I was supposed to be on a plane to Zambia a week before I sat down to write this article.
RightsCon 2026, the world’s largest gathering on human rights and technology, was scheduled to take place in Lusaka, the African nation’s capital city. More than 2,600 participants were expected to attend in person, alongside another 1,100 joining online. All told, registrants represented more than 150 countries and 750 organizations.
Then, the Zambian government suspended the summit just days before it was set to begin. The explanation cited vague security concerns and the need for “further consultations.” But Reuters and WIRED soon reported that the Chinese government had responded to the planned participation of Taiwanese civil society groups by exerting diplomatic pressure on Zambian officials.
Access Now, the organizer of RightsCon, later confirmed that the Zambian government had asked for the exclusion of Taiwanese participants and alterations to the program before the conference could proceed. Access Now refused.
The conference did not go ahead.
An all-too-familiar pattern
For some, the cancellation came as a shock. For me, it felt familiar.
In recent years, repressive states have grown increasingly comfortable targeting institutions far beyond their own borders. Human rights defenders, journalists, academics, and members of diaspora communities have dealt with these tactics for years, often quietly. An invitation rescinded. A visa delayed. A program altered without warning.
I am intimately familiar with Beijing’s pressure campaigns. In July 2020, Hong Kong authorities issued arrest warrants for me under the recently passed National Security Law in response to my pro-democracy advocacy. Shortly after, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs sanctioned the organization I founded in the United States.
People often imagine transnational repression as dramatic or cinematic. In reality, it is quieter but more corrosive.
I have learned to weigh where I can travel, who can afford to host me, and the risks my participation in an event may create for others. The result is not always direct censorship but gradual invisibility. What makes the Zambia case significant, however, is the trajectory and scale of the interference.
In 2010, Beijing shut down Shanghai’s Chinese Bloggers Conference. Sixteen years later, Beijing appears to have helped block the world’s largest digital rights gathering on an entirely different continent.
Economic relationships and civic space
China’s economic relationship with Zambia is extensive. China is Zambia’s largest creditor, lending billions of dollars for infrastructure and development projects. Firms backed by the Chinese state are deeply embedded in mining, construction, and energy sectors across the country. Less than a week before cancelling RightsCon, Zambia announced expanded economic cooperation with China, including new investment agreements and the removal of tariffs for exports to Chinese markets.
Even the would-be conference venue itself reflected these dynamics. The Chinese government had, in fact, funded construction of the Kenneth Kaunda Wing of the Mulungushi International Conference Centre in 2022.
Economic relationships on this scale inevitably create political leverage. Increasingly, that leverage shapes civic space itself.
What the cancellation exposed was not simply that authoritarian censorship can reach across borders. It also discredited the international rights ecosystem’s belief that civic space exists outside geopolitics rather than inside it.
The significance of RightsCon rested not in its plenaries or official programming but rather in everything that happened around them. The impromptu hallway conversations. The late-night gatherings in hotel lobbies. The introductions among people who otherwise would never have met. Relationships formed there. Trust accumulated over the years.
That is precisely why these spaces matter.
It is also why they become targets.
Networking is not a substitute for movement building
The informality of RightsCon’s early manifestations was not incidental. It was part of what made the ecosystem resilient. But over time, many working within the human rights field began to confuse visibility, scale, and institutional access with influence. Too often, they treated convening itself as evidence of power rather than one of its building blocks.
Instead of constructing durable membership, leadership pipelines, political homes, and deeply rooted transnational networks, the field became very good at gathering.
International openness felt inevitable in those years when the current human rights movement was coming of age. Mobility would increase, institutions would globalize, and authoritarian states would moderate as they integrated into international systems.
We are no longer operating in that environment.
Geopolitical fragmentation, surveillance, economic coercion, contested mobility, and transnational repression shape today’s landscape. Visibility itself has also become more fraught. For years, activists often believed that international attention would translate into protection. Sometimes it still does. But under conditions of transnational repression, visibility can also be a vulnerability. The more centralized and prominent a network, the easier it is to trace, map, and disrupt.
States no longer simply suppress dissent. They study civil society ecosystems. They watch who funds whom, where people gather, how institutions react to pressure, and who is most easily isolated.
Visibility without power is exposure.
The dynamics of resilience
The consequences of transnational repression are not distributed equally. Large organizations can absorb the logistical and political costs of disruption, building alternative platforms or moving meetings behind closed doors. Senior figures in the field can rely on established institutional and personal relationships. But smaller organizations, independent journalists, and younger activists frequently lose access entirely. The conversations continue without them.
When global civic space becomes vulnerable to political interference, the damage extends beyond one canceled conference. The infrastructure for international coordination itself begins to weaken. That does not mean we should abandon global civic space. But the current circumstances demand different strategies to build and sustain it.
In lieu of giant annual convenings, the future likely belongs to smaller, more specific, and more resilient ecosystems built on trust, overlapping relationships, and distributed coordination. These systems can continue operating when permission or access suddenly disappears. Neither panels nor declarations sustain movements. They survive because people know, trust, and remember one another. They survive because advocates continue operating under pressure.
There is a historical irony here. Many of the movements celebrated by today’s democracy and human rights sector arose under conditions of surveillance, censorship, and contested mobility. They assumed civic space was fragile.
Much of contemporary global civil society moved in the opposite direction. It professionalized into international systems built around publicity, visibility, and access.
The assumptions that undergirded this shift look more fragile every day.
Don’t wait for permission
I often tell organizers: Go where you are not allowed.
But much of global civil society favors places where permission is granted.
The lesson from Lusaka is not simply that authoritarian governments are contesting global civic space. We already knew that.
The deeper warning is that too much of the international human rights movement is dependent on visibility, convening, and permission.
Access is not power.
And permission is not protection.