Democracy faces serious and growing challenges, but it has significant capacity for renewal. This is one of the key reflections of the 2025 State of Civil Society Report from CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance and ENSURED partner. The report offers a scathing civil society perspective of the world as it stands in 2025, ridden with autocracy and impunity, where perpetrators of gross human rights violations evade accountability, and where multilateralism and the idea of a rules-based international order is under attack, with hard-nosed national power taking its place. Yet despite attacks on all fronts, civil society continues to push back, combining advocacy, sustained protests, online campaigns, strategic litigation, international diplomacy and every other creative tactic imaginable.
The State of Civil Society Report takes a 360° look at the state of the world, drawing from hundreds of interviews across over 120 countries, exploring the key themes of conflict, democracy, economy, climate and environment, technology, gender rights, migrants’ rights and multilateralism and ending with a look ahead for civil society.
Unprecedented Crises Are Underway
The report highlights how conflicts are testing international law, as powerful states ignore or apply legal principles selectively based on political alliances. Those responsible for mass atrocities escape justice. The breakdown of multilateral institutions has created a dangerous “might-makes-right” world where little can be ruled out, including a Russia-USA axis of authoritarianism or a carve-up of the world into spheres of influence underpinned by the very real prospect of further conflict to assert dominance.
Instead of cooperation to solve the pressing problems that transcend borders, there’s a growing assertion of narrow national interest and transactional approaches to international relations.
The report also underlines how democracy is being undermined by media and tech oligarchs who derive their power from economies that are characterised by extreme inequality and precarity. Instances of ‘state capture’ through collusion with right-wing politicians who have weaponised state institutions to advance anti-rights agendas are on the rise. Civic freedoms are being attacked on a monumental scale. What was once considered legitimate protest is being criminalised in many countries. Climate activists, Indigenous rights defenders and democracy advocates are among those facing the most targeted repression. Excluded groups, including women, LGBQTI+ people and migrants, are seeing an assault on their rights.
Civil Society: the Last Line of Defence
Despite these pressures, civil society remains a vital force for defending democracy and human rights. The report points to successful mobilisations in countries like Bangladesh, Guatemala and South Korea, where grassroots activism and concerted civil society action have resisted and reversed democratic backsliding. Civil society organisations (CSOs) play crucial roles in ensuring election integrity, fighting disinformation and expanding political participation for excluded groups. “Efforts to engage people in governance, hold power accountable and build reform coalitions don’t always make headlines,” said Andrew Firmin, editor-in-chief at CIVICUS and ENSURED researcher. “But they show how people can mobilise to protect democracy.”
The time has come to re-imagine how civil society can ensure it is able to keep defending and advancing human rights amid a cascade of crises.
Civil society action in the past year also led to the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Greece and Thailand, the passing of a constitutional amendment in France to protect the right to abortion and the decriminalisation of same-sex relations by the courts in Dominica and Namibia.
Bold Solutions for a Volatile Era
The State of Civil Society Report calls for urgent action to defend democratic norms and ensure international accountability. Among its key recommendations:
- Conflict - Calls for an end to arms transfers to perpetrators of human rights abuses, UN Security Council reform and a strong treaty on crimes against humanity.
- Defending democracy - Recommends stronger civil society action by adopting a movement mindset, prioritising narrative change to counter authoritarianism and populism and building better connections with communities.
- UN reform – Urges better civil society participation and engagement, the appointment of a UN civil society envoy and the selection of a feminist woman UN Secretary-General.
- Economic justice – Supports proposals for wealth taxation for the ultra rich, a global tax treaty and reform of international financial institutions.
- Climate action - Calls for respect for the right to protest on the climate crisis, funding to enable low-income countries to adjust and fossil fuel lobyists to be excluded from climate negotiations.
“The world in 2025 is a dangerous place,” said Inés Pousadela. “But we also see courageous activists and communities carrying the torch of hope, proving that a more peaceful, just, equal and sustainable world is not only possible but already in the making through civil society and citizen action.”
Photo: Bryan Dozier/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
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