Originally published on Global Voices

Amale Khlat, ‘Fishing on a Tridacna’ Cosmetic Vessel, 2023. 34 x 49 cm (13.4 × 19.3 in). Watercolor and archival ink on 300 gsm Arches paper. Image courtesy of the artist.

As wars, forced displacement, and humanitarian catastrophes unfold before us in an endless stream of images, the challenge is no longer simply witnessing violence, but understanding what it means to look, remember, and respond. Lebanese-British artist Amale Freiha Khlat belongs to a rare group of contemporary artists whose work resists the speed and spectacle of our image-saturated world. Instead of reproducing scenes of suffering, her installations create spaces of reflection where silence, absence, memory, and materiality become vehicles for confronting conflict. Layered, contemplative, and emotionally resonant, her visual language invites viewers into the ethical complexities of war rather than offering easy conclusions. In doing so, her work transforms spectators into participants, asking them to consider not only what is visible, but also what has been erased, omitted, or quietly accepted.

Born into a family of independent-minded Lebanese journalists and writers, Khlat grew up between Lebanon, France, and the United Kingdom. From an early age, she learned to question how news is produced, whose stories are told, and how images shape public understanding. Her childhood was marked by the Lebanese civil war, where memories of warplanes, shelling, car bombs, and constant news bulletins left a lasting awareness of loss, exile, and instability. Those experiences remain central to her practice, which increasingly addresses displacement, refugees, war, and the politics of memory through multidisciplinary installations.

Lebanese-British artist Amale Khlat in her studio in London, 2025. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Educated at Penninghen in Paris and the Royal College of Art in London, where she earned an MA in Print with distinction, Khlat has developed a practice that moves fluidly between installation, sculpture, print, video, sound, and artist books. Her works rely on concealment, reflection, theatrical distance, and material presence rather than direct representation. As she explains, “The direct image of suffering does something very specific to a viewer. It produces an immediate emotional response that closes as quickly as it opens. You feel something. Then you move on. The work has done its job and released you.” Instead, she creates works that refuse that release, encouraging viewers to remain with discomfort, ambiguity, and difficult questions long after they leave the gallery.

In this interview with Global Voices, Khlat reflects on the politics of archives and museums, the ethics of representing war and displacement, the limits of documentary images, the relationship between material, medium, and memory, and the role art can play when political language and humanitarian responses fail.

Amale Khlat’s ‘The Archive of Silence’ was created for the group show ‘The Doorway Effect’ and exhibited at The Handbag Factory Gallery, London, UK, in 2025. 210 x 210 x 185 cm (82.7 × 82.7 × 72.8 in). Engraved plywood, MDF, timber, metal, UV print on acrylic sheet, magnet, one-way mirror sheet, two chairs, a table, a photo, an archival box.  Image courtesy of the author.

Excerpts from the interview follow: 

Omid Memarian (OM):  In “The Archive of Silence” (2025), you stage a war museum preparing an exhibition sponsored by an arms manufacturer, with two empty chairs, a folding screen, and an audience “caught in the doorway” as both witness and accomplice. Your statement describes silence not as absence, but as something reconstructed through erasure, memory, denial, and spectatorship. At a moment when wars are unfolding in real time before global audiences, how did you think through silence as an active force, something that speaks, accuses, protects, or implicates?

Amale Freiha Khlat (AFK): Silence, in this work, is not the absence of sound or speech. It is the condition that makes certain things possible. The denial that passes as dignity, the forgetting that presents itself as moving forward. The war museum in the play is not a place of silence. It is very busy, very institutional, very concerned with how things are presented. The silence belongs to what is not shown, not collected, not sponsored.

The archival box on the table holds things that cannot be displayed. A photograph. Objects. The silence around them is not emptiness; it is a decision. Someone has decided what belongs in an archive and what does not. Someone decided what a museum can say and what it cannot. The arms manufacturer’s sponsorship makes that decision visible, but the decision exists in every institution, in every collection, in every wall text that frames what we are allowed to feel.

Amale Khlat, ‘The Archive of Silence’ was created for the group show ‘The Doorway Effect’ and exhibited at The Handbag Factory Gallery, London, UK, in 2025. 210 x 210 x 185 cm (82.7 × 82.7 × 72.8 in). Engraved plywood, MDF, timber, metal, UV print on acrylic sheet, magnet, one-way mirror sheet, two chairs, a table, a photo, an archival box. Image courtesy of the author.

I am interested in the audience’s silence, too. The moment of standing before something difficult and choosing how to respond, whether to sit, to read the play, to look in the mirror, or to walk away. All of these are forms of testimony. The work does not ask you to feel a particular thing. It asks you to notice what you do when you are given the choice.

At a time when wars and genocides unfold in real time, when we consume images of suffering between one scroll and the next, silence has become both more dangerous and more complicit. “The Archive of Silence” tries to make that silence audible, to give it weight, presence, and consequence.

Amale Khlat, ‘The Testimony of a Refugee II – Que Sera Sera, Whatever Will Be Will Be,’ 2018. Various dimensions: cherry tree root, 16 amber resins, plywood, MDF, timber, screenprint on 5 acrylics, one-way mirror window film, high-definition monitor and player, headphone and school chairs. Photo courtesy of the artist.

OM: In The Testimony of a Refugee, you write that the spectacle of war is observed, directed, and performed, and you invoke Susan Sontag’s warning that “pictures don’t speak for themselves”— they require context and knowledge. How do you build that context inside the work itself, especially when the image of suffering is so often consumed quickly, emotionally, and without historical or political depth?

AFK: Sontag’s warning has stayed with me since I first read it. ‘Pictures do not speak for themselves.’ They need historical, political, ethical context, without which even the most powerful image becomes decoration, or worse, spectacle.

“The Testimony of a Refugee” tries to build that context inside the work itself, through accumulation. The cherry tree root is not labeled. The amber resins are not explained. The Mediterranean Sea engraved into the floor between the two chairs is not announced. The visitor has to arrive at these things slowly, through attention, through proximity, through the decision to sit down.

Amale Khlat, ‘The Testimony of a Refugee I – Question Time,’ 2017. Exhibited at the Cafe Gallery Project, London, UK, 2018. Various dimensions: cherry tree root, plywood, nine amber resins, school chairs and panel lights. Image courtesy of the artist.

The school chairs carry the weight of what is taught and what is not. History as curriculum. The child who was never told. This is not stated anywhere in the work; it is felt, if the visitor chooses to feel it.

The question of how suffering is consumed, quickly, emotionally, without depth, is the subject of the work, as much as its content. The tête-à-tête structure of the earlier version, with one person watching and one only listening, makes this explicit. You cannot share the same experience even when you are sitting together. Context is not something that can be given. It has to be built, slowly, by each person who enters the room.

OM: How has academic training shaped your practice, not only technically, but conceptually, in the way you approach installation, print, sculpture, video, sound, theatrical space, and the role of the spectator?

AFK: The Royal College of Art gave me permission to fail. That sounds simple, but it is not. The permission to make work that does not resolve, that does not conclude, that holds contradictions without resolving them — this is not easy to arrive at alone. The RCA gave me the critical framework and the space to test ideas until they became something I could not have predicted at the beginning.

Penninghen gave me rigor. The French tradition of drawing, of composition, of understanding the image as something constructed rather than found, which is the foundation beneath everything else. The printmaking came from the RCA, but the eye came from Paris.

What academic training cannot give you is the subject. That comes from elsewhere, from memory, from geography, from the specific experience of living between two worlds and belonging entirely to neither. The training gives you the tools. The life gives you the necessity.

Conceptually, what both institutions gave me was the habit of questioning. Not what to make, but why. Not how to make it, but what it costs to make it. That question — what does it cost to make this work, and what does it cost the viewer to receive it — is still at the center of everything I do.

Amale Khlat, ‘Mousharabiah Screens,’ 2022. Screenprints on acrylic sheets mounted on steel frames. Image courtesy of the artist.

OM:  Your work moves across installation, sculpture, print, video, sound, artist books, screens, and staged spaces. How do you decide which medium can carry a subject as difficult as war, displacement, erasure, or spectatorship? 

AFK: I do not choose the medium first. The medium arrives with the subject, or sometimes after the subject has been circling for a long time without finding its form.

The “Mousharabiah Screen” had to be a print. The reduction process, carving away, removing, revealing, is the subject as much as the image. You cannot separate the method from the meaning. The linocut reduction is itself an act of erasure and revelation.

The forest had to be sculpture. You cannot print a tree root. You cannot photograph the weight of wood and beeswax and steel. The materiality of the ephemeral (the cloud made stone, the forest reconstructed according to mathematical laws) requires physical presence. The viewer has to be in the same room as the object.

The screens, acrylic, mirror, one-way film, had to be transparent and reflective simultaneously. The viewer had to see themselves in the work. That is not a metaphor. It is a material requirement.

The chairs, the archival boxes, the engraved floors — these are not decorative choices. They are questions made physical. A chair without a seat cannot be occupied. A box that cannot be opened holds a silence that is louder than anything it might contain. The material is always the argument.

Amale Khlat, ‘Mousharabiah Screens, The Perilous Journey.’ newspaper series, 2018. Series of nine linocuts on newsprint. Image courtesy of the artist.

OM: One thread running through your practice is the screen: the Mousharabiah that reveals and conceals, the folding panel, the one-way mirror, the printed surface, the stage, the fourth wall. What does the screen allow you to say about looking, especially in an age when images of war, refugees, and catastrophe circulate constantly, but do not always produce understanding or action?

AFK: The screen is the condition of our moment. We live behind screens, we watch screens, we are watched through screens. The image of war, of refugees, of catastrophe arrives through a screen, framed, edited, captioned, scrolled past.

What the “Mousharabiah Screen” allows me to say is that this is not new. The mediation of looking (the screen that simultaneously reveals and conceals, that protects and withholds) is as old as architecture. The desire to see without being seen is as old as the human gaze.

What is new is the speed. The image of suffering that arrives on a screen today is gone tomorrow, replaced by another image, equally urgent, equally forgotten. The screen produces a constant present tense in which nothing accumulates, nothing sediments, nothing becomes history.

My screens slow that down. The Mousharabiah lattice requires attention. You have to look through it, not at it. The one-way mirror shows you yourself looking. The folding panel requires you to move around it, to find your position. These are not passive surfaces. They are negotiations between the viewer and what is being seen.

In an age when images of war circulate constantly without producing understanding or action, I am interested in the screen that makes you stop. That makes you aware of your own looking. That asks not only what you see, but what it costs you to see it, and what you have chosen, consciously or not, not to see at all.

Amale Khlat, ‘The Celestial Weave,’ 2025, shown at the Handbag Factory Gallery, London. 30 x 45 x 1.5 cm (11.8 × 17.7 × 0.6 in.) Twenty-four linocuts on newsprint-mounted plywood. Two unique artist’s books consisting of 12 linocuts and silk prints on Arches paper, mounted and bound in a concertina format, with a handmade cover when closed. Series of linocuts on Arches paper in archival boxes. Image courtesy of the artist.

OM: Your works seem intentionally composed to lead audiences toward awareness, sympathy, or even awakening without relying on overt imagery or direct visual shock. Instead, you use “concealment, theatrical distance, ornament, reflection, and erasure.” How did you come to trust this quieter, more layered approach, and what do you think it asks from the viewer that a more direct image may not?

AFK: I did not arrive at this approach through a theoretical decision. I arrived at it through failure, through making work that was too direct, too illustrative, too close to the image it was trying to question.

The direct image of suffering does something very specific to a viewer. It produces an immediate emotional response that closes as quickly as it opens. You feel something. Then you move on. The work has done its job and released you.

I wanted to make work that does not release the viewer so easily. That keeps them inside the question rather than delivering an answer. Concealment, distance, ornament, reflection, these are not ways of avoiding difficult subjects. They are ways of holding the viewer inside the difficulty for long enough to actually feel it.

The “Mousharabiah Screen” is the model. It does not show you everything. It shows you enough to make you want to see more. It protects, and it withholds simultaneously. The viewer has to do some of the work. And in doing that work, they become part of the piece. Their looking becomes the subject.

Trust in this approach came slowly. It came from watching audiences in the gallery space, noticing when they stopped, when they moved closer, when they sat down. The work that held them longest was never the work that shouted.

OM:  As a Lebanese-British artist based in London, how do war, displacement, and the unresolved histories of the region enter your work, not as autobiography alone, but as a wider artistic and ethical question? What can art offer when political language fails, or when humanitarian response is blocked by distance, fatigue, or indifference?

AFK: Lebanon is not a subject I choose. It is the condition from which I see. The civil war was not something that happened to Lebanon while I watched from a distance. It was the air, the sound, the daily negotiation between ordinary life and extraordinary violence. You learn, very young, to hold both simultaneously.

Living in London has not changed this perspective. If anything, living here sharpened my experience of watching a war from a distance that is also intimate, of reading the news about a place you carry inside you, of navigating between a world that knows your country as a crisis and the country itself, which is so much more than that.

What art can offer when political language fails is not an answer. Political language fails because it is trying to produce agreement, consensus, action. Art does not need to produce any of those things. It can sit with the contradiction. It can hold the question open. It can make the viewer feel the weight of something they have been watching from a safe distance, without telling them what to do about it.

The distance, the fatigue, the indifference — these are not problems to be solved. They are the conditions the work has to navigate.

Amale Khlat, ‘Crafting Memory Lane 2, The Odious Smell of Truth,’ 2017. Hockney Gallery, London. Image courtesy of the artist.

OM:  How have galleries, fairs, institutions, and collectors responded to works that are formally refined but emotionally and politically charged? Do you feel the art world is becoming more open to works rooted in current human suffering and historical rupture, or does it still prefer difficult subjects to arrive through abstraction, beauty, or distance?

AFK: The art world is complicated. It has always preferred difficult subjects to arrive through beauty, and I understand why. Beauty slows the viewer down. It creates the conditions for a harder encounter. I use beauty deliberately, for exactly this reason.

But beauty also protects the institution. A formally refined work about war can be collected, exhibited, and praised without the collector or institution having to take a political position. I am aware of this tension. I do not think it is resolvable. I work within it.

Whether the art world is becoming more open to works rooted in current human suffering, I am not sure. There are moments of genuine openness, usually following a specific crisis that has reached a tipping point of visibility. But openness is not the same as sustained engagement. The question is not whether difficult work can be shown. It is whether it continues to be shown, collected, and discussed after the crisis has moved off the front page.

Originally published on Global Voices

Assyrian refugees on a wagon moving to a newly constructed village on the Khabur River in Syria. Photo by John D. Whiting/Matson (G. Eric and Edith) collection at the Library of Congress on Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

By JR Younan

This post is part of Global Voices’ August 2026 Spotlight series, “Indigenous Rights.” This series offers insight into the lives and experiences of Indigenous peoples, to build connections across regions, center Indigenous experiences, and share the stories of leaders, activists, and community members, and more. You can support this coverage by donating here.

I was 11 years old the first time I was told Assyrians don’t exist by a friend. I got home, slumped on a stool and snapped open a packet of prawn cocktail crisps. 

Assyrians are an Indigenous ethnic group from West Asia, tracing our ancestry to an ancient people. Parts of Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq make up our homeland. We speak the Neo-Aramaic Assyrian language. While predominantly Christian, we maintain ancient cultural traditions such as Akitu and Musarda. 

Intuition on full alert, it didn’t take my mother long to wheedle out what was troubling me that day. With dill splayed across a chopping board, she told me about the Simele massacre for the first time.

The Simele Massacre

The massacre took place in 1933. The Iraqi army, with the assistance of Kurdish tribes, executed an attack on the town of Simele and surrounding districts inhabited by Assyrians. It was a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing, with extensive propaganda unleashed beforehand by the state to sour public opinion, describing us as “foreign” and “colonial agents.” 

In the massacre’s prelude, Assyrian men were forcibly disarmed while Arab families received evacuation notices. The British administration in Iraq, aware of the impending violence, remained inactive. Thousands of Assyrians were killed in the violence that followed, and afterwards public celebrations were held; according to some accounts, some even commemorated with watermelons carved to resemble skulls. The army commander who led the operations, Bakr Sidqi, became a national hero. The Iraqi state has never officially acknowledged the massacre.

On August 7, we commemorate Assyrian Martyrs’ Day, founded for those who lost their lives at Simele but which now encompasses remembrance for all Assyrians who have been persecuted. 

Hearing about Simele was a gut punch. As I immersed myself in our contemporary history, its cyclical nature was apparent: genocides, displacement and the eternal lack of accountability. One aspect proved especially resonant: the plight of Assyrian women and girls. 

I saw the same pattern: girls taken from their homes, women disappearing without a trace, families left searching for answers that never came. Within our families, they live on anecdotally: a sister escaping, an aunt resisting. But how many were they? What were their names? What became of them afterwards?

An invisible people

No constitution in the Middle East recognises Assyrians as an Indigenous people. We remain one of the most socio-politically disenfranchised groups. Both the Western and the Eastern gaze have been confined to majority demographic groups. Assyrians have scarcely warranted a footnote. The unrecognised Ottoman-led 1915 genocide (known as “Sayfo” — “sword” in Aramaic) wiped out approximately 75 percent of our population.

The Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO) warns that land theft, security threats and diminishing political status continue to drive our exodus. In West Asia, we are the marginalised of the marginalised, so where does that leave our women and girls? 

Sexual violence as a tool of genocide

Genocide scholarship increasingly understands sexual violence as an instrument of destruction. Abducted women and girls, rape, forced conversions and marriages fracture family structures; women are the custodians of continuity, preserving family recipes, cultural rituals and folklore, while being the first voice through which a child hears their mother tongue. 

Raphael Lemkin, the jurist who devised the term “genocide” in 1944, and whose thinking was shaped by the Simele Massacre, argued that genocide is not simply the killing of a people or removal from their lands. It is the destruction of a group’s social existence. Gendered violence is central to that process, reverberating across generations. Lest we forget the women and girls to whom this happened. It is impossible to comprehend how they lived with what followed. The violence did not end when the rape ended or when their names were changed. It endured for the rest of their lives. How do we even begin to measure that? 

Assyrian genocide memorial in Yerevan, Armenia. Photo by Divot on Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

I spoke to a British-Arab journalist about discrimination faced by Assyrians in Iraq. He dismissed it, citing his Assyrian great-grandmother from Simele. He knew nothing of the massacre, nor was he interested in learning. It was bizarre: an Arab man claiming an Assyrian lineage while remaining entirely oblivious to the violence that may have produced it. 

Historical absence

Outside of our own communal memory, these women and girls are largely absent in academia. Their violation has been threefold: first as Indigenous people, then through sexual violence and finally by the archival silence that follows. If it’s not written down in the history books, it never happened — the culmination of ethnic cleansing through the manipulation of collective memory. 

This silence is not universal. Following the 1915 genocide, international legal frameworks such as the Treaty of Sèvres required the Turkish government to co-operate with investigations into missing Armenian women and girls and assist in locating them. Humanitarian organisations such as the Aleppo Rescue Home and Near East Relief facilitated family tracing. The League of Nations commissioned searches for the missing up until the 1930s, accompanied by meticulous archival documentation.   

This is, as it should be. Assyrian women and girls were never afforded the same mechanisms for identification, documentation or recovery. Whilst there are details recorded on Assyrian persecution by the British and missionary organisations, they are scant. As a transnational people divided across arbitrarily drawn borders, Assyrians faced challenges in establishing cohesive institutions and political representation, unlike Armenians who, despite a substantial diaspora, have benefited from the leverage provided by being a state-bearing nation. 

Assyrians have traditionally been geopolitically powerless; amidst the fledgling post-war struggle for hegemony over oil resources, it is little wonder we inspired no assistance.

A glib justification has been our smaller numbers. However, just over a century ago Assyrians were the majority demographic across much of our homeland. West Asian states have spent the last century rebranding Assyrians as everything other than Assyrian through forced assimilation, state classification (Arab, Semitic Turk, Kurdish Christian) and sectarian divisions sown by late 19th-century missionaries that resulted in religious-affiliated identifiers emerging instead of Assyrian. These factors have all contributed to a gross underestimation of our population and, by extension, impact on our communities.

Current minority status should not lessen our importance socio-politically and historically; on the contrary, it elevates it, demanding interrogation as to why we have become a minority in the first instance — why an Indigenous people, whose presence stretches across millennia, could within a century face the prospect of disappearance from their ancestral homelands.

Not to downplay efforts within our own community at historical preservation. Organisations such as Seyfo Centre, Assyrian Studies Association and Assyrian Genocide Studies have begun addressing these historiographical lacunae, with the latter archiving women’s accounts. Yet these are relatively recent endeavours, the onus always being on Assyrians themselves, sustained mainly through volunteer goodwill.

Ongoing gendered violence

The rise of Islamic State (ISIS) brought renewed persecution, as Assyrian communities were targeted through killings, displacement, and the abduction and enslavement of women and girls. Western media and liberal discourse have devoted considerable attention to centering the experiences of ISIS “brides,” invariably portrayed as victims despite growing evidence illustrating many were not passive actors. 

Yet the actual women victims of ISIS have been largely neglected. During an all-women’s panel on intersectional feminism, I highlighted this double standard. Rather than engagement, Assyrian testimony was dismissed as Islamophobic and nationalist and exposed the limits of widespread binary political discourse.

Yazidi people have, rightly so, received international advocacy for the crimes committed by ISIS against their women and girls. Their persecution was rapidly framed internationally as a genocide against a distinct ethnoreligious minority. 

Assyrians were subsumed within broader narratives of Christian persecution. This categorisation has obscured Assyrian ethnicity and the specific gendered experiences, compounded by the fact that a predominantly secular West has viewed Christianity as a trait of the right wing, which may have contributed to reduced recognition.

It would be naïve to ignore potential stigma surrounding experiences of sexual violence. Fear of shame and social repercussions can hinder survivors’ testimony, as well as the intergenerational consequences, particularly within West Asian legal and social frameworks where children born of rape inherit the perpetrator’s religious identity rather than that of their mother. 

Continued loss

Having performed within West Asian spaces, some audience members would approach me. Their stories were uncannily similar. Raised as Arabs, many only discovered as adults that their mothers were Assyrian. They spoke of mothers forbidden from speaking Assyrian, of fathers dismissing Assyrian identity as “minority mentality,” and of estrangement from maternal families. 

I am not suggesting these women lacked agency in their marriages, nor am I equating these experiences with the sexual violence discussed. Rather, I am highlighting a disproportionate burden placed upon women to relinquish their language, culture, and identity to assimilate into the identity of their husbands upheld by patriarchal West Asian status laws. Time and again, people felt compelled to tell me these stories because they sensed something had been lost, even if they couldn’t always name it. 

Remembrance

My great-great-aunt, Sorayya was a survivor of Seyfo. She lived with us for a time when I was a child. She was full of stories. She spoke about travelling to Jerusalem, knocking back a whisky before getting a tattoo of a cross, masquerading as a soldier to prank neighbours and the adventures she had as a nanny for an American ambassador in Baghdad — but never Seyfo. 

By the time I understood that these silences were part of the story, it was too late. She was no longer alive for me to ask. As older generations pass away, opportunities to preserve first-hand and inherited memories of Assyrian women and girls erode. There are limitations to our remembrance, of course; being the least we can offer, it is incomplete, constrained by the stories that were never told, by those whose names were lost, with lives that were disrupted and the justice that remains unresolved.

Originally published on Global Voices

Screenshot from YouTube video, ‘Kuwait's stateless bedoun in limbo’ uploaded by Reuters. Fair use

This article by Nazeeha Saaed was first published on Muwatin on October 2, 2025. This edited version is published on Global Voices as part of a content-sharing agreement. 

This post is also part of Global Voices’ July 2026 Spotlight series, “Statelessness.” This series offers insight into the issue of statelessness and how it hinders people’s freedom of movement, educational opportunities, political access, and more. You can support this coverage by donating here.

The denial or revocation of nationality in the Gulf states is a political practice shaped by each state’s internal dynamics and governance style. It reflects the failure to uphold human rights, chief among them, the equal right of every individual to acquire a nationality and never be arbitrarily deprived of it.

In 2025, Kuwait passed amendments to its Nationality Law, making it easier to revoke Kuwaiti nationality. In parallel, the country launched a broad campaign to review nationality acquisition. Through the Supreme Committee for Verifying Kuwaiti Nationality, more than 42,000 people have reportedly had their citizenship revoked since 2024 — an unprecedented escalation.

The campaign has targeted naturalized citizens, dual nationals, and those accused of acquiring nationality fraudulently. Many affected are women who acquired Kuwaiti nationality through marriage under Article 8 of the law, which has now been repealed. These revocations were carried out without judicial oversight or avenues for appeal, raising serious legal and human rights concerns.

Many of those stripped of their nationality are now stateless, deprived of access to essential services like healthcare, education, and employment. Their identity documents and passports are confiscated, effectively curtailing their freedom of movement and participation in public life.

Kuwait’s Bidoon population has faced statelessness since the country’s founding, leading to profound economic and social marginalization, with many struggling to access education, healthcare, and employment because of their lack of an official identity.

Khadija, a Bidoon woman from Kuwait born into a family of 10, realized early on that her family lacked the privileges others enjoyed. When she was in primary school, she and her sister were forced to stay home because the family could not afford tuition fees, despite public education being free for Kuwaiti citizens.

“We stayed home and studied using last year’s textbooks until the time came when my sister and I had to help our struggling family,” Khadija recalls. “We worked to save money for bunk beds like our brothers had, and for school fees the following year. I longed to run, play, and draw like other girls. But our little project irritated a municipal employee, or so he claimed. He threatened us — and that ended our business.”

Originally published on Global Voices

Image by SyriaUntold, used with permission.

This story by Arya Haji was first published on SyriaUntold on April 2, 2026. This edited version is published on Global Voices as part of a content-sharing agreement.

This post is also part of Global Voices’ July 2026 Spotlight series, “Statelessness.” This series offers insight into the issue of statelessness and how it hinders people’s freedom of movement, educational opportunities, political access, and more. You can support this coverage by donating here.

The stories of Syria’s unregistered people span decades — an open wound for a vast population that refuses to heal through makeshift “solutions.”

This tragedy affects hundreds of thousands of Syrian Kurds. It started in 1962, when the Secessionist government issued a decree to conduct a rushed census in the Al-Hasakah governorate alone, completed in just a single day.

The result was that tens of thousands of Syrian Kurds in al-Hasaka lost their citizenship through a bureaucratic process that ignored basic fairness and equal treatment. Those affected fell into three groups: those who kept their nationality, the “Ajanib” (Foreigners of al-Hasaka), and the “Maktumeen” (Unregistered), left with no legal recognition at all.

In 2018, the organization Syrians for Truth and Justice cited official sources within the Civil Registry Directorate of Al-Hasakah, stating that the number of Kurds stripped of or denied citizenship between 1962 and 2011 reached over 517,000. Following the 2011 uprising, the Bashar al-Assad regime issued Legislative Decree No. 49, granting Syrian Arab citizenship to those registered as “Aliens of Al-Hasakah” (Ajanib al-Hasakah), while continuing to exclude the “unregistered” (Maktoum al-Qayd).

Aliens of Al-Hasakah

In the city of Qamishli, Helbest Mohammed, a 28-year-old Kurdish woman, was born “unregistered” to an unregistered father. Today, she is a graduate of the Faculty of Medicine at Damascus University, yet she does not hold Syrian citizenship nor possess any formal identification. This status strips her of the most basic civil rights that other Syrian citizens take for granted.

When it was time for her to start school, she was too young to grasp the hardships her family had to overcome. The features of the crisis became starkly clear during her middle school years; despite passing her exams, she was denied her graduation certificate. The same scenario repeated itself when she achieved a high score on her high school finals — a grade that qualified her for medical school — only to face the same institutional wall.

“Being ‘unregistered’ was a daily conversation in our home,” Mohammed explains. “When the 2011 decree to naturalize the ‘Aliens of Al-Hasakah’ was issued, it excluded the Maktoum al-Qayd category. While those classified as ‘Aliens’ held a red-colored civil status record, we only possessed an identification certificate from the neighborhood mukhtar (an elected local official who represents a village or neighborhood) to prove our residency. At that time, we actually wished to become ‘Aliens,’ hoping it might one day lead to citizenship. However, the security services’ pursuit of my father prevented that. We never took a single step to change our legal status.”

An impossible path

According to the organization Syrians for Truth and Justice, the number of “unregistered” individuals in Al-Hasakah reached over 171,300 by 2011. By 2018, approximately 50,400 of them had obtained citizenship after their legal status was transitioned from “unregistered” to “aliens,” and finally to “Syrian citizens.”

Nonetheless, nearly 41,000 individuals were unable to change their status because of technical issues encountered by the Civil Registry Directorate while migrating their files into the “Aliens of Al-Hasakah” records. Furthermore, 5,000 individuals did not report to the directorate to rectify their legal standing. By 2018, the vast majority of those classified as “Aliens of Al-Hasakah” — 326,489 out of 346,242 people — had successfully obtained citizenship, according to the same source.

“Since I was a child, I had a fierce ambition to complete my education and earn the highest degrees,” Helbest Mohammed continues. “My family supported me with everything they had, and our status as ‘unregistered’ never discouraged me from pursuing my academic journey; even my teachers saw me as a highly driven girl. In 2016, I traveled to Damascus without a graduation certificate. I defied reality and went to the Faculty of Medicine to enroll, despite having no proof of the high grades that qualified me for medical school.”

She was told to consult the Ministry of Education for a transcript, but that wasn't enough to complete her university registration. “So, I submitted a request to the Ministry of Higher Education, and that is where my true suffering began: shuttling between two ministries in a city I didn't know, far from my family, facing an uncertain fate. In the end, I managed to achieve my dream through a conditional enrollment, provided that I would not be granted a graduation certificate upon completing my studies.”

Mohammed was fully aware that she would not receive a graduation certificate, yet she insisted on completing her studies. She faced constant harassment at military checkpoints and at the airport during her travels to Damascus. Despite holding certain exemptions as a university student, she was frequently forced to provide exhaustive explanations of her legal status to every official she encountered. She even had to rely on a friend to collect the monthly allowance sent by her family via wire transfer. Moreover, she was forced to register her mobile phone line under the name of a Syrian ID holder; registering it in her own name would have stripped her of most student communication privileges available to Syrian citizens.

Mohammed explains further: “I was fully aware of my academic fate, yet I clung to the hope that our lived reality would change, a reality where we avoided any proximity to security branches or government institutions due to my father’s security status. When I graduated in late 2021, I received no documentation to prove my degree. A profound sense of pain overwhelmed me, as it did my family, seeing years of toil seemingly go to waste. I was unable to pursue a medical specialization after graduation. We worked tirelessly to find a solution, and my family eventually decided to hire a lawyer to extract papers for us, one way or another, despite my father’s situation.”

Hopes for justice

When Mohammed’s family of five decided to move forward with their civil registration in 2022, they were shocked by the financial costs required to rectify their status through a lawyer. The fees approached USD 4,000, at a time when everyone was struggling with dire living conditions. “Despite that,” she shares, “we decided to bear this cost for my sake, so I could finally obtain a certificate that would allow me to complete my medical specialization.”

“I was supposed to be in my third year of medical residency by now, but the procedures were agonizingly slow, causing me to miss the opportunity to begin my specialization. I finally obtained approval from the Political Security branch shortly before the regime’s fall, after a long and grueling wait. However, the government institutions in our region shuttered their doors following the collapse, and the specific digital network for the ‘unregistered’ remains closed. I have lost all hope of moving forward with the process.”

Following the fall of the Assad regime, Mohammed decided to travel to Damascus, carrying her documents and the recently obtained approval. The response she received was disappointing: “There has been no specific decree regarding the ‘unregistered’ (Maktoum al-Qayd) as of yet; therefore, the digital network cannot be activated to process their files.”

“I hope we are granted justice and compensated for the opportunities we have lost throughout our lives… we have spent an entire lifetime in suffering,” says Mohammed. On January 16, 2026, the transitional president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, issued Decree No. 13 concerning Syrian Kurds. Article 4 of the decree stipulates: “All exceptional laws and measures resulting from the 1962 census in Al-Hasakah Governorate are hereby repealed. Syrian citizenship shall be granted to all citizens of Kurdish origin residing on Syrian territory, including the ‘unregistered’ (Maktoum al-Qayd), ensuring their full equality in rights and duties.”

Just before the publication of this story, Helbest Mohammed confirmed that she recently obtained her citizenship.

Originally published on Global Voices

Image by UntoldMag, used with permission

By Khalid Bencherif and Federica Rossi

This story, by Khalid Bencherif and Federica Rossi, was first published on UntoldMag on June 10, 2026. This edited version is published on Global Voices as part of a content-sharing agreement. 

Fatima’s eight-year-old son coughed through another sleepless night in Mediouna, a neighbourhood southeast of Casablanca, Morocco, where the air carries something heavier than dust. “I only worry about my child,” she said, unfolding medical records worn soft from handling. “The doctor told me I had to move. But we don't have a place to go.”

Morocco’s government has issued 416 permits authorising the import of European waste — clothes, rubber tyres, industrial byproducts — burned as fuel in cement kilns across the Casablanca-Settat region, including within 15 kilometres (9 miles) of her home. European corporations save an estimated USD 52 million a year by shipping their waste here rather than processing it at home. Fatima doesn’t know that; what she knows is that her son can’t breathe, and that some nights the smell reaches dozens of kilometres from the landfill.

An investigation drawing on exclusive Basel Action Network trade data, customs records and Freedom of Information responses found that European countries shipped at least 36,611 tonnes of waste to Morocco between September 2024 and September 2025, 93 percent of it classified as “reusable” despite declared values as low as EUR 0.10 (USD 0.11) per kilogram. 

Industry sale prices for sorted reusable clothing run between EUR 0.50 and EUR 1.50 (USD 0.57 and USD 1.7) per kilogram. At that price, a shipment barely covers sorting and freight. 

The gap suggests not just different markets but different goods — genuinely reusable clothing commands higher prices, while low declared values indicate material destined for disposal rather than resale.

The economics of dumping

The arithmetic is brutally simple. Treating waste properly in Europe costs, conservatively, around USD 100 (EUR 88) per tonne.  Shipping it to Morocco and burning it in cement kilns costs USD 36 to USD 39 (EUR 32  to EUR 34). Applied to the 821,500 tonnes Morocco reported importing in 2024, that differential is worth roughly USD 50 million (EUR 44 million) a year — a figure that explains why the trade keeps accelerating before the EU export ban on plastic waste deadline on November 21, 2026.

Spain dwarfs all other EU exporters — shipping up to 4.5 million kg of waste to Morocco in a single month, while every other country combined barely registers. Source Basel Network trade records, Sep 2024–Sep 2025

The 36,611-tonne ban figure captures only what Europe still ships under waste codes: clothing, plastics, paper, electronics. The Moroccan Energy Transition and Sustainable Development Ministry’s much larger total includes 517,000 tonnes of ferrous metals and 200,600 tonnes of organic residues that European exporters list as commodity scrap, not waste. The gap between the two figures is essentially the volume reclassified out of the waste category before it leaves Europe. “The longer the chain of parties involved, the shorter the chain of enforcement,” says Paola Ficco, environmental lawyer and director of the Italian magazine Rifiuti. “Unofficial flows are undetectable.”

Spain handles nearly 80 percent of clothing exports to Morocco — 73 tonnes a day — and two-thirds of its plastic waste. 

The corporate players are embedded. The French firm CHIMIREC established a Moroccan subsidiary in 2020 to produce “Energy Substitution Fuel” for cement manufacturers. CHIMIREC Maroc told us it processes only domestic waste. LafargeHolcim’s Ecoval subsidiary is the country’s primary industrial waste treatment provider. Ciments du Maroc, owned by Germany’s Heidelberg Materials, operates a grinding centre at Jorf Lasfar — a documented entry point for European shipments. Neither LafargeHolcim nor Ciments du Maroc responded to requests for comment.

The loophole

The Basel Convention nominally restricts wealthy nations from dumping hazardous waste on poorer ones. In practice, a single word change on a customs form — from “waste” to “secondary raw material” — transforms a regulated substance into an unregulated commodity.

According to data collected through a Freedom of Information request, the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) told us that between 2020 and 2023 no Italian waste was registered as having gone to Morocco “for disposal purposes” — but, in the same response, it acknowledged that “small quantities” had been shipped during 2021, 2022 and 2023 “for the purpose of material recovery.”  

UN Comtrade records for 2023 confirm the flow; approximately 817 tonnes of Italian rubber waste reached Morocco that year, worth USD 427,000. The following August, the Moroccan Ministry of Energy Transition authorised the import of 20,000 tonnes from Italy alone.

Ninety-three percent of EU waste exported to Morocco is declared as “worn clothing” — material industry insiders say only 20–30 percent of which ever reaches secondhand markets. Source: Basel Network, Sep 2024–Sep 2025

The contradiction is the loophole. Under EU law, burning waste in a cement kiln counts as “energy recovery,” not “disposal.” Reclassifying garbage as alternative fuel or reusable merchandise allows European countries to legally erase millions of tonnes from their disposal ledgers while keeping their domestic recycling statistics pristine.

The human cost

The health impacts accumulate invisibly. Communities living near Moroccan cement plants face an excess risk of respiratory disease, cancer and mortality. Peer-reviewed research on cement kilns co-processing hazardous waste has measured dioxin emissions rising more than fourfold once hazardous waste enters the fuel mix. In Morocco specifically, occupational cement exposure has been directly linked to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease — a leading cause of respiratory mortality.

Mediouna’s landfill alone receives 1.2 million tonnes a year and is approaching saturation; in November 2024, the World Bank approved a USD 250 million programme to upgrade Morocco’s landfills — a tacit acknowledgement that domestic capacity is inadequate before any added burden from imports.

When the government approved more than two million tonnes of new imports in August 2024, activist Mohamed Benata of the Environmental Assembly of Northern Morocco called it “incompatible with the spirit of citizenship” and unconstitutional. In 2016, similar outrage forced the government to suspend Italian waste imports. The shipments resumed.

European corporate accountability law does not reach what happens after the containers leave port. The 2024 Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive “ends with handing over the goods, more or less,” says Miriam Saage-Maaß, legal director at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. Whether European exporters bear any responsibility for what then burns inside Moroccan kilns, she adds, “depends on how direct EU exporters are connected to the waste burning.”

From November 2026, the EU will ban plastic waste exports to non-OECD countries like Morocco; other non-hazardous waste exports will follow in May 2027 unless a country is on an approved list. Morocco submitted its application in February 2025. “Circularity cannot become an elegant way to outsource health and environmental impacts to other communities,” says Cristina Guarda, an Italian MEP from the Greens/EFA, “creating ‘sacrifice zones’ outside Europe.”

Back in Mediouna, Fatima remains caught in the middle. Europe celebrates its recycling milestones; Morocco counts the jobs. She and families like hers are left breathing the toxic fumes — from waste produced at home and shipped in from a continent that no longer wants its own.

This story was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe

Originally published on Global Voices

Image by SyriaUntold, used with permission.

This story by Jonas Karlov and Roméo Kermarec was originally published on SyriaUntold on February 6, 2025. This version is republished on Global Voices as part of a content-sharing agreement. 

This post is part of Global Voices’ June 2026 Spotlight series, “Gender Diversity.” This series offers insight into gender diversity and how it is being threatened, protected, and preserved around the world. You can support this coverage by donating here.

On the third floor of an apartment building in Jaramana, south of Damascus, Syria, a figure discreetly parts a curtain to watch the street below. A quick phone call is enough. Permission to come up is granted. Behind the front door, Maya reveals herself. The 20-year-old transgender woman does not look well.

The day before, two men ambushed her at the entrance of her building. “They waited for me to come home, then dragged me up to my apartment while hurling insults and pressing my head against the ground,” she says, delicately smoking cigarettes with purple filters.

In the entryway of her small studio, a few tufts of hair still bear witness to the violence of the attack. The left side of her face is marked by bruises she has managed to soften with her makeup skills. “I dream of leaving my country and becoming a makeup artist,” she says with a faint smile, interrupted by pain in her neck.

Under the blood-soaked regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad, which fell on December 8, 2024, transgender people were criminalized. “The laws targeting the LGBT community have not changed since the French Mandate,” explains François Zankih, director of the Guardians of Equality Movement (GEM), the first organization supporting the community in Syria. The pre-colonial era was legally more permissive, with a sort of pragmatic tolerance. After the Mandate ended and Syria gained independence, the 1949 Penal Code was enacted. Article 520 became the primary tool for prosecution. “One of the articles bans dressing as a woman, punishable by six to nine months in prison,” Zankih adds.

Maya would like to become a makeup artist, but finding work in Syria is not easy for a trans woman. Jaramana, Damascus, October 12, 2025. Photo by Roméo Kermarec, used with permission

Maya has already faced that sentence. When she returned from Lebanon after turning 18, following four years spent there at the hands of abusive pimps after running away from her family home, she was imprisoned. “I spent several months in prison when I came back to Syria, including time in a facility reserved exclusively for transgender women, where I couldn’t even stretch my legs,” she sighs. “The guards grouped us together so they could abuse us. They would call us to follow them into their offices and force us to perform oral sex,” she adds, her gaze almost impassive.

Once released from the carceral hell of Assad’s prisons, transgender Syrian women were condemned to another kind of confinement, this time in the open air. “Live better, live hidden,” one might say. In this conservative society, stares in the street are relentless; their ID cards even carry the notation “Gender Identity Dysphoria.” Maya has only a handful of friends in her Jaramana neighborhood, most of them from the LGBTQ+ community. The rest of her social interactions take place online, through social media.

For many Syrians, Bashar al-Assad’s flight to Russia meant liberation and a regained sense of freedom after half a century of totalitarian dictatorship. But for Maya, there were never any illusions about her fate. “I knew that for transgender women like me, everything would be worse than before. I expected to be killed.”

Requests for assistance

Last summer, as she was returning from a birthday party with four transgender friends, their taxi was stopped at a government forces checkpoint. “The soldier started flirting with us, and when we told him we were transgender, his attitude changed. He insulted us and took us to the nearest sheikh’s (religious authority) office,” Maya recounts.

“I’ll be lenient with you, but another one wouldn’t have been,” the sheikh told them. This sounded more like a threat than an act of compassion. Next stop: the police station. They were held there for an entire day. Their long hair was cut off with a knife, and they were then forced to sign a statement pledging not to “imitate a woman.” Since then, Maya has worn a wig constantly, out of shame.

Maya at home in Jaramana, Damascus, October 12, 2025. Photo by Roméo Kermarec, used with permission.

Since a coalition of Islamist rebel groups came to power in December 2024, GEM has documented around 15 attacks against transgender women. The number is likely underestimated, as few dare to speak about the violence they endure. “We have recorded attacks carried out both by forces linked to the new government and by armed Druze groups. They fight each other, but targeting the LGBTQIA+ community is a common ground,” laments Zankih.

Over the course of 2025, GEM recorded a 60 percent increase in requests for emergency assistance. “Fourteen years of war have deeply radicalized society, and the country has adopted far more extreme religious views,” Zankih explains. In response, GEM is trying to increase its visibility among affected communities to make the support it offers better known.

A soldier cut Maya’s hair when he found out she was a trans woman, then took her to a cell, where she spent four days. Jaramana, October 12, 2025. Photo by Roméo Kermarec, used with permission.

One of the main challenges transgender women face is the impossibility of working and the forced isolation imposed by fear of going out in public. Maya leaves her apartment wearing a hijab to blend in, and only to go to the corner grocery store to buy necessities. She cannot rely on her family to pay the rent: her father filed a complaint against her and disowned her. As a result, she is forced into sex work to keep a roof over her head. Through an app, she discreetly meets men who then come to her home. This allows her to earn an essential income to continue living. She asked me not to mention how sex work and apps work, in order not to break her “business.”

In response, the organization has developed a training program to help trans people access remote work opportunities. “We provide grants so they can buy a computer and everything they need. The program lasts a year and aims to free them from discrimination in the job market,” Zankih says.

Two men violently assaulted Maya on the landing of her apartment. The bruises on the right side of her face indicate that her head hit the floor, and torn hairs still lie on the floor of her apartment. Photo by Roméo Kermarec, used with permission

Despite this assistance, most trans people dream of only one thing: fleeing Syria. Since the fall of the Assad regime, 400 Syrian transgender women have contacted Helem, an organization defending LGBTQ+ rights in Lebanon, seeking help to escape to the country. Among them, the organization has recorded 32 arrivals from Syria.

But the journey is a dangerous undertaking that requires placing one’s life in the hands of smugglers. In December 2024, four trans people disappeared while attempting to reach Lebanon — there are no reports on this, but it’s a story well known within the community. This deeply marked Grace and continues to terrify her.

Conversion therapy

Grace does not dare take the risk. Wrapped in a large white coat that contrasts with her frail appearance, her suffering becomes palpable within seconds of conversation. “I spend my life acting straight. I hate my appearance. It depresses me completely,” she confides in a low voice at a café in the Old City.

Seated at the back of the café, her voice is hesitant, and her sentences never extend beyond a few words. Despite her obvious shyness, Grave repeatedly refused the opportunity to take a break during her testimony.

Grace, 18, in a café in Damascus’s Old City. She is part of the trans community in Syria, although she hasn’t fully transitioned. Damascus, November 26, 2025. Photo by Roméo Kermarec, used with permission.

Born into a religious family whose father died when she was young, Grace lives with her mother, who prefers to ignore her child’s true nature. At home as well, the young woman has grown used to slipping into the skin of someone she is not. But when her mother discovered intimate messages exchanged with a boy, Grace no longer fit the image expected of her, and punishment followed.

“After she found those messages, we went to my uncle’s house, where he beat me,” she says, showing photos of her bruised, blackened eye. “Then she took me to a psychologist so I could undergo conversion therapy. He tried to make me feel guilty and to change my sexuality. I never went back.”

This type of therapy is common across all sects in Syria, and the trauma these practices inflict sometimes goes far beyond psychological violence alone. “We have collected numerous testimonies describing episodes of torture, including the use of electrical cables, carried out by psychologists themselves,” says François Zankih.

Maya, 20, has faced inhuman violence many times. She spent two years in prison in Damascus, Homs, and Aleppo, where the guards sexually abused her. Jaramana, Damascus, October 12, 2025. Photo by Roméo Kermarec, used with permission

Like many transgender women, Grace finds comfort among her friends online. She created an Instagram page where she felt free to express herself, but it was quickly discovered by classmates. “After school, a boy was waiting for me and stabbed me in the wrist. After that, the teachers stopped speaking to me,” the high school student recounts, her eyes downcast.

Grace struggles to imagine a future, trapped between a rejecting family, a violent school environment, and a society that shuts her out. She takes refuge in her dreams, and there are many. “I want to go abroad, transition, become a pharmacist, but above all, create my own music band. When I play the guitar, I’m happy, and I forget everything,” she says, sketching the first smile of the conversation. Then she pauses for a few seconds before adding, “A model! I’d really like to be a model!”

At the mention of the word, Grace recovers a candid smile, a glimmer of childlike dreaming she should have been allowed to keep. For a moment, the violence of reality seems to dissolve. In the space of a fantasy, she imagines herself elsewhere, seen differently, free in her body and her image.

She did not choose the name “Grace” by chance. She borrowed it from Grace Zak, a Syrian model, the embodiment of an ideal denied to her here. A name as a refuge, a silent promise. In a country that tries to erase her, Grace fashions another existence for herself — fragile and inward — where, for an instant, she can breathe and be herself.

Originally published on Global Voices

Screenshot from video ‘Gaza’s electricity crisis deepens as Israeli strikes threaten vital solar panels,’ uploaded to YouTube by Al Jazeera English, fair use

By Jalal Abukhater

For many people around the world, the digital economy is not an abstract concept but a lived reality shaping everyday life and work. At the mention of the digital economy, most people would think of entrepreneurship, innovation, and technological advancement. But for Palestinians, the question is not whether the digital economy exists, but whether they are allowed to access it at all and participate in the global economy equitably.

7amleh recently published a new report entitled “Palestinian Accessibility to Digital Economy Platforms: Barriers, Gaps, and Adopted Policies to Overcome Them.” The report documents how Palestinians across historic Palestine face systematic barriers in accessing digital payment systems, e-commerce platforms, and remote work opportunities. The research tested around 30 major digital services by attempting account creation, verification, and use under real conditions, while also relying on semi-structured interviews and user testimonies from Palestinians navigating these systems daily.

A structural exclusion

The report’s findings reveal, once more, that Palestinian exclusion from the digital economy is not accidental or technical, but rather structural. This matters because the digital economy has become one of the few remaining spaces where Palestinians can attempt to overcome restrictions on movement, employment, and access imposed by decades of occupation and apartheid. For many young Palestinians, digital work offered something rare: the possibility of connecting to the outside world without passing through a checkpoint.

But even online, Palestinians encounter walls. The report examines three central pillars of the digital economy: digital payment platforms, e-commerce services, and remote work platforms. Across all three, Palestinians face layered barriers shaped by platform policies, telecommunications restrictions, financial exclusion, and broader political realities that severely restrict their participation in the global economy.

Digital payments are perhaps the clearest example. Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza remain excluded from PayPal, despite years of advocacy and despite the platform operating freely for Israeli citizens, including settlers living illegally in West Bank settlements. This exclusion forces Palestinian freelancers and businesses to rely on costly intermediaries, informal transfer systems, or unstable alternatives that consume significant portions of their income.

For a generation increasingly dependent on online work, being unable to access basic financial tools is devastating. A designer in Gaza may successfully secure freelance contracts through global platforms, but still struggle to receive payment safely or consistently. Access exists in theory, but meaningful participation remains blocked in practice.

Unequal infrastructure

Infrastructure deepens these inequalities. Palestinians do not control their own telecommunications sector and continue to face severe restrictions on spectrum access, network development, and digital infrastructure. While Israelis benefit from advanced 4G and 5G connectivity, Palestinians in the West Bank only gained limited 3G access in recent years, while Gaza has remained restricted largely to outdated 2G infrastructure for years. The consequences are immediate: unstable internet directly undermines remote work and client relationships, while also severely disrupting communication, education, and e-commerce.

In Gaza, these structural restrictions have escalated into outright destruction. A previous 7amleh report, “The Impact of the Gaza Blockade and the Destruction of Telecommunications Infrastructure on the Digital Economy Amidst Genocide,” documented how the deliberate targeting of telecommunications and power infrastructure since October 2023 pushed Gaza’s digital economy toward collapse. 

The most recent Gaza and West Bank Interim Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment, published by the EU and UN in April 2026, found that 81 percent of Gaza’s telecommunications network had been completely destroyed, 12 percent partially damaged, with only 7 percent minimally damaged. Internet traffic in Gaza dropped by more than 80 percent during October 2023 alone and has not recovered since.

A digital lifeline

Yet amid genocide, famine, displacement, and blackouts, Palestinians continued trying to work. The research conducted during the famine period in July 2024, surveying over 180 digital workers in Gaza City and across the Gaza Strip, captured testimonies that remain difficult to forget. People described prioritising access to a laptop, electricity source, or internet signal over almost everything else because digital work represented their final connection to survival, dignity, and hope. 

Freelancers gathered in makeshift solar-powered coworking spaces to charge devices and access weak internet signals for a few hours each day. Others walked long distances searching for connectivity to submit projects or respond to clients before losing signal again.

One thing must be made clear: this resilience should not be romanticized. It reflects the absence of alternatives. Before October 2023, remote work had already become a critical lifeline for Gaza’s economy. Thousands of Palestinians worked through platforms like Upwork and Fiverr in programming, design, translation, and digital marketing. The Palestinian ICT sector employed nearly 9,000 people across around 700 companies and contributed approximately 4 percent of Palestinian GDP. For many young Palestinians facing movement restrictions and unemployment, digital labour became one of the only viable economic pathways available.

But Palestinians are expected to compete in the global digital economy while being denied equal infrastructure, equal payment access, freedom of movement, and even stable electricity.

The price of occupation

The conversation about Palestinian digital rights often focuses on censorship and online speech. Those issues remain essential. But digital rights are also economic rights. They shape who can work, trade, build businesses, receive payments, and sustain livelihoods. As more of the world moves online, exclusion from digital platforms increasingly means exclusion from economic life itself.

Technology companies cannot continue treating Palestinian exclusion as a secondary issue or an unfortunate side effect of “complex realities.” Platform policies are political when they systematically deny access to one population while enabling another living under the same geographic control. Digital infrastructure is political when an occupied population is denied sovereignty over the networks it depends on to survive. For Palestinians, digital access is ultimately about the right to participate in modern economic and public life on equal terms.

Originally published on Global Voices

Illustration by UntoldMag, used with permission

By Enas Kamal

This story, originally published on UntoldMag, was produced under the Feminist Journalist Fellowship. It is part of a series highlighting the work of fellows, developed in collaboration with UntoldMag and Noor. An edited version is republished on Global Voices as part of a content-sharing agreement.

This post is also part of Global Voices’ June 2026 Spotlight series, “Gender Diversity.” This series offers insight into gender diversity and how it is being threatened, protected, and preserved around the world. You can support this coverage by donating here.

Years before Jan (preferred pronoun “he”), a 33-year-old non-binary Egyptian, came out or even knew about the LGBTQ+ community, he would search online for people like him. He often found himself deceived by strangers on social media — people pretending to be LGBTQ+, or men posing as women.

Like many queer Egyptians, he was searching for connection in a digital landscape designed to expose him.

A few years ago, Jan adopted a new name for safety, deleted all his old social media accounts and rebuilt his online presence from scratch. The fear of being tracked by security forces, anti-LGBTQ+ groups, or far-right actors shaped every decision he made online. On an earlier account, he met members of the community who guided him through basic digital protection practices. For the first time, he felt a degree of safety.

Homosexuality in Egypt: A dangerous secret

According to a report by Transat, a trans rights organization in Egypt, transgender and gender non-binary people in Egypt live under a repressive system that perpetuates violence, discrimination, and stigma in various areas of life. This includes the private sphere, where domestic violence and deprivation of family support are prevalent, as well as the public sphere, where discrimination in education and the labor market persists. It also includes systematic legal and societal harassment that exposes LGBTQ+ individuals to direct targeting through the state’s repressive laws and practices.

Egypt criminalises same-sex relations under the Law on the Combating of Prostitution (No. 10 1961) and, in recent years, under cybercrime laws such as the Law on Anti-Cybercrimes and Information Technology Crimes, in Egypt’s economic courts.

According to the Transat report, there is an increase in cases where online morality laws are applied:

“The Egyptian media is a key partner in adopting and disseminating hate speech and incitement against women, minorities, and the LGBTQ+ community in particular. It consistently participates in stigmatizing LGBTQ+ individuals by perpetuating the stereotypes that have been nurtured about them over decades in artistic productions and media programs.”

The telecommunication law has been under the Economic Courts since they were created in 2008, and the cybercrime law was added to the Economic Courts by decree in 2019. With this addition, the Economic Courts began exercising influence over public life by reinforcing digital surveillance and policing digital morality.

For Jan, digital safety became urgent. Other LGBTQ+ individuals stepped in early on, teaching him how to protect himself online. This was guidance he needed because, by his own admission, he was once too bold and dismissive of the dangers. Today, his greatest concern is keeping his identity from his family.

“I was harassed online by both women and men, within and outside LGBTQ+ circles. This harassment was not always direct or explicit, perhaps, meaning if the conversation escalated, I would stop it, but it still happens,” Jan recalls in an interview with the author.

In a disappointed tone, he recounts a time when he was shamed by his closest friend, who was also part of the LGBTQ+ community. During an argument between them, she threatened to go to his house and out him with his mother.

These threats reflect the broader precarity facing LGBTQ+ Egyptians: vulnerabilities compounded by policing, stigma, and the absence of legal protections.

How to protect LGBTQ+ persons online?

In 2022, an organized anti-LGBTQ+ campaign known as Fetrah emerged across social media, especially on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Telegram. The name, which translates from Arabic as “human instinct,” was adopted by religious and far-right networks. Using the slogan “Fetrah is an idea,” the campaign launched coordinated posts and Twitter threads in Arabic, urging users to promote its core message: that only two genders exist and that homosexuality is deviant and contrary to human nature.

M.A, a researcher and gender activist who prefers to keep his real name hidden, told the author that he believes the Fetrah campaign promotes the outdated idea that homosexuality is an illness or a perversion. This is a great injustice to the LGBTQ+ community, which is fighting for its rights. “The Fetrah campaign uses religion to fuel hatred and discrimination and legitimize violence against the queer community,” the researcher adds.

For Jan, the violence and threats he experienced online led him to isolate himself. “I practically have no friends,” he says. “I stopped trying to make friends or form relationships online.” After closing his social media accounts, he is even isolated from the LGBTQ+ community, which is increasingly under attack online — a choice many queer Egyptians feel increasingly forced to make.

“The LGBTQ+ community isn’t an isolated island from larger society; it’s a reflection of it to varying degrees,” M.A. explains. “I have seen somewhat similar experiences; some people withdrew, not always out of fear, but sometimes to protect their mental well-being. Others persevered and confronted the situation regardless of the consequences,” he adds.

“When people like Jan are threatened, they certainly won’t go to the police for protection,” M.A. explains. This is why the queer community must be a more compassionate place, or at least more aware of the dangers of male-dominated and patriarchal actions like harassment.

“The presence of violations within the community necessitates that all entities, individuals, and activists re-evaluate themselves, not justify their actions,” M.A says. “They must work on building a genuine culture of accountability that protects people instead of silencing them or causing them to withdraw,” he adds.

Though Jan cannot represent the experience of the entire LGBTQ+ community in Egypt, he reflects a vital part of it, as he and many others have faced — and continue to face — digital challenges and risks that limit their access to safe online spaces.

While social media offers visibility and connection, it also exposes the vulnerable to digital violence, blackmail, and state surveillance. These threats force many LGBTQ+ individuals to navigate the internet with fear and caution, restricting free expression and access to support. Understanding these struggles is essential to recognizing both the power and dangers of online spaces on queer groups in Egypt.

M.A offers some practical advice on how queer individuals can protect their digital presence:

• Don’t share your personal information with anyone you don’t know.
• Don’t post photos or information that could easily reveal your location or true identity, such as tattoos, scars or any other distinguishing marks.
• Use secure and encrypted applications like Signal or Wire, which encrypt conversations to protect from any spying or hacking attempts.
• Enable two-step verification on all your accounts to prevent phishing.
• Change your passwords regularly.
• If you sense something strange happening or there’s an attempted hack, don’t hesitate to seek help from digital security organizations or individuals.
• Be cautious before posting anything online because many people exploit any information to pressure LGBTQ+ individuals.
• Don’t accept friend requests or chats from people you’re not sure about, and try not to use your real name on dating sites and apps.

Originally published on Global Voices

Migrant workers on a building in Bur Dubai, UAE, March 21, 2023. Photo by Gaurav Dhwaj Khadka on Wikimedia Commons (CC-SA 4.0 ).

By Noorudeen Veetykadan

In March this year, life in the Gulf began to feel unusually fragile.

News alerts interrupted ordinary evenings. Rumours travelled faster than reassurance. Missiles, drones, airspace closures, and political tensions suddenly became part of everyday conversations. For many families living in the region, especially migrants far away from their homelands, uncertainty settled quietly into daily life.

Even simple routines changed. People stepped outside more cautiously. Parents followed the news more closely. Phone calls home became longer, softer, heavier.

From our apartment window in Doha, I would often see workers gathered in small groups after long shifts. Men in faded uniforms, their faces marked by heat, dust, and exhaustion. Some sat on pavements. Some leaned silently against construction barriers. Others rested on curbs before heading back to crowded accommodations after building cities they may never truly belong to.

My younger daughter, Maryam, watched them carefully.

“Are they tired after working all day?” she asked.

“Do they miss their families?”

Then, after overhearing fragments of conversations about conflict and uncertainty, her questions deepened.

“Are those workers, security officers, and food delivery boys safe outside?”

I did not always have answers.

But her questions stayed with me.

Children notice what adults often overlook. They see the delivery rider waiting at a traffic signal. The cleaner sweeping empty corridors in silent buildings. The security guard standing alone outside even after midnight. Their world has not yet been divided into categories of importance and invisibility.

And perhaps that is why her questions unsettled me.

Because behind every construction helmet, every delivery bike, every maintenance uniform in the Gulf, there is usually another story unfolding somewhere far away. That is of a mother waiting for a phone call, a wife carrying responsibilities alone, children receiving a father’s love through video calls and the whole family getting dependent on money transfers.

Most migrant workers do not leave home searching for luxury. They leave searching for relief.

Relief from debt.

From unemployment.

From hunger.

From the slow suffocation of poverty.

They come from villages and small towns across Asia and Africa where opportunities are scarce and survival itself demands sacrifice. They carry photographs in worn wallets and promises in tired hearts. Some dream of educating a daughter. Some hope to build a modest house. Some simply want their parents to grow old without financial fear.

They come to the Gulf to build.

To raise towers from sand.

To lay roads like ribbons across deserts.

To clean glass buildings that touch the clouds.

To deliver comfort to homes while living far away from their own.

But many never imagined that they could also become victims of conflicts that were never theirs.

In recent strikes across the region, many migrant workers were among those who lost their lives. Some died quietly, without headlines large enough to hold their stories. A few lines in the news. A brief mention of casualties. Then the world moved on.

But somewhere far away, families did not move on. A mother collapsed hearing that the son who crossed oceans to support her would now return in a coffin. A wife stared at a silent phone, waiting for a call that would never come again. Children too young to understand geopolitics suddenly learned the meaning of permanent absence.

For many migrant families, the worker is not just a breadwinner. He is the bridge holding the entire family above poverty. One salary often feeds parents, educates siblings, pays debts, supports children, and sustains entire households spread across continents.

When such a worker dies, it is not one life that collapses.

It is many.

And what makes the tragedy even heavier is its cruel irony.

These workers came to build cities, not to be buried beneath them.

They came carrying tools, not weapons.

Dreams, not danger.

Hope, not hatred.

Yet in moments of conflict, they become the most vulnerable people under the same sky. When missiles cross borders and drones dominate headlines, powerful nations speak the language of strategy. Ordinary workers speak the language of survival. Delivery riders still ride through uncertain streets. Construction workers still climb scaffolding beneath uneasy skies. Security guards still stand through long shifts while their families back home watch frightening news coverage and wonder if their loved ones are safe.

The world often speaks about war through maps, military calculations, and political speeches. But ordinary people experience conflict differently.

Conflict arrives as interrupted sleep.

As anxious phone calls.

As mothers refreshing news feeds with trembling hands.

As children asking questions adults cannot answer.

As workers pretending calm while carrying invisible fear.

The tragedy of modern conflict is not limited to battlefields. Its shadows travel far beyond borders. They slip quietly into kitchens, classrooms, labour camps, and family conversations. Even places untouched by direct violence begin carrying the emotional weight of uncertainty.

And in these moments, migrant workers become the most invisible witnesses of all.

They build cities they may never fully belong to.

They strengthen economies that may never know their names.

They spend their youth constructing towers, roads, airports, malls, and stadiums while their own families continue living thousands of kilometres away.

Yet when uncertainty arrives, they remain among the most exposed, economically fragile, emotionally isolated, and socially unseen.

Maryam’s questions reminded me of something simple but uncomfortable: empathy often survives more naturally in children than in adults. Adults become distracted by politics, nationality, religion, and ideology. Children still see human beings first.

A worker is not a nationality to them.

A delivery rider is not background scenery.

A security guard is not invisible.

They are simply people who might be tired, lonely, worried, or afraid.

Perhaps the world would look different if more of us learned to see people the way children do.

Not through passports.

Not through professions.

Not through power.

But through shared human vulnerability.

The skies above the Gulf may eventually grow quiet again. News cycles will move on. Headlines will change. But somewhere, there are homes that will never fully recover from these conflicts.

Homes where children will grow up with photographs instead of fathers.

Homes where old parents will continue waiting for footsteps that will never return.

Homes where unfinished dreams will sit silently beside unopened suitcases.

And so, this is also a tribute…

To the workers who left home carrying hope in small bags and responsibility in heavy hearts.

To the men who mixed concrete under burning suns, cleaned towers they could never afford to enter, delivered food while missing meals with their own families, and spent their youth building cities for others.

To those who crossed seas to build lives, but returned only as memories.

May they never be reduced to statistics buried beneath political headlines.

May their labour be remembered with dignity.

May their sacrifices be spoken of with humanity.

And may the world never forget this painful truth:

They came to build cities, not to be buried beneath them.

Originally published on Global Voices

ICRC’s projects provided solar energy and clean water for hundreds of thousands of Yemenis in 2025 alone — vital for health, hygiene and survival in communities where basic services are facing serious challenges. Picture by ICRC, used with permission.

In Yemen’s capital, shifting weather patterns and ongoing conflict are no longer abstract concerns. They are actively shaping public health outcomes.

In a neighborhood of Sana’a, 17-year-old Malak Abdulmalik manages chronic respiratory symptoms that worsen with dust and seasonal changes. “I rely on my inhaler almost daily,” she explains, describing how air quality and temperature fluctuations directly affect her breathing.

Her cousin faced a different challenge. After consuming contaminated food, she contracted cholera, a waterborne disease that continues to threaten Yemenis. The illness caused severe dehydration and required 11 days of medical care. Shortly after recovery, she was diagnosed with Hepatitis A, an infection commonly linked to unsafe water and food.

According to the World Health Organization, Yemen has experienced recurrent cholera outbreaks driven largely by unsafe water and limited sanitation access, reporting the highest burden of cholera globally in 2024.

Stagnant water caused by flooding and poor drainage also creates mosquito breeding grounds, contributing to the spread of dengue fever.

The World Bank reports that climate change is expected to intensify extreme weather events in Yemen, which, combined with infrastructure destruction, places additional pressure on water and health systems.

Monitoring outbreaks and adapting on the ground

These cases reflect a broader pattern: environmental stress, damaged infrastructure from war, and limited health resources combine to increase disease risk.

This is what Hana’a Al-Zubairi, coordinator assistant at Yemen’s Ministry of Health and Environment, explains:

Cholera, dengue fever, and Hepatitis A are driven by both climate change and war-damaged infrastructure. Flooded sewage contaminates water, while stagnant pools create mosquito breeding grounds. Many respiratory illnesses remain unrecognized until severe.

“Respiratory illnesses are also increasingly common. Dust storms, rising temperatures, and seasonal shifts contribute to both upper and lower respiratory infections, placing additional strain on individuals and healthcare providers,” Al-Zubairi adds

Her response team conducts weekly district visits to monitor outbreaks, run awareness campaigns, and guide treatments. Seasonal disease spikes often coincide with harvest periods when crops are irrigated with unsafe water. Poverty and misinformation also limit vaccination uptake, leaving children particularly vulnerable.

Expanding health risks

Healthcare workers report that environmental and living conditions are influencing a wide range of illnesses.

Dr. Ali Al-Hamzi, a surgeon based in Yemen, contracted dengue fever after a mosquito bite in 2018. He describes the illness as physically and mentally exhausting, requiring weeks of recovery.

 “Prevention is critical,” he says, emphasizing mosquito control and household protection measures such as window screens. In his case, the disease was relatively mild, but severe cases can require patients to be admitted to intensive care units, he explains.

Delayed care and community-level challenges

Ashwaq Abdullah, a nurse with over 15 years of clinical experience and founder of her own clinic, highlights delayed treatment as a major challenge. “Many patients wait too long before seeking care,” she explains. “By the time they arrive, dehydration or infection has already reached a critical stage.”

During outbreaks at Al-Sabeen Hospital in the south of Sana’a, she observed how poverty forces many patients, especially from rural areas, to delay care, sometimes leading to severe complications such as kidney failure.

She also notes that respiratory illnesses, worsened by dust and changing weather, are becoming more complex, with viral infections increasingly developing bacterial complications. Her advice is clear: “Seek early medical care and maintain hygiene practices such as thoroughly washing fruits and vegetables to reduce risk.”

The role of humanitarian organizations

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Yemen, six diarrhea treatment facilities are currently supported across Yemen, providing medical supplies, hygiene kits, staff training, and operational support.

Their water and sanitation programs aim to improve access to clean water, a critical factor in preventing disease spread. According to ICRC, more than 580,000 people gained improved access to health care services, while around 390,000 people benefited from improved access to safe water through its interventions in the first half of 2025.

Humanitarian organizations, alongside teams such as the Ministry of Public Health and Population staff and community-based health workers, continue supporting disease response efforts through medical assistance, water and sanitation interventions, healthcare training, and the maintenance of essential treatment services despite ongoing systemic challenges

From crisis to climate solutions and resilience

The connection between climate change, conflict, and public health is undeniable. It is visible in water scarcity, disease outbreaks, and the increasing pressure on healthcare systems. Yet focusing only on vulnerability does not reflect the full reality on the ground.

Alongside these challenges, there is a continuous process of adaptation. Communities are not only responding to crises , they are actively developing solutions. They are adapting through renewable energy, solar-powered water systems, improved hygiene practices, community health awareness, and local health workers who continue disease surveillance despite limited resources. Adaptation is no longer an exception; it is becoming part of daily life in Yemen.

Expanding renewable energy, particularly solar energy, represents one of the most practical climate solutions for Yemen. Solar power is not only an alternative energy source; it is a lifeline that supports clean water access, strengthens healthcare services, and improves living conditions in areas affected by infrastructure damage and climate stress. Yemen’s diverse geography also creates opportunities for expanding sustainable energy solutions in different regions of the country through locally driven approaches.

At the same time, effective climate action depends on collaboration with local actors because communities understand their environment, risks, and needs better than external systems alone. This local knowledge makes climate interventions more sustainable and more connected to realities on the ground.

What becomes clear is that Yemen is not only a place of crisis, but also a place of continuous problem-solving. Where challenges exist, solutions also grow. Where climate risks increase, communities continue to adapt and build resilience through practical climate solutions.

In Yemen, adaptation is ongoing. Solutions are already being built. Resilience is not theoretical — it is happening every day through communities, local knowledge, and climate solutions that are shaping a more sustainable future.

Originally published on Global Voices

Shelters, including a temporary improvised bathroom set up between the tents. Photo by the author, used with permission.

By Marwa Rommaneh

In the early morning hours, when schools are supposed to prepare to welcome students, the yards are filled with men sleeping on the ground. Movement begins before sunrise, and lines gradually form outside sanitation facilities. Gaza’s schools are no longer places of education, but have been transformed into displacement shelters, hosting hundreds of families within a single shared space.

In the first week of the war on Gaza in October 2023, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) reported that around 218,600 displaced people were sheltering in 92 of its schools across the Gaza Strip, while many others sought refuge in government schools and other buildings. Over time, these numbers grew, and overcrowding became an entrenched daily reality.

In these environments, it does not take long to realize that something fundamental has disappeared: privacy is no longer part of life.

A continuous collective scene

Everything that once took place behind the walls of a home is now exposed. Cooking, washing, resting, and daily routines all unfold in a single shared space, in front of everyone. There are no rooms, no closed doors, and no corners that offer even a moment of solitude. Life here is not lived separately, but in constant overlap, where the details of each family become part of a continuous collective scene.

This overlap is not only about limited space — it is also about the loss of the ability to be alone, even briefly. Silence becomes rare, and rest is practised cautiously, as if it were temporary in a place that does not allow stability.

During my involvement in polio vaccination campaigns in Gaza, where I worked in data entry and field support, the experience was not limited to its administrative dimension. It was a daily confrontation with this reality. Reaching children required navigating overcrowded spaces and working in environments that offered neither comfort nor privacy. There was no designated space for interaction or care; every step took place within a crowded setting where movement constantly intersected with daily life.

Over time, the loss of privacy is no longer a minor detail; it becomes part of the lived experience itself. Life is exposed, shared, and constantly visible, where nothing remains “private” as it once was understood.

The difficulty of daily life

The World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF have highlighted the growing health challenges facing children in Gaza, particularly the difficulty of delivering healthcare services and conducting vaccination campaigns in overcrowded and resource-limited settings.

In this context, overcrowding becomes more than a description; it becomes a condition that governs everything: movement, communication, and even the delivery of care. Every small detail is shaped by the lack of space and the density of people, making even the simplest tasks more complex.

Tents and shelters for displaced families in Gaza. Photo by the author, used with permission

Children live this reality every day, often without fully understanding or adapting to it. There is no space for normal play, and no environment that provides a sense of safety or comfort. For children with disabilities, the challenges are even greater, as they live in conditions that do not meet their basic needs.

Estimates by Save the Children indicate that during 2024, around 475 children each month in Gaza sustained injuries that could result in lifelong disabilities, including limb loss, hearing impairment, and severe eye injuries. In overcrowded environments, such realities further intensify the difficulty of daily life, where even the most basic conditions for safety and privacy are absent.

After the war: A reality that has not changed

Despite the notion of “after the war,” very little appears to have changed inside displacement shelters. Overcrowding persists, space remains limited, and daily life continues with the same routines that leave no room for personal space. There is no real return to homes, nor alternatives that provide even minimal comfort, only a continuation of the same conditions that have become normalized despite their harshness.

In this reality, “after the war” does not emerge as a new phase, but as an extension of what came before. The same queues, the same shared spaces, and the same sense that life is constantly lived in full view of others. It is as if time stopped at the moment of displacement, without offering people a real chance to regain any part of their previous lives.

This continuity does not only mean that conditions remain unchanged, but it also means they become deeply rooted. Over time, the loss of privacy is no longer temporary, but a long-term condition that reshapes how people relate to space and to themselves.

What do we lose when privacy disappears?

Displacement is not only the loss of a home, but the loss of an entire way of life, the loss of a space that once protected daily details and gave individuals the simple sense that part of their lives belonged only to them

In displacement shelters, people are not just living in temporary places, but in a new reality shaped by constant overcrowding. Over time, the loss of privacy ceases to be temporary and becomes part of everyday life, a reality that reshapes the relationship between people, space, and life itself.

Here, it is not only walls that disappear, but also the boundaries that once gave life its simplest meaning: the ability for a person to have a space of their own, even if it is nothing more than a small corner where no one is watching.

Originally published on Global Voices

Illustration showing a dictator using surveillance and automated control to watch, predict, and suppress citizens. Illustration by Khalid Bencherif. Used with permission.

By Khalid Bencherif

“On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters and on the wrapping of a cigarette packet — everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed — no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” – George Orwell, “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Orwell could not have imagined that eventually, even those few cubic centimetres inside the skull would be contested on a continent already plagued by corruption and tyranny. This matters especially on a continent where corruption, impunity, and executive appetite long predate artificial intelligence. And where AI adoption is outpacing the development of rights-respecting legal frameworks

Africa rushes for smart tools of tyranny

In the past, tyranny in Africa required prisons, informants, secret police, and visible repression. Today, more and more of it arrives as software, financed by credit, wrapped in the language of modernisation, and sold as an upgrade to public safety.

A March 2026 study by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and the African Digital Rights Network found that 11 African governments had collectively spent more than USD 2 billion on AI-powered surveillance systems. Nigeria alone accounted for more than USD 470 million. The kit includes high-definition CCTV, plate readers, facial recognition, biometric identity layers, and a control room where the feeds converge. Much of it is supplied or financed by Chinese firms and banks, while other layers come mainly from Israeli firms.

Statistics about AI-powered surveillance. By the Institute of Development Studies. Used with permission. 

The common justification usually given by African governments is that acquiring this equipment is necessary to fight crime, but the crime numbers are not decreasing. IDS researchers, having examined the installations across several cities, found little evidence that the cameras reduce offending, and the evidence actually shows that cameras cluster in neighbourhoods where opposition parties organise, where protests have happened and where the press has “made trouble” for ruling regimes.

The info-infrastructure of dictatorships in Africa is not new, and it won’t be starting from zero. In most African countries, the state has long had an appetite for data. Records from communications, tax rolls, bank accounts, and administrative registries have been collected for decades and used with little legal restraint, even where protections exist on paper. What is new is the engine. AI turns the dormant files into a queryable archive. A name, a network, a pattern of travel, a history of transactions, now surface in seconds. 

Even the KGB, the Soviet Union’s secret police, as Yuval Noah Harari has pointed out, did not have enough people to read millions of reports on millions of citizens every day. The dust in the archive was itself a form of freedom. AI dissolves that dust.  

The AI-enabled surveillance now coming online in African cities is much cheaper thanks to Chinese open AI models and Israeli smart tools, because it rarely needs to punish anyone. Mass surveillance technologies — cameras, phone software, local internet networks — do not have to arrest anyone. They only need the citizens to know they are there. The awareness of being watched stops most action before it begins. 

The target list

Every movement for change on the continent has begun the same way. A group of people decides the risk of being seen in public is lower than the risk of staying silent. They gather. They post. The images travel. Sometimes the government falls. Sometimes it holds. The calculation in both cases turns on a single moment, when strangers become visible to each other and to the world as a movement. 

The upgrade changes that calculation at the source. 

AI-enabled surveillance is not a neutral grid cast over a city. It is configured around a target list, and that target list is political. The IDS mapping shows cameras clustered where opposition parties organise, not where ordinary crime is highest. 

The effect is pre-emptive; it suppresses dissent before it forms. Facial recognition at a bus stop does not need to arrest the organiser; it only needs to make clear that organising is no longer anonymous, and that being identified carries a cost. For instance, a protest planned for Sunday and identified on Saturday — through metadata, social media posts, network analysis and face-matching — rarely needs to be broken up by police. The organisers already know they have been seen, and they know what being seen can cost: arrest, charges filed later in court, or even being banned from government jobs. Often, the protest simply does not form. 

The logic compresses into a loop: the algorithm flags a person as a likely organiser, and that flag is treated as proof that the event would have occurred; thus, the person cannot be innocent because the alarm itself is the evidence. In a country with thin courts and a politicised security service, this becomes a machine that treats intention as guilt. 

Digital footprints widen the target list. Through the traces users leave online and through state-controlled communications, the state can build a profile of every citizen, then query it for signs of disloyalty. Not for what the person has done, but for what they have liked, who they have called or messaged, which rally their phone was near, which anti-government hashtag they shared. The quietest and most uncomfortable finding within the Atlantic Council’s report concerns this integration of administrative databases into something broader, a loyalty index, built out of records that were each introduced, separately, for a different reason.  

The consequence is that reform dies early. CIPESA (the Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa) documents the chilling effect across fourteen countries; a measurable retreat of expression, assembly, and independent media in places where the surveillance architecture has been built out without rights-based safeguards. The citizen who would have marched, posted, joined the committee, filed the complaint, now calculates and stays home. 

From North to South Africa, a new kind of everyday atmosphere settles in. The seed of change is aborted, not in a cell but in a bedroom, by a person who has understood that the database remembers, and that the algorithm does not distinguish between the opinion expressed and the opinion held. 

This is what the upgrade protects most efficiently. Not the state’s capacity to punish. It’s capacity to make punishment unnecessary. Foucault called this the panopticon: a design in which the inmate, uncertain whether the guard tower is occupied, learns to guard himself. 

Those who refuse

While AI surveillance is becoming a powerful tool for authoritarian regimes, there are small counter-efforts, underfunded, and racing against a procurement cycle that has already delivered the cameras and wired the databases. Several journalists and organisations are documenting abuses, litigating test cases, and pushing for rights-based AI governance. Civic technologists are turning the same tools back on the state, including fact-checking generative content, monitoring hate speech, observing elections, and offering open, safe, smart tools for journalists and activists. 

However, the symmetry is false. The infrastructure, the compute, the training data, the vendor contracts, the technical talent, all sit with the state and its foreign suppliers. They do not sit with the African citizen, who struggles every day for just their daily bread. A civic-tech app might monitor some corruption, but it cannot match the control room. 

The few cubic centimetres

Orwell’s dictatorship needed a ministry, a war, an informant behind every door. The new African version seems to need only a loan agreement for buying AI infrastructure, and a population that has been persuaded that the whole thing is for their convenience. 

The historian Yuval Noah Harari has warned that the combination of biometric sensors, facial and voice recognition “make it possible for the first time in history for a dictatorial government to follow all the citizens all the time,” and could produce totalitarian regimes “much, much worse than anything we saw in the 20th century.” That warning is usually aimed at Beijing. But Beijing and Tel Aviv are starting to export the tools to Africa. 

The fear on the continent is not that AI will turn any single African state into a dictatorship. The fear is that AI is lowering the cost of authoritarian capacity and raising its ceiling — at an unprecedented pace, at precisely the moment when the appetite of corrupt regimes is growing, and the legal and institutional safeguards meant to contain them are thin or absent.  

Certainly, AI can be a lever for development and well-being in Africa; for public services, for innovation, and for expression, too. But, without the underlying infrastructure of democracy and a free press, it becomes a nightmare. 

Originally published on Global Voices

The Solidarity Fields in Jaramana initiative is an extension of the “Solidarity Fields and Dignity” project. Picture by Lahlah. Used with permission.

By Leida Zeidan

This article was originally published in Lahlah in Arabic on April 7, 2026. This translation is republished on Global Voices as part of a content-sharing agreement. 

This post is part of Global Voices’ May 2026 Spotlight series, “Global crisis, local solutions.” This series offers stories of resistance and successful climate action, insight into how communities in the Global South are fighting back against the crisis, analysis of what this might mean for future generations, and more. You can support this coverage by donating here.

On a small plot of land on the outskirts of Jaramana, in rural Damascus, the earth has been transformed into a site for reviving local seed production. In stark contrast to the city's crowded streets, the green expanses of this area represent a departure from the ordinary. It is an attempt to return to rural life, nature, and farming. On these grounds, the initiative known as “Solidarity Fields in Jaramana” was launched at the beginning of last March, when a group of organizers and farming enthusiasts began restoring the production of local and indigenous seeds by preparing the soil, sowing, covering, and irrigating it with the goal of recovering crop varieties that had nearly disappeared, amid the country's deteriorating economic conditions and the decline of agriculture.

From Greece to Jaramana

The Solidarity Fields in Jaramana initiative is an extension of the “Solidarity Fields and Dignity” project, which operates across various regions of Syria with the aim of supporting agriculture and rebuilding the relationship between people and the land. It seeks to empower communities to produce their own food, share harvests with those in need, and create a different model of cooperative work, particularly as environmental challenges and climate change increasingly affect land and agriculture.

Muhannad Deeb, an artist and coordinator of the Solidarity Fields in Jaramana initiative, spoke to Lahlah magazine about the project's origins. It emerged, he said, “from the convergence between the Shughl wa Fan [Work and Art] initiative and ‘Solidarity Fields and Dignity in Syria,’ which was established in 2025 as an extension of the Solidarity Fields project in Greece.”

The Greek Solidarity Fields project was founded by Suleiman Dakdouk, a Syrian refugee, and his fellow Syrians in Greece. Beginning with just 0.4 hectares, two cows, and three sheep, the project eventually expanded to more than 15 hectares, spread across displaced communities. The initiative was built on a principle of self-sufficiency, organizing work residencies, farms, poultry raising, crop harvesting and marketing, as well as the production of food items including dairy products, cheeses, beverages, and other daily necessities. It also established shops to market any surplus production. 

The Shughl wa Fan initiative, for its part, was founded in 2008 as an artistic, cultural, and developmental project aimed at raising awareness within Syrian society about its role in preserving living spaces, and recognizing the impact of art on creating a better environment, engaging local communities alongside governmental institutions, and clarifying the role of artists in society. This alignment in vision and goals led to collaboration and ultimately to the establishment of the Solidarity Fields in Jaramana.

Deeb continues:

After connecting and meeting with the general coordinator of Solidarity Fields in Syria, Suleiman Dakdouk, the Jaramana Solidarity Fields was established in March 2026, work in the field began, and interested parties, farmers, volunteers, and friends were invited to engage with the experience.

Local seeds and food security

The importance of local seeds lies in the fact that they represent the primary source of planting material for farmers. According to FAO, community-based seed systems can account for 80 to 90 percent of total seeds consumed, particularly for self-pollinated crops. Ensuring a supply of local seeds also helps reduce dependence on food aid.

Local seeds are well-suited to local climates and low-input farming systems, and they carry wide genetic diversity, making them resistant to disease and adaptable to climate variation. FAO notes that community seed system activities tend toward integration and self-organization, encompassing the ways in which farmers produce, disseminate, and access seeds directly from their harvests, or through exchange and barter with friends, neighbors, relatives, and through local markets.

Deeb describes the heart of the Solidarity Fields work as relying on “diverse agricultural experiences that are shared to enrich the project,” adding that the initiative sources its seeds primarily from household gardens, “where most people rely on their home plots to produce vegetables.”

According to Deeb, indigenous seeds can be identified by experts, but the most reliable method remains obtaining them from a mature, locally grown fruit. Seed planting is the project's first phase: the initiative has allocated approximately 300 dunams (around 75 acres) of farmland for cultivating the seedlings that emerge from these seeds. After the cultivation and harvest process is complete, the produce is distributed in a way that ensures the project's continuity and the availability of authentic local seeds going forward.

Seeds are the fundamental source of human food and the carriers of the genetic traits of crop varieties and types. Over time, through improvement, selection, and adaptation, the highest-quality varieties have emerged. Improving seeds and obtaining high-quality varieties is essential to increasing production and meeting environmental challenges. FAO underscores that food security depends critically on farmers having access to good seeds appropriate to their environment. Without good seeds, there can be no good crops. This makes projects that provide local seeds particularly significant, especially in post-war and post-disaster periods. 

The importance of Indigenous seeds

The war in Syria caused the rural population to shrink by 50 percent between 2011 and 2016, leading to heavy losses in crop and livestock production, the destruction of irrigation systems, damage to vast agricultural areas, and sharp increases in the costs of agricultural inputs such as seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides. The blockade of certain areas also prevented the transport of seeds, pushing farmers to rely on imported varieties. When war ravages a country, the continuity of its agricultural systems is also destroyed. Farmers may keep their lives but lose land and seed stocks carefully stewarded for generations, lacking the resources for reconstruction. 

Deeb considers this initiative especially significant following the years of drought and conflict, arguing that it “helps increase the number of farmers adopting this approach, thereby expanding the areas cultivated with local seeds, particularly as production costs are reduced through the elimination of chemical pesticides and fertilizers.”

He also believes the initiative has the potential to bring about lasting change in agricultural practice and to influence farmers and local communities: “Most farmers rely on experience before adopting any method in their work, so it's possible for the results of this experiment to influence farmers and the wider community, making it more widespread.”

Given the challenges facing agriculture in Syria and the decline in agricultural output in recent years, the production of local seeds represents a vital step toward ensuring sustainable farming and toward rebuilding the farmer's relationship with the land and their dependence on it as a source of food, in the face of both climatic and political crises.

Originally published on Global Voices

The Qasmiya Bridge on the Litani River, which connects southern Lebanon to the rest of the country, was destroyed by the Israeli army on March 22, 2026. Photo by Megaphone on Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

By Mohamed Soufan

Social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) are often treated as reflections of public opinion, with journalists using social media trends and posts to infer broader sentiment, especially during political conflicts.

Trending topics and viral posts can give the impression of broad, representative debate. But this perception can be misleading. An analysis of online discussions related to Lebanon showed that a small minority of users can dominate visibility and interaction, with the top 1 percent accounting for more than 60 percent of total engagement.

If a handful of highly active accounts shape most of what we see, what does “public opinion” online actually represent?

A small minority

Engagement — likes, reposts, and replies — is not evenly distributed. A small group of highly active or highly visible accounts captures a disproportionate share of attention. As a result, a limited number of voices can shape narratives, amplify specific viewpoints, and set the tone of discussion.

This is not always obvious. Repeated exposure to similar messages can create the impression of consensus, even when it is driven by a narrow segment of users.

This becomes clear in a dataset I compiled of Arabic-language posts about Hezbollah on X. The dataset includes 15,767 posts from 8,148 unique users collected between March 1 and March 8, 2026. Posts were identified using Arabic-language keyword variations of “Hezbollah,” and engagement was measured as the sum of likes, reposts, and replies. Accounts were classified as media or non-media based on profile metadata, supplemented by manual review of the most engaged accounts.

The results reveal a sharp gap between participation and visibility. Non-media users make up 89.6 percent of accounts and produce 79.9 percent of posts, yet the top 1 percent of users capture 61.5 percent of total engagement. The top 5 percent capture 90.6 percent , and the top 10 percent capture 96.2 percent.

Media accounts, although only 10.4 percent of users, account for 29.6 percent of the top 1 percent most engaged users and receive roughly 34 percent more engagement per post than non-media users — about 41 interactions per post on average, compared to 31. At the same time, most total engagement (74.8 percent) still comes from non-media users because of their much higher volume of posts.

Beyond social media

The implications go beyond social media itself. In practice, journalists, researchers, and audiences often turn to X during fast-moving events to get a sense of what is happening and how people are reacting. Trending topics, widely shared posts, and visible engagement can quickly become shorthand for public sentiment.

But these signals are not neutral. Research by Shannon McGregor shows that journalists sometimes rely on social media trends as indicators of public opinion, even though the users driving those trends are not representative of the broader population. A widely shared post or a trending hashtag can give the impression of a dominant public mood, even when it reflects the activity of a relatively small and highly engaged group.

Data from the Pew Research Center shows that political activity on X is concentrated among a small share of users. When the same accounts and viewpoints dominate what is seen, they can influence how events are framed, which voices are amplified, and which perspectives are overlooked.

This dynamic can reinforce itself. Content that gains early visibility is more likely to be seen, shared, and amplified again, making certain narratives appear more widespread than they actually are.

At the same time, social media data still provides valuable insights into how information spreads and narratives form, but it requires careful interpretation. This shifts the focus from ‘What is everyone saying?’ to ‘Who is being seen and heard — and why?’

In conflict contexts, this matters. When a small group dominates what is seen, it can create the impression of consensus where there is none. For those following events in Lebanon, highly visible reactions may reflect amplification rather than widespread agreement, making online discourse a misleading signal of public sentiment.

Originally published on Global Voices

Image from iMEdD, used with permission.

This article by Elli Kostika, Katerina Voutsina, and Kelly Kiki is an excerpt from a longer piece, first published on March 18, 2026, by the non-profit journalism organisation Incubator for Media Education and Development (iMEdD). This excerpt is published on Global Voices, with permission. It has been republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. Any other use of images or charts by third parties require permission.

On January 8, 2026, Iran went dark. As protests spread across the country, the government imposed a near-total internet shutdown, cutting millions off from the outside world. The move came in response to the largest protests the country had witnessed since the 1979 revolution. During these protests, which started in late December 2025 and lasted almost a month, Iranian security forces carried out a sweeping crackdown, killing thousands of protesters, a number that spanned from 3,000 according to Iranian official figures, to 30,000, based on several reports.

Limited access returned in late January, but journalists still struggled to stay online. Then, hours after the first US-Israeli strikes hit Iran on February 28, authorities imposed another internet blackout.

 

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On March 11, 2026, Access Now, a nonprofit organization that protects the digital rights of vulnerable communities, urgently called on the Iranian authorities to restore full internet access and to refrain from imposing further disruptions. The organization reemphasized that “internet shutdowns in conflict zones have life-and-death consequences. They put civilians at risk of death, injury, and illness, cause psychological trauma and mental distress, disrupt livelihoods, and block people’s access to essentials for survival like food and medicine. They also block journalists and human rights defenders, weaken social cohesion, and cause lasting socio-economic harm long after connectivity is restored.”

Internet shutdowns are not new. Access Now defines them as “intentional disruption of internet or electronic communications” for a specific population or location.

In its STOP dataset, the organization has documented close to 2,000 internet shutdowns between 2016 and 2024, with the number of blackouts rising since 2020. The team relies on a context-driven methodology, manually verifying each event through local media, United Nations contacts, and regional partners to determine the primary cause behind internet shutdowns. Such disruptions are often “a precursor to atrocities and violence against civilians,” says Zach Rosson, the #KeepItOn Global Data and Research Lead at Access Now, speaking to iMEdD, adding that “throttling” is another form of an internet blackout, where the internet speed is intentionally slowed down to a level equivalent to 2G or less, making it unusable.

Reporting, verifying information, filing stories, and even paying bills or ordering food often depend on a stable connection. Yet, governments have increasingly turned off the internet, cut mobile networks, or blocked apps, imposing what experts describe as “digital curfews” or “kill switches.” Often deployed during moments of conflict or unrest, these shutdowns sever the free flow of information, leaving journalists struggling to stay connected, as rumors and misinformation spread.

Reporting under blackout

Mehdi Mahmoudian, an Iranian political and human rights activist and former journalist, who is currently based in Iran, told iMEdD via WhatsApp in early March that internet shutdowns make it difficult to verify or publish information. “As someone engaged in documenting human rights violations and collaborating with journalists and civil society networks, the loss of internet access effectively prevented me from verifying information, sharing testimonies, or reporting on what was happening”, said Mahmoudian, a co-writer of the 2026 Oscar-nominated film “It Was Just an Accident.” Over the past 16 years, he has been arrested 13 times and has spent nine years in prison because of his journalism and activist work.

He was most recently arrested on January 31, 2026, after signing a statement with other Iranian journalists and activists expressing support for the mass protests in Iran; he was released on February 17. “Basic communication with colleagues, friends, and family was also disrupted. In such situations, individuals can feel cut off not only from the global internet but also, to some extent, from their own society,” he told us a few weeks later.

Iran has not been a unique case. Between 2019 and 2021, India imposed a 552-day internet blackout in Jammu and Kashmir, leaving some 12 million residents without reliable service in the name of national security.

This visualization that from Access Now's STOP dataset shows how often internet shutdowns happen across countries.

Since 2017, laws have outlined the circumstances under which the government can cut connections. Those rules were replaced by the Temporary Suspension of Telecommunication Services Rules, 2024, which came into effect on November 22, 2024. Still, analysts who measure shutdowns in the country say the government frequently issues blanket shutdowns that exceed what the law allows.

“The government is acutely aware of the power of the internet and how it shapes public discourse, how it can be leveraged politically, and when it can be curtailed. Internet shutdowns in India predate the current administration, but their use has expanded significantly in recent years,” said Sadhika Tiwari, an independent journalist and host of Eco India for Deutsche Welle.

Similarly, in Ethiopia, internet access has also been used as a tool for control during conflict. In northern Ethiopia, the Tigray region was largely cut off from the internet for nearly two years, from November 2020 to February 2023, after the government imposed a shutdown following clashes between Ethiopia’s federal forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).

“One of the most obvious things is that we’re not able to get photos and videos. That’s the biggest drawback,” Maya Misikir, a freelance journalist from Ethiopia, told iMEdD. Not being able to see what other news outlets are publishing online was another challenge for her.

When the Amhara conflict escalated in the summer of 2023, Misikir was able to talk to sources just on the phone. “Sometimes the connection was really bad, so you had to make appointments. […] Plans didn’t always follow through, and stories were delayed. Sometimes they didn’t happen. It just took longer,” she added.

Targeted censorship

While reporting in Turkey, Metin Cihan, a Turkish activist and social media journalist now living in exile in Germany, faced a different constraint: social media censorship.

“Internet or social media, at least in Turkey, are something people can use until it starts to be very annoying for the government. When it comes to that level, they just turn off the button,” he said to iMEdD. Cihan, now part of ECPMF’s Journalists-in-Residence program, decided to flee from Turkey in 2019, after facing online harassment linked to his investigation into the suspicious death of 11-year-old Rabia Naz in northern Turkey.

In 2025, his X (formerly Twitter) account, which now has more than half a million followers, he said, was blocked. “Internet or social media, at least in Turkey, are something people can use until it starts to be very annoying for the government. When it comes to that level, they just turn off the button,” he said.

For more than a decade, the Open Observatory of Network Interference, known as OONI, has worked with digital rights groups around the world to shed light on targeted censorship, which involves the blocking of specific websites or apps.

“We’ve definitely seen a spike in the blocking of social media and VPN websites in recent years, especially during political events,” said Maria Xynou, who leads the organization’s research program. As she explained, targeted censorship happens during protests, elections, conflicts, or wars, when there’s more political incentive to censor information to control narratives.

OONI investigates censorship through its free software app, OONI Probe, which collects data through crowdsourcing. Volunteers around the world install it on their phones and computers to run tests on their local networks. The results are sent back and published as open data in real time to increase transparency. But without internet access, users cannot run the tests, and no data can be collected.

You can read the second part of this story on the iMEdD website.