We relaunched the Democracy Seminar back in 2018 as a “worldwide committee of democratic correspondence” in the hope that “democrats of the world can learn from each other as we oppose the dark forces of our times.” Unfortunately, we still have much to learn and much work to do in response to the attacks on democracy. And we have decided that one thing we can do is to share stories of the small acts of resistance that often go unnoticed. For it is through the accumulation of such acts that citizens can come together to defend themselves and thus to defend democracy. For, as Vaclav Havel once famously said, “even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.”
