The Fight Back

From the 2021 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and bestselling author of How to Stand Up to a Dictator, this is a frontline guide to understanding, defending, and rebuilding democracy in the age of AI, with 10 strategic goals broken down into 100 concrete actions citizens can take right now. The window for saving democracy is closing. If 2024 was the tipping point for elections, then 2025 and 2026 have taught us what happens when citizens don't hold the line and Western democracies begin to fall. It's time for the fight back. As Maria Ressa knowingly writes, we face three convergent crises: 1. The crisis of truth: Tech platforms and AI have destroyed our information ecosystem, splintering our shared reality. 2. The crisis of order: The United States - the nation that built the postwar international system - is now dismantling it, launching military operations without congressional approval, killing its own citizens in the streets, and arresting journalists who document it. 3. The crisis of accountability: Institutions have been captured, law weaponised and those with power answer to no one. The Fight Back is about how we meet this moment, written by someone who survived the dictator's playbook firsthand. It's grounded in frontline experience from different continents, with specific frameworks for immediate action in the age of AI. The postwar order is coming apart, and this book tells you how you can shape the world you want.

Maria Ressa is CEO, co-founder and President of Rappler, the Philippines's top digital news site. She is the current Nobel Laureate and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 2021, the first Filipino in history to do so. She grew up in America and studied at Princeton University before working as a journalist in Asia for over 40 years. Maria has endured multiple arrests by the Duterte government, which is the subject of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival documentary, A THOUSAND CUTS. Ressa won the UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize 2021 and was TIME Person of the Year in 2018, and was named by TIME as one of the most inspiring and influential women of the century. She has also featured in Prospect's Top 50 Thinkers, Bloomberg 50, and the BBC's Top 100 Women. She has received countless awards for her work, including the Golden Pen of Freedom Award from the World Association of News Publishers. Before founding Rappler, Maria investigated terrorism in Southeast Asia, opening and running CNN's Manila Bureau and Jakarta Bureaus, before heading the largest news group in the Philippines. She wrote Seeds of Terror in 2003 and From Bin Laden to Facebook in 2012.