The Civic Space Squeeze
Civil society repression worsened in thirty-nine countries last year. The entry and exit of NGOs is now controlled by governments in thirty-seven. The squeeze is networked. The opening is, too. Civic space is not optional infrastructure. It is the operational substance of democratic life.
The Civic Space Squeeze
Civil society repression worsened in thirty-nine countries last year. The entry and exit of NGOs is now controlled by governments in thirty-seven. The squeeze is the strategy. The opening is in the response.
I. The Quiet Numbers
Some numbers do their work loudly. The democracy index. The election count. The Freedom House classification.
Other numbers do their work quietly. They land in annual reports, get quoted by specialists, and never quite reach the news cycle in the way they should.
Two such numbers, from the most recent CIVICUS Monitor and the V-Dem 2026 dataset, deserve a louder hearing.
In 2025, the operational space for civil society organisations measurably worsened in thirty-nine countries. The deterioration showed up across multiple indicators: legal harassment, registration restrictions, funding pressure, surveillance, intimidation, and direct coercion of civic actors.
In 2025, the entry and exit of civil society organisations was increasingly controlled by governments in thirty-seven countries. This means that in those countries, an NGO cannot simply exist as a matter of legal right. It must obtain government permission to register, must operate within tightly controlled mandates, and can be dissolved or expelled without meaningful judicial review.
These are not numbers about countries with theoretical concerns. These are numbers about countries where civic organising has become operationally harder, year over year, with measurable consequences for the citizens those organisations exist to serve.
II. What "Civic Space" Actually Means
The phrase "civic space" can sound abstract. It is anything but.
Civic space is the room in which citizens can do four things: associate freely with each other, speak freely about public matters, organise to advocate for change, and engage with each other's organisations across borders without state interference.
When civic space is healthy, a citizen can join a union without fearing retaliation. Form an environmental group without facing tax harassment. Run a women's rights organisation without facing legal challenges to the registration. Coordinate with a sister organisation in another country without being accused of foreign interference.
When civic space is squeezed, every one of those activities becomes harder. Sometimes dramatically harder. Sometimes incrementally harder. The increments accumulate.
Civil society is not the marginal layer of democracy. It is the part that does the daily, distributed work of democracy in between elections. It is where the labour rights actually get fought for, where the environmental protection actually gets monitored, where the corruption actually gets exposed, where the marginalised communities actually get organised. When civic space narrows, all of that work becomes harder, and much of it does not happen at all.
III. The Toolkit of Repression
The thirty-seven-country figure on entry and exit control is the most operationally significant. The toolkit being deployed across those countries follows a consistent design.
Restrictive registration laws. Countries impose registration requirements on civil society organisations that are technically demanding, financially expensive, and politically discretionary. The result is that registration becomes a permission rather than a right. Organisations the government dislikes find their applications delayed, their compliance findings questioned, or their renewals denied.
Foreign-funding restrictions. Many civil society organisations in lower-income countries depend on funding from international donors. Restrictive foreign-funding laws — requiring pre-approval, capping foreign-funded budget percentages, criminalising certain funding sources, or labelling foreign-funded organisations as "foreign agents" — choke off the financial oxygen.
Legal harassment. Civic organisations face investigations, audits, criminal charges against staff, and procedural challenges that consume resources even when the underlying allegations are weak. The cost of legal defence drains the operational budget. The chilling effect drains the staff energy.
Surveillance and intimidation. Civic activists face physical surveillance, digital surveillance, and personal intimidation through visits to their families, contact with their employers, or public smear campaigns. The intimidation is calibrated to fall just below the threshold that would trigger international attention.
Information control. Restrictions on the ability of civic organisations to gather, analyse, or publish information — particularly about government conduct — narrow the substantive contribution civil society can make to public debate. An organisation that cannot legally collect data on extrajudicial killings, for example, cannot meaningfully advocate against them.
The toolkit does not require all five elements to be deployed simultaneously. It requires enough of them, sustained over enough time, to make civic work prohibitively expensive in money, energy, and risk.
IV. The Geography of the Squeeze
The thirty-nine-country deterioration is not concentrated in any single region.
Africa has multiple cases, particularly in countries where new restrictive laws have been adopted in the last two years. Asia has a substantial cluster, including some of the most populous countries in the world. The Middle East and North Africa, with notable exceptions, have seen continued narrowing across most of the region. Latin America, despite a generally better baseline, has several active deterioration cases. Europe, including parts of the European Union, has at least three notable cases of recent deterioration. North America has its own pressures, particularly around foreign-funding scrutiny and tax-status challenges to civic organisations.
The geographic spread matters. It demonstrates that civic-space pressure is not a phenomenon of one region or one regime type. It is a method that has spread across regimes and across continents, often with deliberate cross-pollination of legal and operational design.
This is one of the under-discussed features of the contemporary authoritarian playbook: the methods are shared. Countries that want to restrict civic space borrow the laws, the framings, and the operational techniques from each other. The "foreign agents" framing has a clear genealogy traceable across multiple countries. The restrictive registration framework has been copied from one continent to another. The surveillance technology has been sold and resold across regimes.
The squeeze is not coincidental. It is networked.
V. What Civic Society Is Doing Back
The opening, however, is also networked.
Civil society's response to the global squeeze has matured significantly in the last decade. The response operates at three layers.
Layer one: legal and institutional resistance inside the country. Civil society actors challenge restrictive laws in the courts, organise public campaigns against new restrictions, and coordinate among themselves to share legal strategies. This is the visible, ground-level resistance, and it is the layer that is hardest because it bears the direct cost of the regime's pressure.
Layer two: cross-border solidarity and resource sharing. Civil society organisations in less-pressured countries are increasingly providing material, legal, and operational support to organisations in more-pressured countries. This includes secure communication infrastructure, legal defence funds, emergency relocation networks for at-risk activists, and shared training programmes. This work is necessary and increasingly well-organised. It is also, in some cases, what triggers the "foreign agents" framing — the pressure response targets the cross-border ties precisely because the ties are working.
Layer three: structural reform of the international civic infrastructure. A smaller but increasingly active conversation is underway about whether the international architecture of civil society — donor practices, multilateral civic forums, the United Nations special procedures, regional human rights mechanisms — can be redesigned to be more useful to organisations operating under squeezed conditions. The redesign is at an early stage. The conversation is overdue.
What links the three layers is a shift in self-understanding. Civil society, in the older Western framing, was a domestic phenomenon — citizens organising within their own country to engage their own government. The new framing, increasingly visible in practice, is transnational. Civic actors in any country are now part of a global civic infrastructure that exists alongside, and sometimes in tension with, the state-based international system.
This shift is the most important development in civic space politics this decade. It is also the development that the squeeze is most clearly designed to suppress.
VI. The Stakes
If the squeeze succeeds, the consequences are not merely organisational. They are civilisational.
Civil society is the layer where most of the operational work of holding power accountable actually gets done. Investigative journalism. Independent legal aid for political prisoners. Documentation of human rights abuses. Public health advocacy. Environmental monitoring. Anti-corruption work. Refugee and migrant assistance. Worker organising. Women's rights advocacy. LGBT rights protection. Indigenous rights defence.
Every one of those domains depends on civil society organisations doing the daily, distributed, often unglamorous work of representation, documentation, advocacy, and direct service. When civic space narrows, the work shrinks. When the work shrinks, the population it served loses protection.
The squeeze is not, primarily, about restricting NGOs. It is about removing the layer of representation that the most vulnerable people in society have, in many cases, no other access to. The squeeze is felt by the activist whose office is raided. It is suffered by the worker whose union no longer functions, the woman whose shelter no longer operates, the migrant whose legal aid clinic has closed, the journalist whose investigations no longer have a publisher, the student whose civic group no longer meets.
This is what the numbers describe. This is why the numbers matter.
VII. The Open Door
The squeeze is real. It is not the whole story.
The open door, in this moment, is the increasing recognition — across regions, across regime types, across generations — that civic space is not optional infrastructure. It is the operational substance of democratic life. The international architecture has been slower to recognise this than civil society itself, but the recognition is growing.
Three concrete openings worth attention.
The transnational civic platform. Platforms that allow citizens to engage across borders on shared issues are no longer marginal experiments. They are the operating environment that millions of civic actors already use daily. Building these platforms with deliberate civic-space awareness — protecting users, providing redundant infrastructure, partnering with regional civil society — is among the highest-impact interventions available right now.
The civic-space audit. Several international initiatives are working to produce regular, granular, country-level civic-space audits with operational recommendations rather than abstract scoring. The audits are useful only if they are read and acted on. The reading is the responsibility of the international civic ecosystem.
The sanctuary infrastructure. As the squeeze intensifies, more civic actors will need to relocate temporarily or permanently. The sanctuary infrastructure — countries, cities, academic institutions, and organisations that provide credible relocation pathways for at-risk activists — needs to expand and professionalise. This is unglamorous work that saves real lives and preserves real civic capacity.
VIII. Hold the Line
The line, in 2026, is held by people the world mostly does not know about. The lawyer who keeps showing up to court for the case that has been adjourned eight times. The journalist who keeps publishing the story that has cost two colleagues their jobs. The community organiser who keeps the women's circle meeting even after the registration was revoked. The student who keeps coordinating the network even after the warning visit from the security services.
These are the people the data is describing. The numbers are abstractions. The work is concrete.
The Global Federation exists, in part, to make sure the work has a global civic infrastructure to amplify it, protect it, and connect it across borders. The squeeze is the strategy of those who want a quieter civic life. The opening is in the louder one we collectively choose to build.
The line holds when we hold it.
Published by The Global Federation Peace, Prosperity & Progress