[]
The Fight Back
  • Published: 15 October 2026
  • ISBN: 9780753562932
  • Imprint: Virgin Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

The Fight Back

A Citizen's Guide to Standing Up to Dictators

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
13 Oct 2026
Hardback
15 Nov 2026
EBook
15 Oct 2026
Audiobook
15 Oct 2026
Pre-order from…
Amazon Apple Books Google Play Kobo Booktopia eBooks.com

Nobel Prize winner, New York Times bestselling author Maria Ressa provides reader with a powerful, practical and positive guide to resisting authoritarianism and fighting to save democracy, for fans of Timothy Snyder’s ON TYRANNY (over 20k TCM).

Nobel-prize winning, bestselling author Maria Ressa provides a frontline guide to understanding, defending, and rebuilding democracy in the age of AI, with 10 strategic goals broken down into 100 concrete actions citizens can take right now

The window for saving democracy is closing. Authoritarian elections around the world have taught us what happens when citizens don’t hold the line and Western democracies begin to fall.

It’s time for the fight back.

As Maria Ressa knowingly writes, we face three convergent crises:
• The crisis of truth: Tech platforms and AI have destroyed our information ecosystem, making shared reality impossible.
• The crisis of order: The United States—the nation that built the post-war international system—is now dismantling it, launching illegal military operations, killing its own citizens in the streets, and arresting journalists who document it.
• The crisis of accountability: Institutions have been captured, law weaponized, and those with power answer to no one.

The Fight Back is a must-read resistance manifesto—written by someone who survived the dictator’s playbook firsthand, grounded in frontline experience from multiple continents, with specific frameworks for immediate action in the age of AI—and in a moment when the world order is being remade before our eyes.
  • Published: 15 October 2026
  • ISBN: 9780753562932
  • Imprint: Virgin Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288
Categories:

About the author

Maria Ressa

Maria Ressa is CEO, co-founder and President of Rappler, the Philippines's top digital news site. She is the current Nobel Laureate and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 2021, the first Filipino in history to do so. She grew up in America and studied at Princeton University before working as a journalist in Asia for over 40 years. Maria has endured multiple arrests by the Duterte government, which is the subject of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival documentary, A THOUSAND CUTS. Ressa won the UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize 2021 and was TIME Person of the Year in 2018, and was named by TIME as one of the most inspiring and influential women of the century. She has also featured in Prospect's Top 50 Thinkers, Bloomberg 50, and the BBC's Top 100 Women. She has received countless awards for her work, including the Golden Pen of Freedom Award from the World Association of News Publishers. Before founding Rappler, Maria investigated terrorism in Southeast Asia, opening and running CNN's Manila Bureau and Jakarta Bureaus, before heading the largest news group in the Philippines. She wrote Seeds of Terror in 2003 and From Bin Laden to Facebook in 2012.
MR

Also by Maria Ressa

How to Stand Up to a Dictator
See all

Praise for The Fight Back

An inspirational – and deeply practical – guide to re-writing the authoritarian playbook by someone who has herself retaliated against tyranny

Carole Cadwalladr

Everyone who cares about what’s happening in the world as national and tech dictators exercise greater unaccountable power over our lives needs to read this book right now to learn from Maria Ressa how to wage 'The Fight Back.' You couldn’t have a better guide than Maria, a brave journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who stood against both Duerte and Zuckerberg despite their best efforts to ignore and silence her. She’s taken the lessons she learned to tell all of us how we can overcome fear and despair to hold leaders responsible for the harms they’re causing. This is the call to action we need now.

Former US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton

This is a timely and crucial book. It provides a clear plan for how to save democracy in the age of AI. Equally important, it gives readers the courage to hold the line.

Yuval Noah Harrari, bestselling author of 'Sapiens'

The Fight Back is nothing less than a survival guide for democracy. Drawing on her own experiences as a journalist, media founder and public intellectual, Maria Ressa lays out with dazzling clarity the way in which political and technological autocrats are destroying not just democracy but humanity itself, and offers a practical, step-by-step guide for resistance. For anyone who’s ever said change is impossible, The Fight Back lays out clearly what each of us must do in this moment. Buy everyone you know a copy.

Jodie Ginsberg, CEO, Committee to Protect Journalists

This is a manifesto for our times: a bold, brilliant, gut-punch of a book, with an inbuilt action plan for change. The plan is forged from Maria’s experience as a target of legal, financial, physical and online attacks, all designed to silence her - but instead they lit a fire.

Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC, human rights lawyer

Maria Ressa is a relentless and fearless leader who ignites a room and leaves you wanting more. Clear, urgent and gobsmackingly necessary, The Fight Back is the next best thing to having Maria in your pocket: an impeccable guide to where we are, where we need to go and what each of us can do to get there.

Baroness Beeban Kidron, UK Crossbench Peer and author of USERS, How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back

A practical guide for rejecting cynicism and resisting tyranny - from a woman who has done both

Amal Clooney

Maria gives us hope — and a playbook — for building a new era of democracy, where journalism thrives, facts unite us, and power answers to the people.

Christy Tanner ,President and CEO of New York Public Radio