The world increasingly appears afflicted by “us-them” divides that breed anger, resentment, and violence. But across the globe small local groups are mounting a thoughtful resistance against polarization and hate.
August 2025
Political competition across the globe is spiraling into zero-sum conflicts. Mass atrocities occur with impunity. And hot wars are back in style. Democracy’s promise of peaceful and humane resolution of differences appears no match for the centrifugal forces of polarization.
Polarization manifests as “us-them” divides that make negotiation and compromise virtually impossible. In its extreme forms, polarization threatens the legitimacy, dignity, and even the lives of the “other.” Tribal hostilities are now so prevalent as to seem the natural order of things. Many people opt for the clarity of a pure identity and ideology over the messy work of dealing with difference.
But this need not be the end of democracy’s story. I have spent the past few years meeting members of an eclectic global resistance against polarization and hate. This research, for my forthcoming book Fighting Polarisation (2025), took me to Australia, Britain, Canada, Fiji, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States, as well as my home grounds of Hong Kong and Singapore.
The counterpolarization interventions I examined cultivate spaces for citizens to talk directly to one another about what matters to them. Such opportunities are rare: Our perceptions of others are mostly filtered by our politicians, mainstream news media, and social media. These three mediating forces, even if they do not actively peddle hate, have a vested interest in segmenting societies, since narrower social identities and demographic niches are easier to influence and mobilize than a diverse population united in its shared humanity. Political and religious leaders, commercial media, and internet platforms have little incentive to build a larger “we.”
People can bypass these powerful polarizing influences by connecting face-to-face (or at least through media that embrace the mission of social conciliation). That’s the common goal of these counterpolarization projects. They are small-scale, mostly grassroots initiatives, which is why they rarely make the news. Another reason why this global movement is easily overlooked is that organizers work within different domains and philosophical frameworks. Some use the language of deliberative democracy, while others are situated in the paradigm of conflict resolution and peacebuilding. Then there is interfaith dialogue inspired by progressive theologies; memory activism informed by cultural studies; deliberative pedagogies in the education sector; social-media innovations applying insights from the behavioral sciences; and settler-native cogovernance models drawing on indigenous worldviews.
The organizers of these diverse projects are united in their conviction that polarization is not programmed into human nature but socially constructed, and therefore possible to resist. We are social beings with a need to belong, but our most treasured social identities need not be exclusive. Even if people cannot agree on difficult policy questions, the resulting contention does not have to escalate to the kind of enmity that denies opponents their equal rights.
“Ideological” polarization — when people express extremely divergent and fixed views about some issue — is not necessarily incompatible with democracy. Indeed, it is a byproduct of a free and equal society that tries to accommodate different beliefs and give everyone the right to be heard. Rather, my book is about “affective” polarization, when perceived differences breed animosities that destroy reciprocal respect for the other.
The root causes of growing polarization have been well analyzed. Mounting socioeconomic insecurity foments fears that, with encouragement from opportunistic leaders, get misdirected at out-groups. Better communication alone cannot replace efforts to fix unjust and unresponsive structures. Yet economic reforms cannot progress if there are communication breakdowns due to toxic polarization. Societies need committed investment in counterpolarizing dialogue and deliberation in parallel with progressive structural change.
The most institutionalized of these innovations are citizens’ assemblies, which have taken root in Belgium, Canada, France, Ireland, and several other countries. These exercises bring together “micropublics” of perhaps a hundred citizens who match the larger population in key demographic attributes. They receive expert briefings, hear testimonies, deliberate among themselves with the help of trained moderators, and then make recommendations. The European Union is increasingly using assemblies to enhance citizen participation in the EU. The radical climate-action group Extinction Rebellion lists the institution of citizens’ climate assemblies as a core demand. In Britain, the 858 Project is campaigning to replace the unelected House of Lords with a standing citizens’ assembly.
Skeptics correctly point out that citizens’ assemblies are ineffectual against determined political and corporate opposition to change. Furthermore, the bigger their potential impact on policymaking, the likelier it is that they will be targeted for capture by those same corporate and political forces that make other democratic institutions less representative of the citizenry. These doubts notwithstanding, most studies show that participants’ attitudes toward fellow citizens with opposing views soften considerably when they are given the opportunity to deliberate face-to-face. Even if they do not reach a consensus on the issue at hand, properly run assemblies tend to reduce affective polarization.
This strategy of resuscitating democracy from the ground up is also being deployed by civic groups that intentionally bypass toxic national-level politics. In the United States, Down Home North Carolina (DHNC) has been working in rural and small-town working-class communities often neglected by elite politics and big media. DHNC engages these voters in developing a citizens’ agenda and supports candidates up and down the ballot who are aligned with this agenda. Its ground game applies a technique called deep canvassing, which prioritizes active listening, personal storytelling, and empathy. In its 2024 canvassing, DHNC workers deliberately avoided starting conversations about the presidential campaign, as that tends to activate voters’ partisan identities. In contrast, most local issues — school funding and local amenities, for example — are not inherently partisan. A focus on local needs and races can thus be depolarizing.
Similarly, civic groups in Turkey focus on the common ground among young voters, such as their concerns about jobs and student housing. Turkey has ranked among the world’s most polarized polities for decades. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the long-ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have exploited historic divides, such as between conservative Muslims and more-secular Turks, to build a seemingly insurmountable voting bloc. But groups such as Arayüz Campaign are attempting to work across party lines, gathering young candidates across the political spectrum for discussions and training programs. These Turkish groups reject the liberal habit of demonizing fellow citizens who vote for intolerant strongmen. Voter preference for authoritarian populists may be a symptom of deeper grievances that can only be addressed through civil, face-to-face deliberation.
DHNC and Arayüz Campaign are officially nonpartisan, open to supporting candidates on both the left and right. But their approach may be an antidote to the extreme-right populist playbook, which cynically exploits division to distract from solving ordinary people’s problems. DHNC says its grassroots lobbying contributed to down-ballot successes in the 2024 cycle. In Turkey, similarly, the strategy of reaching out across partisan divides to address people’s real needs — dubbed “radical love” — influenced the campaign style of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), and may have contributed to the AKP’s losses in the 2024 local elections.
Some of the most inspiring examples of counterpolarizing dialogue are found at the hyperlocal level, outside of electoral politics. At the University of Pennsylvania, amid campus upheavals over Israel’s war in Gaza, a small group of pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian students decided they should meet over meals, not for policy debates but to listen and understand one another’s traumas and fears. They found their first meeting, involving just five students, so valuable that they decided to turn it into a series of progressively larger gatherings.
On the other side of the world, I met Othe Patty, a community organizer who had been displaced by the sectarian war in Ambon, Indonesia, in 1999. The deadly Muslim-Christian conflict resembled the archetypal “clash of civilizations” predicted by Samuel Huntington — where deep-rooted cultural differences propel two peoples toward violent conflict. But Othe, like many Ambonese women, refused to conform to this fatalistic view of human relations. Before the war segregated the city, she had lived happily as a Christian in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood. She longed to rekindle her old friendships, but even after the war ended, fear kept Muslim and Christian communities apart.
Othe Patty, a peace activist in Ambon, Indonesia.
To break the ice, she organized cross-border shopping expeditions to markets on the Muslim side of the city, where groceries were cheaper. Every couple of days, she compiled her Christian neighbors’ shopping lists and walked to the border, where Muslim acquaintances would pick up the lists and buy the items for her. Beyond saving money, the hidden agenda of Othe’s supply-chain solution was to demonstrate to women on both sides that the divisions caused by their men’s intransigence made no sense. It worked. The following year, she was able to lead a delegation of about forty Christian neighbors to visit her Muslim friends and celebrate Eid at the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, just as they had done before the war.
Like other counterpolarization strategies, Othe’s plan worked by making a cross-cutting identity — in this case, mothers looking after their families — more salient than the sharp divisions that were causing fear and hate. But none of the projects I studied involved throwing diverse people together and hoping for the best. Such random encounters could easily go south and exacerbate animosities. They could also, as Nancy Fraser points out in her critique of formal public spheres, reproduce inequalities of status. Therefore, for communicative spaces to reduce polarization, they must be intentionally designed to facilitate inclusion and empathetic connection.
The emphasis in these spaces is not on winning debates or making decisions quickly; the goal is mutual understanding through patient, nonjudgmental listening. While participants in structured dialogues are usually given painstakingly produced briefing notes, they are not expected to suppress their own feelings and perspectives, but are instead encouraged to share personal stories when explaining their stances. This not only lowers the barrier for participation, but also makes participants aware of their own baggage and helps to humanize their interlocutors and make them more relatable.
Leadership is vital. National leaders such as South Africa’s Nelson Mandela or Colombia’s Juan Manuel Santos were able to persuade millions to take a leap of faith and trust erstwhile enemies. But most countries plagued by extreme polarization lack leaders of such stature and moral courage. The resistance cannot sit back and wait for saviors to emerge. This decentralized global movement against polarization tries to convert the political culture one conversation at a time. Leadership could take the form of a trained citizens’ assembly facilitator, a student reaching out across opposing encampments, or a mother who turns grocery runs into peace missions. As moderators, such individuals keep dialogue on track, model civil disagreement, and pivot potentially triggering points of view into opportunities for understanding. In many cases, this requires courage. People who take on this work expose themselves to viewpoints that may stab at their own unhealed wounds inflicted by years of racism and bigotry.
None of my sources have any illusions about the scale of the challenge they have chosen to undertake. But they are not the kinds of political actors who act only after calculating the odds. Most are driven by a moral imperative to do what they can, hoping their projects will be replicated by others and eventually turn the tide. In a world where agents of polarization and hate loom large, this dispersed and largely anonymous resistance looks decidedly unimpressive. But in the absence of grand solutions, the slow and steady cultivation of dialogue is a mode of change that cannot be ignored.
Cherian George is professor of media and politics at Hong Kong Baptist University. His new book, Fighting Polarisation: Shared Communicative Spaces in Divided Democracies, is forthcoming from Polity.
Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy
Featured image credit: Ryan Rahman/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
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