The Fight Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Standing Up to Dictators

Maria Ressa writes from a position that most analysts of information warfare cannot claim: she has been the target of the systems she describes. The legal harassment, the coordinated online attacks, the use of state power against a news organisation — these are not abstractions in Ressa’s account but operational realities she has navigated, and that forensic proximity gives the book an authority that purely scholarly treatments cannot match. The ten-goal structure is deliberately practical, aimed at citizens rather than policymakers, and it reflects a hard-won understanding that systemic problems require distributed, coordinated responses rather than institutional solutions alone.

The framing around three linked crises — the collapse of shared truth, the breakdown of international order, and institutional accountability failures — is analytically coherent and more useful than accounts that treat disinformation as a discrete information problem rather than a symptom of broader democratic erosion. For practitioners, the book is most valuable as a document of what the information environment looks like from the inside of a targeted organisation, and as an argument that resilience at the individual and community level is not supplementary to systemic reform but constitutive of it.