On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear
By Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer
Mariner Books; hardcover, 288 pages; $26.00
Julia Angwin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who is a New York Times Opinion monthly contributing writer. In 2018, she founded The Markup, an award-winning nonprofit newsroom that produces meaningful data-centered journalism about technology and the people affected by it.
Ami Fields-Meyer is a political strategist, speechwriter, and former White House senior policy advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris. He is a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
On Courage is an outgrowth of their incredibly popular piece in The New Yorker from April 2025 called "So You Want to Be a Dissident." They build on it by highlighting what it really means to be a dissident and how to effectively do it in today's digital age.
Angwin and Fields-Meyer define "dissident" as "anyone who is taking a meaningful risk in their own context by fighting for the principle that all people are worthy of equal rights, dignity, and opportunity."
As people watch the Trump administration erode democratic norms and Constitutional foundations, this book gives practical ways for how people can find their power. It is a simplification of activism that makes it more accessible than the fundamentals of taking political risk. They deftly take lessons from conflicts in hotspots like Venezuela, Egypt, and Russia and how that can apply here.
This richly reported manual. shows how individuals can resist, based on original interviews with more than 100 dissidents, activists, and theorists around the world. It is a captivating collection of stories and lessons from the front lines of the battle for the future of the free world that invites action and rouses hope.
Angwin and Fields-Meyer see the new type of dissidents as ordinary people here and around the world who never aspired to be activists, but are writing the playbook for courage, risk, and resistance in this authoritarian age.
In this excerpt, from a part titled "You Are in a New Reality," Angwin and Fields-Meyer write: For nearly a year, we investigated what to expect in this new authoritarian reality. As the president was unleashing fear in the streets of America, we were talking with dissidents - activists and opposition leaders, scholars, and movement strategists, journalists, and faith leaders, humanitarians, corruption watchdogs, and leaders of human rights groups.
Our earliest conversations with dissidents from Russia, Venezuela, Hungary, and Nicaragua had a strange quality to them. We conducted our first interview at 3:00 p.m. on Janury 20, 2025: Inauguration Day. For the first few weeks, our inquiries were met with amused detachment. Two earnest Americans had found a sudden interest in their longtime struggles - that's rich! Most interviewees politely answered our questions in abstract terms but rejected comparisons between the United States and the repressive regimes they called home.
But as the U.S. president began enacting many of the scenarios anticipated in the authoritarian simulations, the dissidents' skepticism lifted. What replaced it was acute alarm, as well as practical advice delivered at a rapid clip. "You are in a new reality," one former Venezuelan opposition leader told us, "and you need to behave like it."
We broadened our conversation to include U.S. dissidents, recognizing that for some the fight in America was not new, while others had joined in only recently. In the end, we spoke with more than one hundred people on five continents who have cut through fear to preserve their values: A student activist from Hong Kong who risked everything for democracy. A mom in a working-class neighborhood in Caracas who broke with the political move3ment that had raised her. Twentysomethings in Cairo who staged a gutsy stunt to try to bring down an autocrat. A mild-mannered immigrant in Washington, D.C., fighting to save a landmark civil rights law. And we spoke to Americans whom are living under a cute threat - because they are undocumented, because they are transgender, or because of their political activism - and who have faced risks as they dissent in their workplace, their community, or their family. Each did it anyway.
We also dug into he history of nonviolent dissident movements at home and abroad. We read the works of Soviet dissidents whose writings undermined the communist narrative in Russia. We absorbed the accounts of campesinos who smuggled tortillas to the rebels during El Salvador's brutal civil war. We studied the civil resistance techniques of the U.S. civil rights movement, the efforts of California farmworkers who organized for humane conditions, and the fight of Guatemalan women to win justice for the atrocities committed against them.
We pored over research across academic disciplines, form political philosophy to theology and psychology. We scoured the memoirs of movement leaders, from Black anti-apartheid activists in South Africa to student civil rights leaders in the American South and beyond - with an eye toward both their enduring lessons and their useful mistakes and regrets.
Each I a part of the same story - of where courage comes from, how it is sustained, and how taking personal risks can help save the free world.
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