The Anti-Autocracy Handbook is a call to action, resilience, and collective defence of democracy, truth, and academic freedom in the face of mounting authoritarianism. It tries to provide guidance to scholars navigating the growing global trend of democratic backsliding and autocratization, in particular in the U.S. To this end, it sets out how autocracies often follow a common playbook, built around the “3 Ps”: populism, polarization, and post-truth. Leaders present themselves as voices of “the people” against “corrupt elites”, inflame societal divisions, and undermine facts to avoid accountability. This leads to a cascade of dangers for scholarship, including censorship, restrictions on funding and research collaboration, and even violence. The Trump administration serves as a contemporary example, with policies that curtail international scientific cooperation, revoke research grants, and suppress studies related to public health, climate change and minority issues. Because open inquiry and dissent are central to science and academia—qualities antithetical to authoritarian control—academia is often among the first targets of autocrats. To help scholars resist authoritarian developments, the handbook highlights both historic and contemporary measures aimed at attacking scholars, their institutional environments, and their scholarship. The handbook also sets out a framework for action based on personal risk level—low, medium, high, or extreme. This is designed to help scholars think about their own risk and purposefully choose actions in line with it. The handbook considers tools for enhancing digital safety and highlights the importance of ongoing documentation, preserving imperilled data, and creating distributed archives as a defence against erasure. It also calls on scholars to tell their stories—publicly or anonymously—to inspire others, maintain accountability and preserve a historical record. Accompanying the handbook is a living wiki that will continue to incorporate new developments and provide updates on global efforts by scholars to push back against authoritarianism and safeguard the democratic foundations that enable free inquiry. Available translations German version: Das Anti-Autokratie-Handbuch: Ein Leitfaden für Forschende zum Umgang mit erodierenden Demokratien Italian version: Il manuale Anti-Autocrazia: Una guida per aiutare gli studiosi ad orientarsi nell'arretramento democratico

SL was supported by the European Commission Horizon 2020 SoMe4Dem project (grant 101094752) via a UKRI Horizon replacement grant (10049415) and, together with DH, by the Horizon 2020 JITSUVAX project (grant 964728). SL and CA received funding from the European Research Council under the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme (Advanced Grant PRODEMINFO, 101020961). RH and SL acknowledge support from the Volkswagen Foundation (“Reclaiming individual autonomy and democratic discourse online: How to rebalance human and algorithmic decision making”) and from the Horizon 2020 SoMe4Dem project (grant 101094752). KA was funded by the DDC×TrygFonden Digital Democracy Centre Fellowship Programme at the University of Southern Denmark. EL-L, UH, and SL were supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) POLTOOLS project (grant 458366841).