USAID Funds Revolution & Civil War Training Inside American Universities

In an investigative piece published on February 11, 2026, journalist Natalie Winters reveals that the Serbia-based Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS),founded by Srda Popovic (Srđa Popović) and known for its book Blueprint for Revolution, has been receiving funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Specifically, CANVAS benefits from a $17 million, five-year Civil Society Engagement Program in Georgia that launched on November 1, 2021, which supports its expertise in building and executing nonviolent movements—tactics long associated with U.S.-backed color revolutions and regime-change efforts abroad.

CANVAS openly promotes its “revolutionary know-how” by training over 16,000 activists in 52 countries, claiming credit for 126 successful campaigns, and providing free toolkits, modules, and courses that teach strategic nonviolent action, including power mapping, coalition-building, message crafting, media amplification, fundraising, crisis management, and security measures for organizers.

These methods emphasize provoking authority overreactions, using humor and spectacle for disruption, and sequencing actions into winnable campaigns.

What raises particular concern in the report is that these USAID-supported protest-engineering techniques have been embedded within the United States itself, with CANVAS trainers and curricula integrated into American universities and activist networks.

Examples include longstanding partnerships such as a dedicated CANVAS block in the Political Science Department at Colorado College since 2006, the adoption of the course “Waging Non-Violent Conflict: Organizing for Social Change” at New York University in 2021, programs at Grinnell College, Tufts University’s Fletcher School through its Tactics4Change platform, Harvard University, and collaborations like a strategic nonviolent action course developed with the University of Essex.

CANVAS also works with U.S.-based organizations such as IREX, Humanity in Action, New Tactics in Human Rights, and initiatives like the People Power Academy, which feature contributors tied to racial-justice activism and former media figures. Evidence cited includes CANVAS’s own website documentation, public course syllabi, archived Reddit AMAs from self-described “revolution consultants” confirming training of Americans and university presentations, and connections to Gene Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institution, which influenced movements like Occupy Wall Street.Winters frames this development as deeply ironic and alarming: the same professionalized, USAID-backed regime-pressure strategies exported to destabilize foreign governments are now being normalized as legitimate civic education and activist training inside elite U.S. institutions, potentially enabling organized unrest or leverage against domestic authorities, often aligned with left-leaning social causes. She stresses that these connections are not speculative but rest on verifiable public budgets, organizational self-reports, named partnerships, and explicit training materials, urging readers to recognize the significance of this internalization of foreign-tested “revolution consulting” within America.