Every movement carries knowledge. We make sure it spreads.
People Power Publishers exists to make sure that knowledge spreads. We are a nonprofit publisher dedicated to advancing the understanding of strategic nonviolent resistance, through rigorous studies and through the first-hand accounts of the people who lived it. The accounts in our books now represent more than 80 countries, because this knowledge was never anyone’s alone to keep — it’s been built by organizers and scholars everywhere people have had to find a way to resist.
From ICNC Press to People Power Publishers
For a decade we did this work as ICNC Press, building a library of Special Reports and Monographs that scholars, journalists, and practitioners around the world have relied on.
In 2026, we relaunched as People Power Publishers. We’re continuing the Special Report series our readers know, and we’re expanding into memoirs and other books written by activists, for activists. Soup Throwers and Super Gluers, on Europe’s climate uprising, and Going Behind the Sun, releasing this September, are among the first of this new chapter.
What makes some of these books different isn’t just who they’re about — it’s how they get written. Starting with New Blood: How Youth in Zambia Are Reclaiming Politics, we began developing books through collective writing: activists from the same movement, writing their own history together, guided through a series of workshops led by Bruce Pearson, PPP’s operational leader. Several more books built this way are already underway, with new releases planned through 2027.
This way of working reflects what we believe publishing should be: collaborative, not extractive. Writers stay at the center of the process, because the meaning in these stories belongs to the people who lived them, and our job is to help that meaning reach the page intact. We work to be the kind of place where an organizer sharing a hard-won story feels less like a source and more like a colleague: trusted, supported, and part of something larger than any single book. That’s true whether you’re a longtime scholar of civil resistance or an activist finding your own campaign reflected in these pages for the first time. There’s a place for you here.
People Power Publishers is an operation of the Center for Nonviolent Conflict Research. Knowledge about how ordinary people build power shouldn’t sit behind a paywall. Paperback editions are also available wherever books are sold, for readers who want a copy on their shelf. Any profit we earn goes back into funding further research and the writing workshops that make books like these possible in the first place.
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