and then helped turn out the vote that Milošević could not survive. Its later attempt to become a party failed within a few years, a reminder that the skills that bring down a regime are not the skills that win elections.

India’s own successes fit the same pattern. The Right to Information campaign had a decade of organisation beneath it, a precise demand and a legislative channel. The farmers had decades-old unions, a clear and achievable demand, extraordinary discipline and a breadth that crossed caste, religion and region. India’s own failures fit it too. The movements that filled the streets but built nothing beneath them left memories rather than institutions.

Measured against these four conditions, the cockroach movement in October 2026 is strong on breadth, discipline and the clarity of its first demand, weaker on its second demand, and weakest of all on organisation and institutional channels. Those weaknesses are not fixed. They are a work programme.

From cockroach to citizen

The cockroach was a perfect symbol for the first phase of this movement. It named a condition, absorbed an insult and turned it into defiance, and it captured the one quality that a generation of surplus graduates most needed to believe about itself: that it could survive anything. For five months, it did. It survived the withheld accounts, the hacked pages, the baton charges, the insults and the arrests, and it emerged with a minister’s resignation and the attention of the nation.

But survival is not the same thing as building, and the qualities that let a movement endure an attack are not the qualities that let it shape a country. Cockroaches survive by scattering, hiding and waiting out danger. Movements that change things do the opposite. They gather, organise, choose leaders, make demands that can be met, and stay together long enough to see them met. The task ahead is to keep the defiant humour of the cockroach while acquiring the patience and structure of something else entirely: the citizen who organises.

That transition will not be decided by the government, by the courts or by the opposition parties eager to claim the movement’s energy, though all of them will shape it. It will be decided by the movement’s own choices over the next year: whether it turns followers into members and members into local teams; whether it reframes its demands so that they can be won; whether it keeps its distance from the parties while holding all of them to account; whether it protects its most vulnerable members; and whether it learns to rest as well as to march. If it makes those choices well, 2026 may be remembered as the year a generation discovered it could move power, and the beginning of something that lasted. If it does not, it will join the long list of Indian youth movements that won a moment and lost the decade.

Which of those futures arrives will depend not only on the movement, but on how the government, the right and the opposition play their hands, and on events no one can foresee. The final essay in this series sets out the scenarios for India between now and the general election of 2029, and the signals that will show which one is unfolding.

Next in The Cockroach Republic, Essay 6: The Cockroach Republic, 2026 to 2029. Scenarios, indicators, and what to watch.

Sources

The movement, its gains and its critics

The Election Commission fight

The party question

Scholarly works referenced: Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture (1963); Chenoweth, “The Future of Nonviolent Resistance”, Journal of Democracy (2020); Ganz, Why David Sometimes Wins (2009); Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties” (1973); McAdam, Freedom Summer (1988); Roy, The RTI Story: Power to the People (2018); Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas (2017).

Author’s Note: This article was conceptualized, researched, and outlined by the author, with generative AI tools utilized to assist in drafting and refining the prose.

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