In Ukraine: Building Civic Life Amid War

Posted on June 30, 2025 by Peter

In this episode of The Stakes, host Brad Rourke speaks with Kettering Foundation Senior Fellow and retired Ohio Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor and Kettering board member and Tufts professor Peter Levine. They reflect on their recent experiences helping to build democracy and civil society in Ukraine—O’Connor working to vet candidates for the embattled Constitutional Court, and Levine teaching Civic Studies in a war-torn Kyiv.

Both offer firsthand insight into the resilience of Ukrainian civil society and the country’s struggle to build democratic institutions. O’Connor describes the bomb shelter where judicial reforms are being debated, and Levine details the micro-decisions citizens must make under constant threat. Together, they explore what the U.S. can learn from Ukraine’s resolve—and how psychological, civic, and symbolic support from the West matters more than ever.

youth trust in institutions

Posted on June 27, 2025 by Peter

CIRCLE has released a detailed report on young people’s trust in various institutions, broken down by demographics and partisanship. They have also published an array of responses to their data by young leaders.

I recommend the whole product. As a teaser, I’m sharing one graph with this post. Note that the police are the second-most trusted institution, below “peers and neighbors” but above nonprofit organizations. White youth trust police at about twice the rate of Black youth.

Also interesting is the extremely low level of trust for social media and technology companies, which turns out to be driven by white youth. (Black youth trust social media somewhat more.)

Whether people should trust these institutions is a different question that is worth some reflection. CIRCLE shows that higher trust is related to voter turnout, so one drawback of deep distrust can be disengagement.

the meanings of ‘civility’

Posted on June 24, 2025 by Peter

If you Google the word “civility,” the Internet tells you that it means “formal politeness and courtesy in behavior or speech.” This bothers me a bit because the word has had other meanings. Besides, demanding “formal politeness and courtesy” in politics can be a way of suppressing criticism and agitation. William H. Chafe describes how calls for civility were used against Martin Luther King, Jr. in Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom.

My favorite meaning of the word “civility” (or its analogue in Italian: civiltá) comes from the Italian renaissance. For proponents of renaissance republics, civility meant speech and behavior that was egalitarian. Civility existed among people who treated each other as equals and therefore spoke plainly, practically, and with an absence of formal politeness.

For example, in the Discourses (book LV), Machiavelli writes, “Republics where political life has been maintained uncorrupted do not tolerate any of their citizens to be gentlemen, or to live in the manner of gentlemen: rather, they maintain equality among themselves. … ” He adds that in lands where many rich men live idly on inherited wealth, “there has never been any republic, nor any political life; because such generations of men are completely enemies of all civiltá.”

The last word is sometimes translated as “civil government.” Thompson’s Victorian translation simply says, “Such persons are very mischievous in every republic or country.” But literally, the idle rich are enemies of civility for Machiavelli, because civility is a conversation among equals aimed at making collective decisions.

Using the common Latin noun civis (“citizen”) as a root, it was possible to construct an abstract noun, meaning something like “citizenness”–civilitas. That word would be understandable in Latin, but it was rare, surviving only in a couple of texts. For one ancient author (Quintilian) civilitas meant the art of government; for another (Suetonius), it meant courteousness. They were thinking of different attributes of a Roman citizen. I doubt that anyone would have noted this range of meanings before the modern era of Latin lexicons.

Nevertheless, the Latin word civilitas was available to be imitated in modern languages, either by authors who found it in Quintilian or Suetonius or by those who re-invented it from its root meaning of “citizen.”

Around 1384, John Wylciffe used “civility” when translating this Biblical passage (Acts 22:26-28):

²⁶ And when this thing was heard, the centurion went to the tribune, and told to him, and said, What art thou to doing? for this man is a citizen of Rome.

²⁷ And the tribune came nigh, and said to him [Paul], Say thou to me, whether thou art a Roman. And he said, Yea.

²⁸ And the tribune answered, I with much sum got this freedom. [Wycliffe's original version: "I with moche summe gat this ciuylite," Wycliffe's note: "cyuylitee, either fraunchise, either dignite of citeceyn."] And Paul said, And I was born a citizen of Rome.

Wycliffe first wrote “civility” for the New Testament Greek word politeian, and then revised it to “freedom,” meaning the rights enjoyed by a Roman citizen. The King James Version simply says: “And Paul said, But I was free born.”

In 1598, an English author helpfully explained, “Policy is derived from the Greek word politeia which in our tongue we may term civility; and that which the Grecians did name politic government, the Latins called the government of a civil commonwealth, or civil society.”

These meanings were political and related to republican government. However, Shakespeare used “civility” to mean something similar to “tameness” and “patience” and as the opposite of “distemper” (Merry Wives of Windsor iv. ii. 23).

In short, people have coined or re-invented the word “civility” several times to capture aspects of what they imagined Roman citizens to be like. Some of their associations involved politeness, and others involved equal rights. It is a shame to remember only the former.

Sources: My translation of Machiavelli. English references from the Oxford English Dictionary with my modernized spellings. See also learning from the Florentine republic; civility as equality; civic republicanism in medieval Italy: the Lucignano council frescoes; what does the word civic mean?;

teaching Civic Studies in Kyiv

Posted on June 20, 2025 by Peter

This reflection is originally published on From Many, We the Charles F. Kettering Foundation blog series that highlights the insights of thought leaders dedicated to the idea of inclusive democracy.

I went to Kyiv, Ukraine, June 2–7, 2025, to offer a short course on Civic Studies at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE).

I wanted to do something useful in Ukraine. Ukrainians earned their democracy by accomplishing massive nonviolent popular revolutions in 2004–2005 and 2013–2014. Their republic stands as a rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has tried to destroy it for more than a decade. In addition to wanting to express solidarity, I also wanted to learn from them and to understand more about civil society in the context of war.

On the Ground in Kyiv

As I traveled toward Kyiv, the tempo of the conflict was increasing. First, the Russians intensified strikes on civilian targets. Then Ukrainian special forces achieved a remarkable attack on Russian strategic bombers, which form part of the Russian nuclear triad. President Putin swore to retaliate—a threat that President Trump repeated without any criticism. Some retaliation then unfolded while I was in Kyiv, although Putin may still be looking for ways to do far worse. The Thursday of my visit was the second-most intense night of strikes on Ukrainian civilians in the war to that date.

I was safe, in part because my hotel had a massive, three-story underground garage. From the bottom level, with heavy summertime HVAC running, I couldn’t even hear the strikes on our district, Solom?yan?sky, or the Ukrainian air defenses. I then left Kyiv after the planned five days, which is a blink of an eye compared to the experience of living with this war for three years so far. Most Ukrainians seem resigned to an indefinite future of the same.

Air raid alerts sound several times every day. Mostly, an alert does not result in an actual attack. The Russians send up a MiG (military aircraft) to cause an air alert and disrupt everyone’s day. We are all familiar with disruptions, but it is different to face a hostile state that is trying to maximize inconvenience for years on end. The Russians choose the times and methods of their attacks for that purpose. My class had to relocate to a bomb shelter while we were doing our introductions on the first day and when the participants were offering their final reflections at the very end. Of course, this was a coincidence (Putin did not know or care about my course), but the point is that anything one tries to accomplish is subject to disruption.

Often, the raids are real. The Russians deploy swarms of Iranian shahed drones that buzz around the city, threatening civilian targets. I am told that they sound like Vespa scooters. Most Ukrainians do not have deep basements under their homes—some say they have no shelter at all. So, they listen to the drones’ buzz and the Ukrainian air defenses.

At a certain point, the shaheds crash into apartment buildings, power infrastructure, schools, or any targets that the Russians choose. Meanwhile, MiGs are launching cruise missiles from hundreds of miles away. The popular Telegram channels (with automatic English translation) are used by civilians to report drones or missiles flying overhead. “Chernihiv, heading south!” “The cruise missile is turning west!”

Ukrainian civilians face constant choices: Go to the subway station or wait this one out? Try to move to an apartment on a lower floor? Try to emigrate? And many have relatives on the frontlines.

They report handling stress in various ways. One confident young man told me that he had thought he was fine until his first night on a trip to Poland, when there was a thunderstorm and he found himself trembling and weeping. His guard was finally down. A clinical psychology professor told me that PTSD is a misnomer, because the trauma is not “post.”

I wanted to understand whether such a violent context would require changes in the course material that I usually present.

The Course

With colleagues in the United States and overseas, I have developed a syllabus for an introductory course in Civic Studies and have offered it many times before in several countries. Indeed, I had helped to lead a version in Ukraine in 2015.

I hoped that the course would be useful for Ukrainians who are active in their own civil society—or who want to act—and who struggle with specific challenges, such as the disruptions of war, endemic corruption, and the difficulty of holding robust public debates in full view of a foreign enemy. I was interested in whether Ukrainian civic leaders had changed their thinking since the full-scale invasion of 2022.

Although my course was open to undergraduates, the participants turned out to be professionals who work for Ukrainian nonprofit organizations, plus some entrepreneurs. At least three participants had free time for studying civics because they had recently lost jobs that had been funded by USAID.

In essence, the course addresses three questions that arise for anyone who wants to preserve or improve society.

First are questions of collective action: What kinds of rules and norms help groups to coordinate individuals’ action so that they can accomplish goals together?
Second are questions of dialogue and deliberation: How should people discuss disagreements about values and make wise decisions together?
And third are questions of exclusion. When institutions (or even whole populations) refuse to collaborate or deliberate with us, how can we compel them to engage constructively without using violence? This last topic turns our attention toward nonviolent social movements.

Our curriculum represents a respectful challenge to definitions of “civic education” that emphasize the national government and its constitution. In Civic Studies, we treat any sovereign republic as one venue among many for deliberation and collective action, and we see citizens as people who may choose to belong to many overlapping groups at various scales.

For the most part, my course unfolded as usual. Near the end, at least two participants wanted me to say how different I had found them from the other people I had taught in other countries. My honest answer was that they were not too different. Active participants in civil society everywhere seem to have generally similar concerns and perspectives.

Perhaps this group was a bit less adversarial than the participants in my previous courses. In the last segment, I always give students instructions for organizing an advocacy effort, and I play the “target” of their advocacy. This group asked me to role-play the chair of the board of KSE. They then chose to present me with a rather good idea for a new program. I do not know whether their gentleness toward a hypothetical authority-figure was representative of Ukrainian civil society, but I found it unusual.

In general, my experience in Kyiv reinforced my confidence in the Civic Studies curriculum, but it did challenge me in some valuable ways.

For one thing, the curriculum presumes that the public sphere should be free and vibrant, full of debate about conflicting values. On the surface, Ukraine is not having a very robust, public debate about existential questions, such as whether it would be worth a vast sacrifice to try to regain occupied territories or whether Vladimir Zelensky is the best available leader.

One explanation is that the answers are clear; the government enjoys a broad consensus. Another explanation is that people are voluntarily keeping diverse opinions to themselves because debating and disagreeing feel wrong; it undermines solidarity. Particularly while the government negotiates with a foreign enemy, it may seem wiser to leave such matters to leaders and not to publicly discuss what Ukrainians would be willing to concede. (After all, the Russians could watch the debate.) Finally, to some extent, the Zelensky government may discourage dissent, not through censorship and violence but by dominating the Parliament and media.

I did not press the class to tell me what they thought about the quality of their national debate because the question did not feel sufficiently respectful in the moment. I am still pondering the appropriate role of debate when a nation is under attack.

Another assumption of the Civic Studies curriculum is the value of nonviolent civil resistance, something that Ukrainians experienced in 2004–2005 and 2013–2014. I can testify that it is difficult to talk about nonviolence in wartime. When I emerged from the shelter on Friday morning, I was not exactly in the mood for reconciliation with Russians.

That said, participants seemed open to my point that their relationships to their own fellow citizens and to Ukrainian institutions must almost always be nonviolent, and therefore it is important to learn nonviolent methods for social change.

Finally, I noticed that concepts of patriotism and honor were more prominent in my own mind than usual. Patriotism is often a central value in civic education curricula that are required around the world, including in the US. In contrast, the ideal of patriotism is less prominent in Civic Studies because the nation-state itself is not our focus. In fact, patriotism can rationalize unjust favoritism for people who hold legal citizenship while excluding others.

Nevertheless, I believe that American patriotism was my most basic motivation for going to Ukraine (along with curiosity about what Ukrainians would tell me). I consider our government’s current betrayal of Ukraine to be a stain on our honor. I feel dishonored because I love my country. If I lacked patriotism, then this shame would not attach to me. It was a privilege and a source of satisfaction to be able to tell Ukrainians that many Americans stand by them.

Peter Levine, a Kettering Foundation board member, is the Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship and Public Service in Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life and the director of Tufts’ Civic Studies Program. He most recent book is What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life.

repairing the damage of federal actions

Posted on June 19, 2025 by Peter

The Trump Administration often targets specific organizations and individuals for deliberate harm. For instance, Donald Trump said, “Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper. They’ve got to behave themselves.” He said this while his administration was canceling up to $3 billion in contracts with Harvard, subjecting the university to at least eight different investigations, and blocking foreign students from attending–actions that could cost the university more billions.

If any private actor caused such damages, it would be subject to a tort claim and would face damages if it lost in court. If Congress passed a law targeting a specific entity, that legislation would violate the Bill of Attainder clause of the US Constitution and would be struck down.

However, the executive branch can violate a basic principle of the rule of law by acting against an individual or entity and face only the risk that its actions will be stopped. The government risks no penalty for persecuting a target, and there is no provision for the victim to win damages. This is because the Sovereign Immunity Doctrine generally shields the government and its officials from civil liability, and the Federal Tort Claims Act carves out very modest exceptions. (See this explanation by Glenn C. Altschuler and David Wippman.)

There is, however, a solution. Congress could pass a law enabling organizations and individuals who were persecuted in certain ways to seek damages in federal court. Victims’ rights could be made retroactive so that they could sue the government in the future for damages being caused now–or, indeed, for damages caused by Trump’s predecessors. If it’s really true that Obama took executive actions to bankrupt coal companies, then those companies might have a case, because such actions would bypass due process. I am skeptical that this claim is valid, but it could be assessed in court.

The goals would be: (1) to repair some of the damage incurred by the many victims of federal actions, and (2) to reinforce rule of law by creating a cost for the government when it targets organizations or individuals and harms them without due process.

I am fully aware that a Republican Congress would not pass this law, and if it did, Trump would veto it. But I think it is important to begin identifying specific priorities for the period of repair that must follow Trump. (See also “a generational call to rebuild” — on the opportunity to reconstruct the federal civil service.)

democracy’s crisis: a system map

Posted on June 11, 2025 by Peter

The graphic that accompanies this post shows 16 explanations for democracy’s current crisis for which I think there is persuasive evidence. The arrows indicate significant causal relationships among these factors.

The details are entirely debatable. The main point of this model is to suggest a mode of diagnosis and prescription that is different from the root-cause analysis that often drives movements for political reform.

Imagine, for example, that the root cause of democracy’s dysfunction were economic inequality, driven by a competitive global market. In that case, a political party with a credible plan to combat inequality might represent a solution. The best strategy would be to support that party in elections.

Or imagine that the root cause were partisan polarization. In that case, it would be better to support moderates in the existing parties and promote reforms that would favor centrist candidates.

Or imagine that the cause were the arrogance of progressive elites; then a right-populist movement might be the solution.

I believe that all of these factors (and more) are causes of democracy’s crisis, meaning that there is no “root” cause. Because they are heterogeneous, it is unlikely that any ideological party or movement could address them all. And because they are interlinked, solutions must address many points.

Fortunately, democracy is not a tool meant for a single problem, as a hammer is designed to pound objects that resemble nails. Democracy means “coordinated efforts to solve problems that emerge as we navigate the natural and social world” (Knight & Johnson 2014, p. 20). Democracy requires pluralism and fallibilism about all ideologies and causal theories. Further, democracy is polycentric. We can find it not only in legislative chambers but also on news websites and in community meetings, interactions between agencies and citizens, and in the streets.

We should not hope for any entity, movement, or leader to remove the underlying cause of democracy’s distress so that it can function better. Instead, many people, organizations, and institutions must address the many causes of democracy’s dysfunction.

This would seem an impossibly tall order, except that many are already at work on the various troubles. A map like fig. 1 is meant to orient and motivate diverse actors and activities.

More detail on these factors is here: 16 colliding forces that create our moment. See also: What our nation needs is a broad-based, pro-democracy civic movement;

Ukraine (3): reflections after a long night

Posted on June 6, 2025 by Peter

I have been here for part of five days–just an instant compared to people who live here. As far as I can tell, Ukrainians are tired but not even remotely interested in quitting.

Air raid alerts sound several times every day. Mostly, these alerts do not result in actual attacks. The Russians send up a MiG to cause an air alert and disrupt everyone’s day.

We are all familiar with disruptions, but it is different to face a hostile state that is trying to maximize inconvenience for years on end. The Russians choose their times and methods for that purpose. My class had to relocate to a bomb shelter while we were doing our introductions on the first day and when the participants were offering their final reflections at the very end. Of course, this was a coincidence (Putin doesn’t know or care about my course), but the point is that anything you try to accomplish is subject to disruption.

And sometimes the threat is real. Last night, there were drone and ballistic missile strikes across the country, including here. On Wednesday night, a local fire chief responded to a drone attack and found his entire family had been killed. These stories add up.

Meanwhile, Ukrainians face the overload of one difficult choice after another. Do I go to the shelter or ride this one out? Do I try to move abroad or stay in the country? I think the emotional toll is substantial. A clinical psychologist told me that “PTSD” is not the appropriate diagnosis, because the “P” stands for “post-.” Here, the trauma continues.

I might also note that there’s a feeling of unreality to it all. This is a country at war. Last night in Kyiv, we had a small but actual battle. If you watch a video like this one from The New York Times, you will see moments and locations around Kyiv where the violence was most dramatic.

Yet most of life continues in a normal way in a large, modern city of about 3 million people. This morning, I could not see evidence of last night’s violence from where I am staying. I don’t think I could hear explosions from the bomb shelter. Normal life—millions of commuters, teenagers clowning around, moms with toddlers in pleasant restaurants—belies the danger.

(The Times‘ video also shows a parking garage very much like the one where I spent last night. There was no dog that I noticed, but there was a very cute baby who was happy enough to be awake most of the night on Mommy’s lap.)

from Ukraine (2): a video on happiness

Posted on June 5, 2025 by Peter

I made this video in my hotel room in Kyiv last night. I was preparing for the public lecture on the subject of “happiness” that I will give tomorrow. For reasons that I mention at the start of the video, I am a bit anxious about this lecture, and I was rehearsing. However, my conversations here with old friends, new students and colleagues, and even a clinical psychology professor this morning make me think that the topic is urgent and that my conversation-opener might have some value.

(By the way, if you look carefully at the building behind my shoulder, you can see a bricked-in hole on the upper floors, surrounded by dark marks. ~~For all I know, there was a kitchen fire there, or a slow-moving structural problem due to bad construction. But I think it was probably a Russian drone~~. That shows the impact of part of a Russian drone that hit in May.)

from Ukraine (1)

Posted on June 2, 2025 by Peter

I am aboard a train from Warsaw to Kyiv, well into Ukrainian territory now. I hope to write something of substance about my week in this country, but my main reflections should wait until I have listened and learned and found the right voice.

I don’t want to pretend to any real knowledge based on a few days in a large country where I cannot even fluently decode the alphabet, let alone study the range of opinion. (I have been here three times before, but always as a brief and superficial observer, which will be the case again this week.)

And I want to find a voice than it not about me, because more than 35 million people live here all the time. Everyone else on this train holds a Ukrainian passport; I saw the whole stack in the arms of the border guard. The people who spend months and years in a war deserve attention, not the guy with the dark-blue passport who can leave when he wants.

I have come in solidarity. That is not a big thing to do; it is a small thing. But it is not nothing, and it seems important right now not to do nothing. Solidarity, plus a desire to learn from activists here, explains my visit.

For the moment, I will just share that a rail journey from Warsaw via Chelm to Kyiv seems haunted. It’s a journey from the site of the Warsaw ghetto, via a town where 60 Jews out of 15,000 survived, to the site of Babi Yar. Our path cuts through the Pale of Settlement, albeit perhaps south of its middle and south of the part of Belarus from which my paternal ancestors escaped in the early 1900s. Trains have rolled back and forth in this region with cargoes of people for mass murder and with soldiers to kill and be killed. (We are currently stopped in Kovel, whose large Jewish community was wiped out, for the most part on the single day of June 28, 1941).

The train that I am riding must have already served the Soviet Union, and the vast majority of the passengers today are women and small children—presumably because most Ukrainian men are not allowed to exit. As we move past farms and through birch-sprinkled woods, the past seems very close.

learning from the Florentine republic

Posted on May 28, 2025 by Peter

(Florence): En route to Kyiv, I am in Florence for a conference of Americans who work on civic and democratic reform in the USA. It happens that I studied in Florence many decades ago–an experience that helped form my lifelong commitment to republican self-government. I am not truly an expert on the Florentine republic, but I can venture some thoughts about its relevance to our time:

For renaissance Florentines, civility (civiltá) meant the kinds of discourse and behavior that benefited self-governance. To determine what counted as civility, one first asked what the republic needed. Their answer was discourse that was frank, plain-spoken, and direct, in contrast to the talk of courtiers, which was deferential and artificial. For the Renaissance historian Giovanni Cambi, a true citizen was a man who refused to doff his hat or call any one “padrone” (boss), and Cambi named that virtue civiltá. Today, we can also ask which kinds of discourse benefit or harm our republic, and it’s unlikely that “civility” (in this sense) should mean politeness.
The Florentines invented many mechanisms to avoid domination. For instance, they tended to elect slates of potential leaders, and then select the actual officer-holders by lot. To prevent military coups, they hired mercenaries as their generals and banned them from entering the city. Most importantly, the city consisted of hundreds of guilds, enterprises, and vigorously competitive religious orders, making its public sphere vastly “polycentric.”
Republican values inspired one of the world’s greatest cultural movements. The Renaissance means the “rebirth” of classical culture, and Florentines recovered Greco-Roman culture because they saw themselves as republicans in the tradition of their early Roman forebears. In short, they created renaissance art to celebrate self-rule. However, the same cultural innovations that they launched for that purpose could also promote Caesarsism. My group stopped to admire the facade of Santa Maria Novella, which Leon Batista Alberti designed on behalf of his city. But, as Ingrid Rowland notes in a review of a new book by Indra Kagis McEwen, Alberti spent most of his career serving dictators in “Italy’s hothouse courts” outside Florence. These patrons also purported to embody “ancient Roman virtues” — but “no longer the republican virtues heralded by Cicero but virtues adapted to the conditions of empire.” Later, when the Medici smashed the republic and installed themselves as rulers, they continued the fluorescence of renaissance art, but in the interest of monarchy. In short, the republic’s cultural legacy was subject to capture.
The leader of the Medici bank and family for most of the 15th century, Cosimo the Elder, cannily avoided holding any official offices in order to preserve the rules of the republic that benefited him. He ran the city as a political machine. His descendants acted more like rulers, and they provoked a republican movement that was also an anti-Medicean faction. The downfall of the republic was simply its military destruction at the hands of the Medici, who had transmuted economic power into monarchical power. Their wealth was the root cause of the republic’s defeat.