Known otherwise as the Flamingo Revolution, the massive civic participation has articulated five non-negotiable demands, starting with the resignation of Prime Minister Edi Rama together with his entire cabinet. The consistency, the novelty in the forms of political articulation, and the ever-growing scale have drawn worldwide attention and coverage in major international media.

The information that Kushner and Trump are behind the interventions in these protected areas, coupled with the deprivation of the local population’s right to common property, reeks of patterns of settler colonialism fused with venture capitalism: the privatisation of land and resources by outside capital, backed by political power, at the expense of those who have long depended on them. 

Criticism of the Albanian government for subordinating itself to a colonial order in order to gain international legitimacy while intensifying oppressive local practices is mounting steadily and has surfaced repeatedly throughout this protest. The protest has drawn together thousands of citizens, activists and environmental organizations, local communities, activists from human rights groups, as well as pro-Palestinian activists and collectives in Albania. 

“I left the barbed wire in occupied Palestine, and I found it in Zvërnec. A week ago, I left the executioners in occupied Palestine and found them in Zvërnec. Edi Rama is not the Prime Minister of Albania, he is Israel’s governor in Albania… That the fence will be removed, there is no doubt. That the project will be cancelled, there is no doubt. What we demand is resignation!”

These were the words by Baki Goxhaj at the 1st of June protest against the ecocidal project in Pishë Poro-Nartë, delivered no more than two weeks after he returned from the Global Sumud Flotilla mission towards Gaza. 

Baki touched the hearts of Albanian-speaking communities everywhere when he participated in the mission in May this year. Israeli military forces intercepted his vessel and detained him for three and a half days. Shaken by the violence he experienced and witnessed against his companions, he affirmed publicly that they have been subjected to ‘extreme violence’ and ‘torture practices’. 

Baki has followed the Palestinian cause for over 15 years. However, the fact that all of Albania’s political, intellectual and cultural elites, who are tied to Rama’s power, have aligned themselves with Israel and condemned Palestinian resistance following the events of 7 October 2023 marked a turning point in his political engagement in the public sphere. 

As an activist of the Palestina e Lirë (Free Palestine Collective), he has been involved in a number of initiatives since 2023. These include drafting the petition ‘Not in My Name’, which was signed by over 6,500 people in opposition to Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama being awarded the presidential medal of honour by Israeli President Isaac Herzog in 2024. He has also filed a criminal complaint against Chief Rabbi Joel Kaplan for participating in war crimes and crimes against humanity. 

Locally, he has been working alongside his partner Eriselda Balliu in the coastal city of Vlorë. He has also created the ‘themulsimvote‘ platform to help Muslim voters make more informed decisions in primary elections (2025) and vote against parties that support genocide.

Connected Struggles

Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians has mobilized many cities across Europe, including Southeastern Europe. Nevertheless, with the exception of Slovenia, almost no official statements condemning this genocide were made from governments of this region. 

Dissent and solidarity in Albania, Kosovo and Albanian diaspora, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia,  Croatia, Slovenia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Greece, and Bulgaria came from citizen protesters, activists, collectives, and religious communities. Political articulations were expressed through protests, marches, student encampments and actions in support of the BDS movement and the Global Sumud Flotilla. Demands included a ceasefire, an immediate halt to the genocide, accountability for genocidal acts, the arrest of Netanyahu, sanctions, the termination of economic agreements with Israel and boycotts of artistic, cultural and sporting organisations. 

There was also a call for an end to double standards in relation to both Ukraine and Palestine and for respect for international law. In Albania, the government’s strong alignment with Israel, which occurred alongside the ongoing genocide in Gaza, provoked revolt and waves of anger and indignation among Albanian citizens. Despite political challenges, this created fertile ground for the Palestine solidarity movement in Albania. 

The Rama government’s alignment with Israel has prompted many activists to engage in more intense solidarity with Palestine. Dorela Binjaku, a feminist activist and member of the same collective explains, “As long as it is our own government doing this, we cannot remain silent because silence is complicity.” 

Some of the activists we spoke with are also involved in other causes, including anti-colonial movements. The wealthy Western states contribute disproportionately to displacement and migration, that is in turn managed through increasingly exclusionary border regimes, through the exploitation of nature and the global commons as well as military interventions and conflicts. 

Fioralba Duma, co-founder of the Free Palestine Collective, has a long history of working with migrant rights in Italy and Albania, and with marginalized social groups without political rights. It was through her work on the Palestine cause that Fioralba came to understand decolonisation more deeply, and how this critical lens could be applied to the political and social dynamics in Albania. 

This implies an in-depth understanding of history from a Palestinian perspective, and a critical love for one’s country that affirms positions locally and globally which support humanism and international law, while condemning the Albanian government’s complicity in the genocide. As Duma explains, referring to Serbia’s war against Kosovo (1999) and the genocide of muslim Albanians in Çamëria (1944-45): 

“Free Palestine’s approach is this: we are Albanians, we have lived through genocide, and we understand what it means. It’s not a special status that we hold; but we lived it, and that means we understand it and we don’t want anyone else to ever experience it either. Today it’s the Palestinians; tomorrow it could be an entirely different people.”

A Solidarity Ecology

The Palestine solidarity movement that emerged in Albania after 7 October 2023 is notably heterogeneous, comprising individuals and groups with sometimes opposing political stances. The Palestinian cause has focused on articulating an end to the genocide, boycotting, divesting from and sanctioning the Israeli State, holding the Albanian government accountable for its recent collaborative stance, terminating all agreements with Israel, and recognising Palestine’s right to self-determination. 

These demands have created conditions in which diverse groups have been able to overcome deep ideological, political and religious differences, and even direct opposition, to unite in protest against the genocide unfolding in Palestine. As a solidarity ecology, Palestine has brought together queer and LGBT+ activists, feminists, progressive leftists, Muslims, Christians, conservatives, patriots, nationalists and even conspiracy theorists. 

Despite mutual distrust and suspicions about the potential instrumentalisation of the cause, these groups have engaged in lengthy negotiations to unify their voices. In the words of Duma, “Palestine has helped us cross these borders”. As emerges from interviews with other activists, Palestine is the issue that pushes everyone to transcend their own specific, radical positions, which may differ sharply from one another. 

They emphasise that now is the time to focus more than ever on Palestine, on solidarity and on mutual cooperation, and they do not hesitate to affirm that this inclusive process has made them more open and given them a broader sense of solidarity towards those who do not think as they do. “It is Palestine that unites us,” Duma says. 

In a context marked by fragmentation and significant challenges to political organisation, stemming from social, political, historical, economic and international factors, the Palestinian cause has sparked hope that differences can be overcome, both within organisations in the country and across regional Balkan organising. 

Since October 2023, pro-Palestinian protests in Albania have been among the most sustained in terms of duration, mobilisation of resources, and social media attention, even if they have not always been massive in scale. As Duma affirms, engagement with Palestine has democratised activist spaces, with the call for liberation serving as a unifying symbol of solidarity. 

Another activist, part of the group Shalqi për Paqe (Watermelon for Peace), who was initially involved in pro-Palestinian internationalist movements outside Albania, emphasises the importance of building bridges as a metaphor for cooperation between different people, highlighting the need to care for others despite their differences: “If we are going to create a bridge, people have to meet in the middle. If we are going to build a bridge, it has to be a safe one for everyone to be on that bridge.”

From interviews with activists describing the nuances of engagement within their respective groups, the concept of comradeship emerges as a common political horizon. This political bond helps to overcome specificities and political particularities in order to engage in emancipatory, egalitarian political struggle. As one activist explains, “We can be comrades; we don’t need to be friends.” Some activists place a stronger emphasis on intersectionality, while others focus more on local and situated decolonial practices built on the concept of patriotism.

Creative Disruptions

From November 2023 to June 2026, pro-Palestinian organizations in Albania have organised, co-organised and participated in numerous nationwide protests, primarily in the capital city of Tirana. Alongside these mobilisations, activists have established social media platforms aimed at disseminating information, mobilising supporters, networking and circulating announcements related to local and international actions and initiatives. 

Pro-Palestinian activists, including grassroots groups such as Palestina e Lirë, Shalqi për Paqe, Liri Palestinës, the Balkan Solidarity Network and other activist and online groups, have launched national campaigns to boycott socio-cultural activities organised by the Israeli Embassy in Albania and to sustain boycotts of Israeli products. These campaigns are in line with the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Since its inception, the pro-Palestine movement in Albania has involved public demonstrations in streets, buildings, historical monuments and peripheral neighbourhoods. The ‘Palestina e Lirë’ collective operates horizontally in an effort to be as inclusive as possible, maintaining a state of readiness for swift and unexpected actions in physical public spaces and online. 

Fioralba refers to these actions as ‘disruptive actions’. According to her, the difficulty of organising while a genocidal war is unfolding and across social networks lies in the frequent emergence of misunderstandings, and the impossibility of sitting down to talk properly, meeting in assemblies and strengthening relationships around shared values. 

Actions are often organised through social media, with people who don’t know each other personally coming to an agreement. These actions have an impromptu character, which sometimes puts the action at risk until the last moment. However, this mode of organising emerged from urgency, and activists have transformed these precarious conditions into strengths, giving their actions an element of surprise while minimising the risk of sabotage or infiltration by the authorities.

Some of these actions include: unfurling a large Palestinian flag in Tirana in opposition to the visit of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken; protests against the visit of President Isaac Herzog to Tirana; and a banner near the National Museum reading ‘Ukraine 2 years: 30,457; Palestine: 144 days, 30,000″, which highlights perceived double standards in responses to war and Russian aggression. Other actions include graffiti condemning the IDF’s genocidal acts, expressions of support for imprisoned activists in the UK, solidarity with the Freedom Flotillas‘ humanitarian actions, and broader calls for Palestine’s liberation.

The Albanian government’s, and in particular Prime Minister Edi Rama’s support for the Israeli state has been widely exposed, criticised and challenged by writers, scholars and activists. As an alternative to campaigns calling for ‘non-action’, such as the boycott of the International Israeli Cultural Week in Albania, activists from various collectives have developed platforms for collective cultural and artistic creation in response and in opposition to Rama’s ‘cultural diplomacy’. 

In June 2024 and 2025, these grassroots groups established and curated the Month of Palestinian Culture in Albania. Activities included poetry readings, meetings with activists engaged in the Palestinian cause across the Balkan region, marches and protests, film screenings, discussions with Palestinian authors and activists, feminist readings, Palestinian culinary evenings and “Queers for Palestine” cinematic events. 

These activities were hosted across multiple social centres and alternative spaces in Tirana, Vlorë, Elbasan and Kamëz, in collaboration with independent, activist- and community-run venues such as Kur’ajo Press (Bulevard Art Space), Tek Bunkeri, Smart Centre and Drejtësi Sociale. Some of these activities extended beyond Albania through cooperation with activist centres in Kosovo, including the ‘Sekhmet’ Centre and the Feminist Collective, among others.

In addition to these engagements activists consistently sought to raise awareness of the Palestinian cause alongside other issues. For instance, they incorporated calls for Palestine into the ‘Flamingo Revolution’ protests, LGBT+ protests and 8 March feminist protests of the last three years. Activities such as marathons and football tournaments were explicitly organised in solidarity with the Palestinian cause, raising its profile through symbolic gestures, active participation, and coordinated dissemination on social media platforms. 

Furthermore, these collectives issued calls of solidarity with Iran, Lebanon, Sudan and others, such as the Albanian student movement in North Macedonia. Through anarcho-feminist activism, Binjaku emphasises:

“Colonialism is not only territorial, it is patriarchal, it is racial, it is class-based. The freedom of Palestine is freedom against all these forms of violence. You cannot support a liberation that ignores violence against queers, against women, against the poor. There can be no true liberation without the liberation of everyone. It is not only a war for territory; it is a social and bodily war, an assault that affects us all, an assault against existence, against truth, against life.”

A notable innovation in grassroots organising has been the interconnection of the Balkan region around the Palestinian cause. As activists explain, one of the first meetings leading to the creation of Balkan Solidarity Network took place online, through the event “Connecting Struggles: A Palestinian Perspective”, held as part of Palestine Cultural Month, and organised by Palestina e Lirë, Shalqi për Paqe, and Boulevard Art and Media Institute (Kur’ajo Press). After this encounter, a physical meeting was organized in Ljubljana in 2024. The Network was established as a platform that mediates and strengthens connections between anti-colonial, feminist, queer, and anti-imperialist struggles across the Balkans and beyond. 

This period was accompanied by the question of whether groups in the region, historically on opposing sides, would be able to come together. This marks the transition from local organising in individual cities in Albania, to national organising across Albania, to pan-Albanian organising, encompassing all Albanian-speaking spaces beyond official borders, and finally to regional organising, spanning the countries of the Balkans and Southeastern Europe, and extending further internationally.

If It’s Small and Insignificant, Why Police It?

In an interview with Middle East Eye, Yoel Kaplan – the Israeli chief rabbi who has been present in Albania since 2012 – dismissed the Palestine solidarity protests in the country as “tiny and irrelevant”, likening them to “bad publicity is still good publicity”. He added that he has the backing of Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama and that, consequently, the protests will have no real effect. 

In September 2025, activist Baki Goxhaj submitted a complaint to SPAK (the Special Anti-Corruption and Organised Crime Structure), accusing the aforementioned Chief Rabbi Yoel Kaplan with six offences, including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Kaplan has publicly and proudly acknowledged that he participated in combat as an IDF soldier alongside his son. 

Three months later, in December 2025, the Anti-Terrorism Directorate of the State Police filed a criminal complaint against Goxhaj for “inciting hatred and discord” – an offence carrying a prison sentence of two to ten years. Listed as ‘evidence’ in the complaint, were Goxhaj’s social media posts criticising the Zionist views of Albanian MPs, journalists and intellectuals. 

All of the posts cited as incriminating acts dated from after September – the same period in which Goxhaj had filed his complaint against the chief rabbi. Ultimately, the case was dismissed due to a lack of evidence. 

In an article titled “Anti-terrorism terrorizes Muslims”, Goxhaj summarised the entire history of his persecution and dismantled every argument put forward in the State Police directorate’s complaint. He concluded that “the violence of Rama’s Zionist system will only deepen against Muslim believers, especially those who speak out”.

The Albanian state’s serious investment in intimidation as evidenced by the level of attention given to it, sits in direct contradiction with the assumption that Palestine solidarity mobilisations are ‘irrelevant’. 

Consider, for example, how the police cordon surrounding every protest in solidarity with the Palestinian people has prevented protesting communities from marching freely through the capital or in front of the prime ministerial building. This alone speaks volumes about the state’s criminalising and surveilling atmosphere. 

Far from the ‘calm’ that Chief Rabbi Kaplan suggests, the state appears deeply unsettled. In January 2026, two protests were held in response to Edi Rama’s official visit to Israel – widely regarded by the Albanian public as the “shameful visit” due to its normalisation of genocide – during which Eriselda Balliu, a protester, educator and activist, had her posters torn by a plainclothes police officer. She was then forcibly removed from the area near the prime ministerial building and detained alongside fellow protester Enes Jashari. After spending several hours at the police station, they were released.

From the very beginning of its organising, the Palestine solidarity movement in Albania has been accompanied by these small acts of repression and policing. In June 2024, a protest organised by the Free Palestine Collective was surrounded by what appeared as an excessive number of police officers alongside two rapid response vans and the anti-explosive unit (Forcat Renea). 

In July 2025, the police cordoned off Skanderbeg Square, preventing hundreds of protesters from marching towards the Prime Minister’s Office. The same thing happened a month later on 16 August 2025, when protesters were again denied the right to march freely. The September 2025 gathering, though notified in accordance with legal requirements, was blocked outright by police forces. 

Activists have noted that, in the overwhelming majority of protests, the police have intervened using subtle tactics aimed at stopping or demotivating protesters, such as changing the time or day of the protest, changing the location, blocking marches, postponing dates, using disproportionate force and making outright arrests. Despite these attempts, the state seems more intimidated than intimidating. 

Against Genocide, Across Borders

Activist groups across Southeastern Europe have articulated what scholar Francesco Trupia has called “spontaneous and transnational postulates of solidarity” in line with global pro-Palestinian anti-colonial movements of the Global South. These groups are motivated by emotional and historical experiences tied to post-colonial, post-socialist, and post-genocidal processes, as well as by different premises and current contexts. 

Historically marginalised, these groups are nevertheless grounded in specific local realities in relation to Palestine. Operating under difficult social and organisational conditions, ranging from state-controlled media censorship to ongoing intimidation and criminalisation attempts, these movements have been careful to avoid any accusation of antisemitism in their anti-Zionist statements about Gaza and Palestine, as seen through the lens of feminist, urban, environmental, intersectional, and anti-colonialist activism.

Pro-Palestinian mobilisation in Albania has not broadly rearticulated any socialist legacy rooted in the history of friendly relations between the Albanian state and Palestine during the socialist regime, but has instead mobilised a new political language which links a systemic critique of the Albanian government’s neoliberal practices with collective traumas of war and genocide in Kosovo and Albania. It also reclaims Holocaust memory and the Albanian protection of Jews, insisting on them as reasons not to tolerate genocide and crimes against humanity. 

At the same time, it appeals to society on moral and legal grounds. Palestine has served as a prism through which the personal traumas of post-genocidal generations in the Balkans have been viewed and rearticulated – collective histories of expulsion, war, segregation and occupation. 

For nearly three years, Palestine has been at the centre of historical analogies used to mobilise against genocide, regardless of ideological differences. After many months, mass protests in Albania have also embraced the Palestinian cause, challenging the colonial practices of Israel and the United States which affect even the most marginalised communities worldwide. 

The post Citizens Against the State: How Albania Answered Its Government’s Embrace of Israel appeared first on Untold.

The sociologist and intellectual Shkëlzen Gashi, author of “Massacres in Kosovo 1998–1999”, has long been aware of the price to be paid for challenging the dominant narrative of those in power. 

According to the Special Prosecutor’s Office of Kosovo, his offence is “distorting the truth about the Kosovo War of Liberation”. Gashi, however, believes that the reason for the persecution is that he has written “the first book on this subject that avoids hate speech and addresses all victims on all sides, regardless of their ethnicity, religion or political ideology”. 

Gashi’s book lists names, numbers and locations, totalling 10,333 bodies across 83 massacres, arranged in chronological order. “In total I counted 105, but there are 22 about which nothing is known,” he says as he turns the pages featuring photographs of piles of bodies, funerals and mass graves, “and the most significant thing is that, for the majority of these killings, no one has been convicted. 90% of the massacres I recount in the book end with this sentence: to date, no one has been tried or convicted for these crimes.” 

Regarding the identity of the victims, he explains that “90% are Albanians killed by Serbian police, military or paramilitaries. Crimes committed by Albanians account for only 10%; they took place after the war, as acts of unorganised revenge, and were not carried out by Albanian military or police.”

Gashi dared to break the taboo surrounding the war crimes committed by Kosovo Albanians against Serbian communities; at the same time, he honours the memory of other ethnic and religious groups—Roma, Ashkali or Catholics—who have been marginalised from the official narrative and are difficult for both Serbian and Albanian nationalism to come to terms with.

The Albanian writer and dissident Fatos Lubonja has written a scathing article in which he argues that “this lynching speaks volumes about the kind of state that is in danger of being built in Kosovo (…) History teaches us that tragedy, in the form of war or dictatorship, begins when the parties identify with the truth and seek to impose it on everyone by any means”. 

For their part, representatives of the veterans’ associations of the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK), the guerrilla group that fought the Serbs, are calling for “a law to be enacted to protect the history of the UCK, and for anyone wishing to write on the subject to obtain evidence from the relevant authorities”. Or, in other words, from those who do not question their version of events. 

“Peacebuilding also involves establishing the truth and creating shared narratives about what happened, as well as reconciliation and letting go. In Kosovo, we haven’t had that, and it’s a serious problem. The Albanian and Serbian communities continue to live within their own constructions of reality, so there are competing narratives about the past,” laments Ramadan Ilazi, head of research at the Kosovar Centre for Security Studies.

Whilst this was happening in Pristina, thousands of kilometres away, in a cell at The Hague prison, Hasim Thaci, the former leader of the UCK and the West’s main ally in NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia, awaits sentencing following the trial that concluded last February. 

The Prosecution at the Special Court for Kosovo is seeking 45 years’ imprisonment for Thaci and three other guerrilla commanders for war crimes, crimes against humanity, kidnapping, torture, cruel treatment of prisoners and murder in 102 cases. 

Whatever the jury’s verdict, which is expected by the end of July 2026 it will have a major impact on Kosovo’s politics: “If he is convicted, it will have consequences for the UCK and would give Serbia a weapon to use against Kosovo and oppose its independence. If they are found not guilty, I believe it would have a major impact on domestic politics, because they would return as heroes,” explains analyst Emir Abrashi. 

Disinformation and Hybrid Warfare

On 24 April, a court in Pristina found three Kosovo Serbs guilty of terrorism and “serious acts against the constitutional order and security of Kosovo” for their involvement in an attack carried out by a Serbian-backed group of armed men in the Kosovo village of Banjska in September 2023, which resulted in the death of a Kosovo police officer.

According to the judge’s verdict, this was a “well-trained” group that “in an organised manner, entered the Republic of Kosovo illegally from the Republic of Serbia with dozens of vehicles, some armoured”. “The aim was to destabilise and destroy the basic political, constitutional, economic, and social structures of the Republic of Kosovo, through a well-organised plan. They attempted to secede parts of the territory in northern Kosovo, which have a majority Serbian population, and join them with Serbia”, the judge argued. 

Furthermore, it claims that the attackers were trained at a military camp in Serbia, and that Serbia provided all the military and logistical infrastructure needed to carry out the attack, in which up to 44 people are implicated. According to a journalistic investigation by BIRN, the grenade launchers seized by the Kosovar police had passed through Serbian state maintenance centres; and the ammunition used by the attackers matches that manufactured in 2022 by a Serbian state arms producer. 

“Serbia continues to harbour hegemonic ambitions over Kosovo,” says Arben Fetoshi, a professor at the University of Pristina and director of the Octopus Institute for Hybrid Warfare Studies, “but it is waiting for a favourable geopolitical context to reclaim Kosovo. Right now they cannot invade Kosovo, which is why they are resorting to hybrid warfare: disinformation, propaganda and acts of aggression to destabilise Kosovo as an independent country.”

“In the months leading up to the attack in September 2023, we detected a large amount of disinformation originating from Serbia and focused on northern Kosovo,” confirms Fitim Gashi, executive director of SBunker, a media organisation dedicated to monitoring and combating disinformation in Kosovo, “and the main argument behind all that disinformation is that the Kosovo government wants to expel the Serbs. The message conveyed by these campaigns, many orchestrated by the Serbian government, is that Serbs are not safe in Kosovo and must take action to defend themselves.” 

According to Ilazi, this is a misguided view of the nature of Kosovo’s political system. “Kosovo wasn’t designed to be a state of a single ethnic group,” he argues, “but I think social media is amplifying these kinds of messages that seek to perpetuate this sense of permanent conflict because certain politicians stand to gain from it. You can win elections by selling dreams or selling nightmares, and I think politics has a lot to do with maintaining this atmosphere of fear and hatred.”

To Question the Narrative is to Question the Elites 

Jeton Neziraj has devoted much of his literary work and his role as a public intellectual to the very opposite: to breaking down taboos, bringing people of different backgrounds together, and telling stories that overcome fear and hatred. This playwright knows well the feeling of being the one who challenges the prejudices of the majority and the demands of the powerful. 

He was one of the promoters of POLIP, the first literary festival to bring together Serbian and Albanian authors. Furthermore, his plays explore the most uncomfortable aspects and blind spots of his country’s culture, politics and society: corruption, the LGBT community, the role of guerrilla veterans, relations with Europe and post-war reconciliation. 

For his plays, he has been branded ‘unpatriotic’, ‘Yugonostalgic’ and a ‘traitor to national interests’. His latest play is “Under the Shade of a Tree I Sat and Wept”, a co-production with a South African theatre company exploring forgiveness between communities.

“I don’t know if I’ve been very stupid or very brave,” says Neziraj as he looks back on all the times his words have proved controversial or divisive. “But I believe that is the role of an artist, to be critical. And I think it’s been useful. I believe there is now more freedom of expression in Kosovo than there was fifteen years ago. There are still problems, of course, but I think that now we wouldn’t have to call the police at a theatre premiere because there are people protesting outside, as happened to us on one occasion, or because veterans wanted to boycott the play which, allegedly, defamed the UCK.” 

It is precisely this problem with veterans that has placed Gashi at the centre of the storm in recent weeks. Gashi, like Neziraj, knew that questioning the heroic narrative of the war was ultimately tantamount to questioning the system of power that has governed the country ever since. 

The former guerrilla leaders and affiliated organisations, explains the sociologist, took control of all spheres of public life: “The university, the judiciary, television, the administration, the political parties and the media are under the control of this so-called elite that has ruled Kosovo for two decades.” In these circumstances, “the UCK has manipulated the war and its memory to stay in power. Since they supposedly liberated the country, they claim the right to rule it and justify their corruption through terror”.

In 2020, Gashi received threats and lost his job as an adviser to President Kurti for stating on television that “some senior officials in the UCK committed war crimes and should be punished for them”. The focus of his historiographical work centres on civilian victims and on the peaceful resistance against Serbian oppression, which, in his view, has been overlooked by official historians intent on highlighting the role of the guerrillas. 

“My aim with this book was to clarify what had happened in each of the massacres. A book like this should be written about every single violation of humanitarian law that took place during the war. First we must know exactly what happened, then there must be reparations, and it is very important that the history textbooks used in schools are revised.” 

The Views of Veterans

Gazmend Syla joined the UCK at the age of 16 and today, at 45, he is the vice-president of the National Veterans’ Association, an organisation with branches in virtually every municipality in the country. Syla speaks with pride of the sacrifices made by his comrades, which, in his view, have not been sufficiently recognised by his compatriots.

We are at the organisation’s headquarters in Peja, one of the main guerrilla strongholds during the conflict, and the walls are covered with flags, emblems and photographs of the martyrs. “Nobody likes war. But you have to go if someone wants to kill you,” he explains after recounting the exploits of some of the “3,000 martyrs” recognised by the organisation.

Syla explains that the organisation’s mission is, at its core, like that of an NGO: “We help veterans when they have a need and mediate with the government to convey their demands.” And what about its influence in politics? “We don’t have a party of our own, but we do have relations with many different parties,” he replies. 

Asked about the trial in The Hague against Thaci and other guerrilla leaders, Syla replies indignantly: it is a set-up against innocent men, the witnesses have been bribed to testify against the UCK and it all boils down, in essence, to “a political issue”. 

The veterans’ association has organised mass demonstrations in Pristina, Tirana and The Hague to demand the acquittal of the accused. He does not wish to conclude the matter without pointing the finger at Western nations: “We fought alongside the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. They helped create the UCK, fought with us and supplied us with weapons. If we are guilty, then NATO is too.”

Syla is unwavering in his defence of the UCK’s political and military role in Kosovo’s independence, and regards the guerrilla movement as one of the pillars of national life. “We are free now and my children go to school,” he explains, “before, in Yugoslavia, we had nothing and the police and the military would beat us for speaking our own language. We had to fight to be free, and now we are doing well. Perhaps we’re not like Switzerland or Spain, but this is our country and we’re happy here.” 

However, his view on relations with Serbia and the Serbs of Kosovo is not what one might expect from a former guerrilla fighter. “The Serbs are citizens of Kosovo just like anyone else. They’re not to blame. They are my neighbours and I get on with them just fine. Their freedoms and political rights are recognised by the Constitution, and that is how it should be.” 

Syla is highly critical of Prime Minister Albin Kurti’s attempts to exclude Lista Sprska, the main Serbian political party in Kosovo, from the elections or to outlaw it: “They should be left in peace.” 

“The things I think and am telling you now, I can’t say them at meetings with the veterans,” Syla laments, sadly, “there, they only want strong, more aggressive rhetoric. And it’s a shame.”

The post To Question Memory is to Question Power: The Narrative of Violence is Shaking up Political Life in Kosovo appeared first on Untold.

The building does not just display history; it selects which histories can remain visible, and which must be softened, abstracted, or forgotten.

This is where the stakes emerge. The museum’s beauty carries political work: it naturalizes a version of the country in which conflict, inequality, and rupture are treated as noise rather than memory. By monumentalizing continuity, the institution implies consensus. By designing awe, it designs obedience. The danger is not that the museum tells a story—every museum does—but that it presents its story as the only one with the right to fill space.

The Grand Egyptian Museum is both architecture and argument. Its material language, spatial choreography, and territorial placement operate like a voice: articulating what the state wants to be believed about the past, and what it hopes the public will no longer remember about the present.

Architecture and the Performance of Sovereignty

The Grand Egyptian Museum acknowledges that architecture is a performance of authority, a stage on which the state rehearses its preferred version of Egypt. Its size, symmetry, and alignment with the desert plateau are not only aesthetic performances; they are choices that speak in the state’s voice. Through these gestures, the structure suggests that the nation is continuous, cohesive, and immune to rupture. What appears to be a museum of the past is, in practice, a projection of the present—a carefully built argument about who owns history and who is permitted to stand inside it.

Official discourse reinforces this message. The museum is presented as a “national gift to the world” and a testament to an eternal civilizational identity, as though a single architectural form could gather every fragment of Egypt into one unbroken narrative. The effect is deliberate: to make political discontinuity feel like historical continuity; to transform instability into destiny. In this framework, the museum does not claim legitimacy; it manufactures it. The visitor is invited to marvel not only at antiquity, but at the modern state’s ability to summon antiquity as proof of its right to rule.

Inside, form becomes instruction. The procession from forecourt to atrium to monumental staircase guides visitors through a spatial lesson in belonging. Awe is not incidental—it is engineered. By directing the gaze upward, outward, and forward, the museum implies that the state is both heir to the ancient past and guarantor of the national future. The body learns by moving. The eye learns by being guided. Authority is absorbed not as argument but as atmosphere.

This is where the strings attached become visible. The question is not whether the museum is beautiful; it is what this beauty is doing. Architecture performs sovereignty not by describing power, but by making it feel natural, inevitable—like the only possible order. In the Grand Egyptian Museum, design becomes a form of speech. The building does not say the state is permanent; it teaches permanence. And in that lesson, certain histories—revolutionary, contested, or inconvenient—must be quiet enough to fade beneath the alabaster light.

Site, Form, and Design

The Grand Egyptian Museum does not sit neutrally on the edge of Cairo; it occupies the city like a statement. Its site, drawn between the density of the urban plain and the rising desert plateau, stages a threshold where the state can curate what Egypt looks like before one even enters the building. The approach—highways, forecourts, controlled access points—prepares the visitor to see the museum not as a public institution but as a destination that has already decided how it should be seen.

The building’s triangulated geometry, derived from the visual lines to the Giza pyramids, is more than an architectural concept; it is a strategy of affiliation. By joining itself to the horizon of antiquity, the museum anchors the present regime to the authority of the ancient past. Material choices reinforce the logic: alabaster, historically used in temples and tombs, glows at dawn and dusk in a way that suggests reverence, authenticity, and inevitability. It is a calculated softness—an aesthetic of welcome that conceals the precision of control behind it.

Inside, the museum’s interior volumes are organized as if they were a landscape of ascent. Wide halls, controlled perspectives, and the long pull of the monumental staircase train the body to read space as progress. The building is not merely walked; it is climbed, ascended, and internalized. Architecture becomes choreography, and choreography becomes instruction. Even the generous sightlines toward the pyramids are not simply vistas; they are confirmations: this is where the story comes from, and this is where the state claims the right to continue it.

At this scale, design produces a political effect. The museum does not demand belief; it designs the conditions under which belief becomes the easiest response. It organizes the city’s edge into a controlled frontier, turning territory into narrative and access into agreement. The message embedded in the site is clear: Egypt can be seen from here—but only in the way the state prefers it to be seen.

Materiality, Light, and the Aesthetic of the Sublime State

Light does a particular kind of political work in the Grand Egyptian Museum. The alabaster façade, glowing at dawn and radiant from within at night, softens the building’s edges just enough to make authority feel gentle. It produces an atmosphere of invitation, but one in which the terms of entry are already decided. Transparency is suggested, not granted; openness is performed, not lived. What looks like light is also a kind of veil.

Inside, illumination becomes a form of direction. Daylight enters through triangulated skylights and alabaster fins that scatter brightness across statues and vitrines, creating a visual field where artifacts appear suspended in reverence. The visitor is not simply observing objects; they are being positioned in relation to them. Light gathers the eye, concentrates it, tutors it. The museum does not tell the visitor what to think—its spatial glow teaches them how to see.

This aesthetic is not accidental. By producing awe, the museum produces agreement. The softness of the alabaster, the slow bloom of light across stone surfaces, the calibrated passage from shadow to radiance—they are emotional cues that smooth over rupture. The technique is subtle: instead of commanding, it persuades; instead of asserting power, it normalizes it. Authority arrives not as an order, but as ambience.

What emerges is a choreography of perception. Light does not simply reveal the architecture; it completes its argument. It ensures that the emotional register of the museum—wonder, pride, belonging—leans toward acceptance rather than interruption. And in that emotional current, alternative narratives lose volume. Under the alabaster glow, disagreement dims, critique quiets, and the idea of a single, unbroken national story becomes easier to believe.

Spatial Choreography and State Pedagogy

The Grand Egyptian Museum is not only a sequence of rooms; it is a sequence of lessons. The spatial journey—from the forecourt to the atrium, to the monumental staircase, to the galleries, and finally to the terrace facing the pyramids—produces a controlled progression in which movement becomes meaning. Each transition feels natural, but it is choreographed with intent. The visitor is ushered from anticipation to reverence to confirmation, as if the architecture were guiding thought through the body rather than through language.

The forecourt acts like a threshold of discipline. It separates the turbulence of Cairo from the curated calm of the museum, signaling that one is crossing from the city’s contested present into a state-managed version of the past. The atrium, dominated by monumental figures, shifts the scale of the body: the visitor becomes smaller, and the state—architecturally speaking—becomes larger. The monumental staircase then performs the emotional climax. Ascending it feels like rising into the national narrative itself, as if the visitor were being placed inside the timeline the state prefers.

Pedagogy happens through design. The galleries are arranged to unfold history as an inevitability: a straight line from antiquity to modern authority, uninterrupted, unbroken, unquestioned. Rooms do not simply display objects; they display a worldview. The architecture directs pacing, determines sightlines, and maintains focus, allowing little room for hesitation or doubt. Even when the visitor pauses, the building continues narrating around them, as if the story could not be stopped.

This choreography carries a political charge. The museum does not instruct through argument or didactic panels; it teaches by shaping how the visitor moves, sees, and remembers. It performs the state’s preferred logic: that belonging is simple, that continuity is self-evident, that the nation has always been whole. The effect is persuasive not because it demands consent, but because it makes consent feel like the most intuitive response. In this sense, the museum behaves less like a cultural institution and more like a training ground for a particular way of imagining Egypt—one where disagreement has no spatial equivalent and where dissent finds no place to stand.

Urbanism, Mobility, and Territorial Control

The Grand Egyptian Museum does not stand alone; it is the anchor of a redesigned territory. The highways, landscaped approaches, security perimeters, and dedicated access routes are not supporting infrastructure—they are part of the project’s architecture. Before the visitor reaches the building, the city has already been edited. Mobility is directed, visibility is managed, and arrival is staged as proof that the museum exists at the center of an orderly national landscape. The edge of Cairo becomes a frontier where the state can choreograph what the capital looks like, and who gets to approach it.

This territorial framing reimagines the western periphery of the city as a controlled zone of presentation. The new roads bypass neighborhoods that once surrounded the plateau, replacing the improvisation of informal life with a curated route that leads directly to the museum’s entrance. What appears as efficiency is also isolation; what appears as access is also filtration. The surrounding communities, markets, and everyday noise of the area are quieted by distance. The museum reads as if it rises out of empty land, even though it does not. The silence is engineered.

Tourism infrastructure intensifies this effect. Airports, arterials, and hotel corridors link into the museum like arteries feeding an image. The state gains not only visitors but vantage points. The approach offers views that feel cinematic—framed horizons, measured distances, controlled skylines that hide the city’s contradictions. This is not about hiding Cairo; it is about selecting which Cairo will be seen. The result is a geography where the museum becomes both destination and filter: a place that promises access to the nation while deciding what the nation looks like on the way in.

In this configuration, territory becomes narrative. Space is made to speak. The controlled approach routes tell the visitor that the city is coherent, the nation is continuous, and the state is the author of both. And because this coherence is experienced physically—driven, walked, entered—it becomes easier to believe. The choreography of arrival, movement, and containment performs a political claim long before architecture comes into view: that modern Egypt can be understood from here, and that the legitimacy of the present depends on the disappearance of what surrounds it.

Authoritarian Monumentality in Historical Perspective

The Grand Egyptian Museum joins a longer tradition in which states build at scales that exceed function in order to exceed doubt. Monumentality here is not an architectural genre, but a political method: a way for governments to materialize certainty where consensus is fragile, and to project continuity where history has been fractured. Across different contexts and eras, monumental projects have served the same purpose—to turn authority into something that looks like geology, something too large to argue with.

Seen in this light, the museum inherits more than its alignment with the pyramids; it inherits the logic of monuments that stabilize regimes by stabilizing narrative. Just as earlier authoritarian and developmentalist states built to outlast the criticism of the present, the museum builds to outlast the memory of rupture. The gesture is familiar: when politics is unsettled, architecture is asked to appear immovable; when identity is contested, stone is asked to speak more loudly than people. The building functions as reassurance, not evidence.

But unlike older monumental projects, the Grand Egyptian Museum operates under conditions shaped by global capital and transnational cultural networks. Loans, consultants, partnerships, and international museological standards do not weaken the national message; they amplify it. They allow the state to present its narrative as globally verified, technically endorsed, and culturally neutral—when it is, in fact, a deeply situated political argument. The museum becomes not just a monument to heritage, but a monument to the credibility of the state itself.

This continuity with past monumentalism is less about imitation than adaptation. Ancient complexes sacralized divine rule; twentieth-century megaprojects dramatized ideological futures; the museum sacralizes heritage as proof of modern authority. In each case, scale stands in for consensus, and spectacle stands in for negotiation. The architectural language changes, but the political instinct does not. The building does not ask the public to believe; it asks them to stand in front of something that makes belief feel unnecessary.

The result is a paradox: a project that appears inclusive by virtue of cultural pride, yet exclusive by virtue of the narrative it enforces. It remembers too much of one history and too little of another. It claims to gather the nation, but it gathers only the version of the nation that can fit inside its myth. What is absent is not forgotten by accident; it is forgotten by design.

The Authoritarian Sublime and the State Machine

The Grand Egyptian Museum presents itself as a place of preservation, yet its power lies in what it constructs rather than what it protects. It uses alignment, scale, and the softness of light to turn architecture into a statement of endurance. The building does not argue for the state’s permanence; it rehearses it. It makes authority feel architectural—quiet, inevitable, already decided.

This is what gives the project its force. By organizing sightlines, controlling approach routes, and scripting movement, the museum draws a boundary around which futures are imaginable and which histories are permitted to matter. The narrative it offers is coherent and compelling, but it is a coherence built on selection. What exceeds the story is allowed to fall away. What disrupts continuity remains outside the frame of alabaster and glass.

None of this negates the museum’s achievements as a work of design. It is visually extraordinary, technically sophisticated, and unmistakably ambitious. But ambition is not neutral, and beauty is not without consequence. If the museum succeeds, it is because it persuades—not because it proves. It gathers visitors into a vision of Egypt that feels seamless enough to stand, and silent enough to hold.

The question that remains is not whether the museum will endure, but what it will ask the public to forget in order to endure. In this sense, the building’s most powerful exhibition is not its collection, but the story it makes possible—and the stories it leaves in the dark.

The post Building Belief: The Grand Egyptian Museum and the Architecture of State Power appeared first on Untold.

“I only worry about my child,” she said, unfolding medical records worn soft from handling respiratory problems. “The doctor told me I had to move. But we don’t have any place to go.”

Morocco’s government has issued 416 permits authorising the import of European waste — clothes, rubber tires, industrial byproducts — burned as fuel in cement kilns across the Casablanca-Settat region, including within 15 kilometers of her home. In 2024 alone, actual imports reached 821,500 tonnes, nearly triple the annual average of the previous three years, a surge consistent with companies racing to ship before the approaching EU export ban. European corporations save over $52 million every year by shipping their waste here instead of processing it at home. 

Fatima doesn’t know all of that, what she does know is that her son can’t breathe, and that some nights the smell reaches dozens of kilometers from the landfill.

An investigation, based on exclusive trade data from the Basel Action Network, customs records, and Freedom of Information responses, found that European countries shipped at least 36,611 tons of waste to Morocco in a single year — 93 percent of it classified as “reusable” despite declared values as low as €0.10 per kilogram, a price that suggests disposal, not resale. 

The Economics of Dumping

Understanding why European waste ends up in Moroccan communities requires following the money. The arithmetic is brutally simple.

Treating waste properly in Europe costs estimated conservatively about $100 per ton. Shipping it to Morocco and burning it in cement kilns costs approximately $36 to $39. For a company processing 100,000 tons annually, the savings exceed $6 million a year. Across the entire waste trade, European corporations pocket more than $52 million annually — calculated from the roughly $62 gap between European treatment costs and Moroccan processing costs, applied across the 821,500 tonnes imported in 2024.

Data obtained from the Basel Action Network (BAN) covering September 2024 through September 2025, reveals how the pipeline operates. In that 12 month period alone, European countries shipped 36,611 tons of documented waste to Morocco, including clothing, plastics, paper, and electronics. The real volume is likely higher; this figure represents only what was officially recorded under waste codes. Shipments reclassified as “secondary raw materials,” “reusable goods,” or “alternative fuel” before leaving Europe drop out of waste tracking entirely.

Spain emerges as Europe’s primary waste gateway to Morocco, handling nearly 80 percent of clothing exports and two-thirds of plastic waste, 73 tons of worn clothing shipped daily from a single country. Spanish waste management companies profit from both low transport costs across the Mediterranean and Morocco’s minimal environmental oversight.

The declared values tell their own story. Romania declares clothing at €0.10 per kilogram. Poland declares identical goods at €1.02, a tenfold difference for the same customs code. Industry sale prices for sorted reusable clothing run between €0.50 and €1.50 per kilogram; Poland’s declaration sits inside that band, Romania’s far below it. 

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.

According to the European Environment Agency, the fate of used textiles exported from the EU is “highly uncertain,” with material unfit for reuse mostly ending up in open landfills and informal waste streams. 

Ninety-three percent of waste in the Basel data is classified as “worn clothing.” But industry estimates suggest only half or less of such shipments actually reach secondhand markets. The rest becomes Morocco’s problem—feeding the cement kilns at Jorf Lasfar, Morocco’s largest industrial port zone 120 kilometers south of Casablanca, entering industrial facilities across the Casablanca-Settat region, disappearing into a system with no transparency about what happens next.

Major corporate players are embedded in this supply chain. The French firm CHIMIREC established a Moroccan subsidiary in 2020 to produce “Energy Substitution Fuel” (ESF) for cement manufacturers. When contacted, CHIMIREC Maroc denied any involvement in European waste imports and exports, stating it processes exclusively 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 center near the Jorf Lasfar port, a documented entry point for European waste shipments. LafargeHolcim and Ciments du Maroc did not respond to requests for comment.

Since 2016, the Ministry of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development has issued 416 permits for waste imports, authorizing more than 2.5 million tons of European waste to enter the country. In 2024 alone, imports reached 821,500 tons—nearly a third of the entire decade’s total in a single year, a surge consistent with the approaching EU ban deadline. 

The Moroccan total is larger than the 36,611 tonnes recorded by BAN because the two datasets measure different stages of the same pipeline: BAN tracks European shipments still declared under waste codes — clothing, plastics, paper, electronics — while Morocco’s ministry counts everything that arrives as “recyclable raw materials”. 

The gap between the two figures is essentially the volume reclassified out of the waste category before it leaves Europe. The ministry has described the program as a strategic pillar of Morocco’s circular economy, projecting 60,000 jobs by 2030. The government frames waste as a valuable resource essential for industrial energy, a narrative that obscures the health costs borne by communities like those in Mediouna.

The Loopholes

International law nominally restricts wealthy nations from dumping hazardous waste on poorer ones. The Basel Convention, ratified by over 190 countries, requires “Prior Informed Consent” for transboundary movements of hazardous materials. But that consent, as the convention is written, operates between governments — not between governments and residents who live downwind.

In practice, the regulations contain loopholes large enough to drive a container ship through. 

Reclassified materials require none of these protections. A single word change on a customs form,  from “waste” to “secondary raw material”, transforms a regulated substance into an unregulated commodity.

Trade records obtained for this investigation reveal the scale of the fiction. 93 percent of waste shipped to Morocco is classified as “reusable clothing” or “secondary materials,” but declared values of €0.10 per kilogram suggest these shipments are waste destined for disposal, not genuine merchandise.

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 been sent to Morocco “for disposal purposes” — but, in the same response, acknowledged that “small quantities” were shipped during 2021, 2022 and 2023 “for the purpose of material recovery.” 

UN Comtrade records for 2023 show approximately 817 tonnes of Italian rubber waste reaching Morocco that year, worth around $427,000. The following year, in August 2024 alone, Morocco’s Ministry of Energy Transition authorised the import of 20,000 tonnes of waste specifically from Italy. 

This glaring contradiction could be the result of a regulatory loophole in how Europe counts what leaves its ports: under EU law, burning waste in a cement kiln is officially classified as “energy recovery” rather than “disposal” .

Through labeling their exported garbage as alternative fuel for Moroccan kilns or misclassifying it as reusable merchandise at customs, European countries can legally erase millions of tons of waste from their disposal ledgers, outsourcing their pollution while keeping their domestic recycling statistics pristine. 

Cristina Guarda, Italian MPE from the Greens/EFA, confirms that the topic is on the European agenda. “The goal is to reduce the areas where opacity can take root, clarify responsibilities throughout the supply chain, and establish the principle that exports are acceptable only if companies can genuinely demonstrate environmentally sound management, with equivalent and verifiable standards”

The Human Cost

One hundred twenty kilometers south of Casablanca, the industrial zone at Jorf Lasfar stretches along Morocco’s Atlantic coast. Container ships dock at a port with 37-million-ton annual capacity. Cement plants rise in silhouette against the sky. Trucks move constantly between the port and processing facilities, carrying material that began its journey in European cities and will end it in Moroccan furnaces.

The health impacts accumulate invisibly. Communities living near Moroccan cement plants face an excess risk of respiratory disease, cancer incidence and mortality, predominantly affecting the respiratory tract in both children and adults. 

Research consistently finds that people living near cement plants are up to nearly five times more likely to report respiratory symptoms than those with no such exposure. In Morocco specifically, occupational cement exposure has been directly linked to Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, one of the leading causes of respiratory mortality.

When rubber tires burn in cement kilns without adequate emission controls, they release dioxins and furans, among the most toxic substances known to science, along with heavy metals including lead, mercury, and cadmium. A peer-reviewed study measuring emissions from cement kilns burning hazardous waste found dioxin levels more than four times higher than baseline (1.57 vs. 6.49 nanograms per cubic metre) — and rising further as more hazardous waste was added to the fuel mix, with emissions rising further as the co-processing ratio increases.

A synthesis by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has documented that where emissions controls on such kilns are inadequate, surrounding communities show elevated rates of respiratory, skin, and gastrointestinal illness.

Morocco cannot yet manage its own domestic waste crisis. The Mediouna landfill alone receives 1.2 million tonnes a year and is approaching saturation. In November 2024, the World Bank approved a $250 million programme to upgrade the country’s landfills — a tacit acknowledgement that existing capacity is inadequate before any additional burden from imports. Casablanca cannot absorb more pollution, let alone safely process hundreds of thousands of tons shipped from Europe each year. 

When the government approved more than two million tons of new waste imports from various European countries 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 over Italian waste imports sparked widespread protests and social media campaigns, forcing the government to suspend the imports. Yet despite this resistance, the waste continues to arrive.

European corporate accountability law, for its part, does not reach far enough to catch what happens after the shipments leave port. The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, adopted by the EU in 2024 to oblige large companies to police human rights and environmental harms across their supply chains, stops at the point of sale. 

“CSDDD ends with handing over the goods more or less,” Miriam Saage-Maaß, legal director at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, said of the directive’s reach. Whether European exporters bear any legal responsibility for what happens to their waste inside Moroccan cement kilns, she added, “depends on how direct EU exporters are connected to the waste burning.”

“The EU is strengthening controls and obligations,” says Guarda, while mentioning the new 2024 Waste Shipment Regulation that sets out stricter rules on the export of waste to non-EU countries. “But the real leap forward must be cultural and industrial,” she adds. “Circularity cannot become an elegant way to outsource health and environmental impacts to other communities. We need a pathway that reduces the problem at the source, increases producer responsibility and leads to waste management that is consistent with climate and health protection objectives, without creating ‘sacrifice zones’ outside Europe.”

Time is running out, but not for the reasons Fatima might hope. From 21 November 2026, the EU will ban all plastic waste exports to non-OECD countries like Morocco, with no approved-list escape route for plastics. For other non-hazardous waste such as metals and paper, exports will be banned from May 2027 unless a country is on an approved list; Morocco submitted its application to be included by the 21 February 2025 deadline.

Whether that ban will actually stop the flow, or simply push it through new classification channels, is contested. When the regulation was adopted in 2024, the Environmental Investigation Agency, an international environmental NGO, warned that its real effect on waste exports would depend on how strictly EU member states transpose and enforce it, and on whether the remaining loopholes are closed. 

One such channel is already emerging inside EU policy itself, in December 2025, the European Commission proposed Union-wide end-of-waste criteria for mechanically recycled plastics, which would allow such materials to circulate across the bloc without being classified as waste at all.

“The longer the chain of parties involved, the shorter the chain of enforcement: controls on thousands of containers travelling through ports are extremely complex. The official data we have on Morocco could be not everything that it’s actually exported, but unofficial flows are undetectable”, says Paola Ficco, environmental lawyer and director of the magazine Rivista Rifiuti.

Back in Mediouna, Fatima remains caught in the middle. While Europe celebrates its recycling milestones and Morocco counts the jobs and greens its image, she and families like hers in Casablanca are plagued by air and soil pollution from domestic and exported waste.

This story was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe

The post Toxic Trade: How Europe Exports Its Waste to Morocco and Calls It Recycling appeared first on Untold.

Growing up in a leftist household, I looked at this change in diet as a way in which companies and neoliberal governments were erasing parts of our cultural identity and social cohesion, so I became obsessed with reading the brand names, places of origin, and lists of ingredients of food in the supermarket.

One thing I started noticing in my teens, and has worsened over time, is the limited variety of options. Don’t get me wrong, long supermarket corridors are colorful and filled with over 50 kinds each of bread, cereals, canned soups, chocolate, peanut butter, cookies, ice cream, potato chips, dog food, cheese analogs, frozen meals, and infant formula, but producers are usually no more than three, and ingredients often include things I wouldn’t be able to place in nature. 

From those ingredients that sound natural, there’s one that troubles me and is present in all the food items mentioned above: palm oil, a main product from the plant called Elais guineensis Jacq.

Beyond the Package

Oil palm derived ingredients are found in food under many names: vegetable oil, vegetable fat, palmate, palmitate, palm stearine, or stearate acid. In cleaning products, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, ingredients like sodium lauryl sulfate, glyceryl, cetyl palmitate, stearic acid, or palmitoyl are often derived from it too.

Healthwise, oil palm derived products aren’t bad, and are used to create nice textures in many items. Even more, palm oil is usually recognized as a renewable alternative to fossil fuels. 

So you might wonder, why does this ingredient make you so angry? Are you simply an angry woman? Well, sure, and the world really needs more of us, but I’d also say we have to take all magical ingredients with a pinch of doubt.

That’s why I decided to dig deeper. Beyond my gut feeling or political instinct, I wanted to understand who actually stands to gain from this ingredient taking over our supermarket shelves, and at what cost. Was it improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers? Was it driving local development, or merely feeding a system of industrial agriculture that thrives on cheap land, cheap labor, and even cheaper ecosystems? Those questions led me to look beyond the pretty packaging and start piecing together a bigger, messier picture that connected oil palms to deforestation and land grabbing.

Around 2018, in the spirit of making something powerful out of my anger towards the industrialization of agriculture and food production, and understanding the full chain of actors benefiting from this, I joined a group of people investigating oil palm in Mexico, on the ground and from space, using satellite imagery.

Hidden Costs

Around the world, oil palm’s high productivity and versatility have led to its rapid and consistent increase in demand and production. Plantations are productive for several decades, so they can be understood as long periods of steady, year-long income by farmers. However, this crop is also associated with high rates of deforestation, biodiversity loss, and significant social, environmental and health impacts to smallholder farmers due to the intensive use of agrochemicals and polluting oil extraction processes. 

In addition, if you’re growing oil palm and at some point decide not to do it anymore, removing the plants is quite expensive – a 2012 study on Malaysian plantations estimated the cost of removing a hectare of oil palm at RM 34,500 (over USD 10,000 at that time).

Furthermore, when we talk about biofuels we usually forget to say that soil is not a renewable resource and, for this purpose, oil palm would most likely be produced as a monocrop in an industrialized way, a practice that does not regenerate the soil.

Initiatives like the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) have been trying to regulate production and reduce these impacts, but many organizations have questioned their efficacy and standards.

In Mexico, the first attempts to establish oil palm plantations began in the 1950s, but production and demand only took off in the late 1990s, when the government classified it as a strategic crop–a crop that’s highly competitive in the market and/or important for food security–and a series of policies were designed to promote its cultivation and commerce at the federal or state levels. 

In 2017, the Secretariat of Agriculture and Rural Development (SADER) published the National Agricultural Plan for the Period of 2017 to 2030, where they included the recommended market strategies to increase production and satisfy domestic needs, and maps indicating which regions were agro-ecologically suitable for each of the 38 strategic crops. 

In the case of oil palm, the suitability map indicated that 14.2 million hectares of the national territory were suitable for oil palm cultivation, an area almost the size of Nepal.

Unequal Maps

The SADER’s suitability maps were based on maps from other institutions, like the Secretariat of Agriculture and Rural Development (SAGARPA), the National Institute of Forestry, Agricultural and Livestock Research (INIFAP), and the Institute for Productive Reconversion and Tropical Agriculture (IRPAT). Such maps are typically publicly available at very low resolutions and use different mixes of data climatic and topographic data (obtained from meteorological stations), edaphic characteristics (obtained from local studies), and cultivation areas (obtained from satellite data).

Observations of the Earth from satellite data, aka remote sensing data, have been used for the identification and analysis of crops of strategic importance, with the purpose of estimating their yields, preventing risks associated with climate change, and identifying socio-environmental impacts. At the moment, commercial satellites can return imagery with a resolution of around 30 cm per pixel every few hours, and software for satellite imagery management, like EarthExplorer or Google Earth have been accessible since the early 2000s, but high-resolution data is typically very costly and affordable only to large institutions and governments. 

Although subscriptions and pay-as-you-go options are more affordable, publicly available data–more likely to be accessible to smallholder farmers–is usually provided at lower resolution, typically 5-500 m per pixel, updated from daily to every few weeks. Also, feature identification and classification can be done manually by humans or with data-driven algorithms to cover larger areas, but results should always be verified against on-the-ground data to avoid confusion between crops and ecosystems. 

For example, distinguishing primary forest from oil palm data plantations is not a simple task. Manual methodologies are typically highly accurate, but unsustainable for large studies, which might explain why SADER gathered data from multiple institutions using different methodologies.

In any case, when agricultural policies rely heavily on remote sensing data, many issues on the ground are obscured, like the full breadth of environmental impacts of a crop’s cultivation, or the desired futures of those working the land. Even more, the lack of, or unequal access to, high-resolution data, raises questions about the adequacy and power imbalances promoted by those policies.

Follow the Data

In 2019, trying to understand the impacts of SADER’s recommendation of turning such a large amount of land into oil palm cropland, we decided to dig deeper into this topic. Afterall, we were city people and maybe farmers were very happy with their job prospects, or using palm oil derived products was the least impactful thing on the environment.

We contacted people involved in oil palm production, like the women farmer organizations “Agua y Vida, Mujeres, Derechos y Ambiente” and “Casa de la Mujer Ixim Antsetic”, and people in academia and the government, and we started looking at all publicly available information about oil palm production in Mexico. Despite abundant governmental data and scientific literature, it was hard to say who was benefiting the most out of oil palm production in the country. 

We didn’t find any publicly available interactive map of oil palm plantations at the national level, which we thought crucial for smallholder farmers and other non-governmental policy-makers to contribute to the design of agricultural policies. 

So we decided to create it.

It took us two years of gathering and analyzing publicly available data on oil palm’s socio-environmental impacts, production and cropland from 2014 to 2019. We followed a semi-automatic remote sensing analysis methodology running Python scripts over publicly available Google Earth satellite images to create our publicly available high-resolution oil palm plantations map, and a report explaining our findings. 

Considering the potential of these mappings, we decided to call ourselves the Observatorio Agroindustrial en México, or OBSAM with the aim of expanding this study to all the strategic crops in the country. 

Our map showed the distribution and expansion of oil palm at the national level. The data had the potential for identifying spatial relationships with transportation and other infrastructure projects, other agricultural programs, or the coverage of governmental sustainable rural development programs.

Expansion and Deforestation

We identified 62,057 hectares (ha) of oil palm plantations, usually close to transportation infrastructure and areas of scrubland, rainfed agriculture, pastureland and secondary vegetation. 

From these, 4,022ha were inside natural protected areas, mainly in the Palenque National Park, and the Encrucijada Biosphere Reserve (EBR) both in the Southern state of Chiapas–researchers, civil society actors, farmers, and media, had long reported this and asked for controlling the crop’s expansion in these areas, but no official response had been given to these concerns. 

In addition, oil palm plantations were found in five terrestrial and seven hydrological regions of importance for biodiversity conservation, as defined by the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO). Finally, comparisons against official data for forest cover from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) for 2017 and 2018, identified a link between oil palm and deforestation in more than 5,400 ha of forests and jungle.

Our literature review also showed that there were indeed multiple opinions about oil palm’s benefits and impacts around the world, depending usually on the level of access to technology and subsidies, labor force, land ownership, social organizing, and decision-making power of those who grow it. 

In Mexico, technological requirements for its cultivation have led to the replacement of itinerant traditional agricultural methods, like roza-tumba-quema –an itinerary agricultural technique practiced in tropical regions for around 10,000 years where land is cleared (roza-tumba), burnt (quema) and then let to rest for a prolonged period of time, recently modernised to roza-tumba-pica (clear-burn-add organic matter) to prevent wildfires. 

In addition, hard labor requirements have pushed women to do less specialized and lower income jobs, and the lack of a local market has led to economic dependency on gathering and extraction centers, which are not always easily accessible and typically private. 

Even more, around half of oil palm production in the country was carried out by smallholder farmers in communal land, or ejidos, of less than 50 ha, which often exposed them to other impacts observed around the world: land concentration, foreignization and grabbing.

In 2018, the estimated revenue per hectare of oil palm was around MXN 38 (less than USD 2), but production was relatively profitable in places like southern Chiapas, where smallholder farmers are typically landowners and have created cooperatives and organizations that help them access governmental financial incentives.

Food Insecurity

So what kind of information, governmental policies and mechanisms would benefit smallholder oil palm producers, improve production, and limit social and environmental impacts?

Turns out that this was not a revolutionary question, and around the same time, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) was also trying to understand this. In 2022, FAO found that around 37% of the world’s land was dedicated to agriculture and over 80% of farms around the world were under two hectares (20,000m2) in size. Such smallholder farmers produced around 35% of the entire world’s food, despite occupying only around 12% of all agricultural land. 

The FAO highlighted the need for detailed data–Earth observations included– that helped understand regional differences in agricultural practices and production, so that policy-makers could design agricultural plans that aligned to the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs). These goals have the stated aim of bringing “peace and prosperity for people and the planet” by promoting sustainable production, improving the productivity and livelihood of smallholder farmers, addressing inequalities, and guaranteeing food security worldwide. 

The FAO’s data means that 35% of food was being grown in around 4.5% of the world’s land by 2022. Although this might sound like our dreams of food security are easy to achieve, we have to be careful with our steps ahead because there’s a limit to how much of the world’s land is suitable for agriculture. Developing some suitable land might carry severe social and environmental impacts, and not all current agricultural land will remain productive in the future due to climate change and impactful land use.

Elusive Answers

As our findings proved the importance of carrying out the independent monitoring of this crop’s expansion, we decided to continue gathering and analyzing data to verify some impacts reported by multiple independent organizations. This way, in 2023, OBSAM published a second mapping with data from 2016 to 2022 and created a publicly available visualizing tool.

Our improved methodology detected 7,559 ha inside natural protected areas, mainly in the EBR and the Tuxtlas Biosphere Reserve in Veracruz, something that had already been reported by peasant organizations but not evidenced in existing mappings. 

This time, to address the lack of verification in situ, the mapping was compared against publicly available data for the Lacandón Jungle in Chiapas, prepared by the General Coordination of Corridors and Biological Resources (CGCRB) and oil palm producers in the municipalities of Benemérito de las Américas and Marqués de Comillas, showing a large number of errors in the CGCRB archive. Comparisons against official data on forest cover now showed oil palm driven deforestation in 7,317 ha.

OBSAM is now expecting to release a third mapping with data until 2023, to enable the comparison between the three different mappings and identify new, growing and abandoned plantations, which would allow us to understand the paths of deforestation and land use changes. 

We’ve also gathered infrastructure maps and contacted people investigating the corporate side of oil palm commercialization, so we hope to get closer to understanding its relationship with important infrastructure projects and which policies are benefiting which actors the most.

However, many questions remained unsolved and to analyze all strategic crops and offer alternatives to oil palm production we would need to develop closer ties with people in communities located in the vicinity of oil palm plantations, to understand agricultural practices and challenges, develop participatory mapping tools for verification of satellite analysis and identify other datasets to capture what is meaningful and desirable by people on the ground. 

It is still unclear which existing agricultural practices and policies are benefiting smallholder farmers the most, but supermarkets continue to have more and more products containing palm oil derived products, so somebody must be making big profits and we would prefer it if it was them.

*If you want to support our work, or if you’re doing something similar and you want to share your struggles with someone in the same boat, full access to OBSAM mappings is granted under request. We are a group of people addressing data-access inequalities, and supporting smallholder farmers, academic research, and non-commercial enterprises. You can think of this as positive action in land observations and policy-making.

The post Deforestation, Data Gaps, and Small Farmers: Mapping the True Costs of Mexico’s Palm Oil appeared first on Untold.

Since 2013, Albania has been governed by the Socialist Party under Rama, who secured a fourth consecutive term in 2025. His leadership has been marked by strong executive power and centralized decision-making. At the same time, civil society groups and international organizations have raised concerns about democratic standards, including pressure on independent media and political influence over state institutions. According to Transparency International, Albania continues to struggle with corruption, ranking 91st globally in 2025 and relatively low compared to other European countries.

Against the tide

More than two years have passed since the genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza began. This first live-streamed genocide has sparked widespread popular support for Gaza, particularly in Western European countries. While academic, cultural, and tourist engagements with Israel are increasingly viewed as ethically and morally corrupt, the Albanian government has pursued the opposite trajectory. Instead of distancing itself from Israel, Albania has deepened its ties. 

Albania is cultivating closer political and economic relations, signing new bilateral agreements, and aligning itself with Israeli interests across a wide spectrum, including defense, cybersecurity, culture, and finance. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Edi Rama, now in his fourth consecutive term, this trajectory appears undeterred and indifferent to both the immense civilian suffering in Gaza and the growing pro-Palestinian sentiment within Albania.

Against the backdrop of the International Court of Justice’s assessment that a plausible case for genocide exists in Gaza, many governments have grown increasingly cautious about the optics and ethics of (openly) deepening ties with Israel. Some have recalled ambassadors, suspended arms exports, or quietly shelved bilateral agreements. Others, such as Ireland, Norway, Spain, Canada, UK, Australia and France issued formal recognitions for the state of Palestine. 

Albania has charted a strikingly different course. Not only has it continued to expand cooperation with Israel across multiple domains, but it has done so openly and without hesitation. Moreover, it has treated these partnerships as achievements to be celebrated rather than associations with a state apparatus suspected on charges of genocide with its most senior leader warranted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. 

To understand Albania’s current relations with Israel and Palestine, it is helpful to consider the long history of Albanian foreign policy. As a small, economically weak country, Albania has often aligned itself with more powerful states to protect its interests.

Making sense of an unusually close relationship 

Albania gained independence in 1912 after five centuries of Ottoman rule. From 1925 to 1939, the country was ruled by President, later King, Zog. During this time, the country became an unexpected refuge for Jews. This period has even been described as “a golden era” for Jews in Albania. Beginning in 1933, Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany and Austria began arriving, many using Albania as a temporary stop on their way to the United States or Latin America. 

The Albanian Embassy in Berlin continued to issue visas until late 1938, and King Zog personally supported efforts to protect Jewish refugees. As a result, hundreds, possibly thousands, of Jews passed through Albania before 1939.

The situation changed when Italy invaded Albania in 1939. Emigration became difficult, leaving many Jews unable to leave the country. They remained relatively safe under Italian rule until 1943, when Nazi Germany took control. Even then, Albanian authorities refused the Germans’ demands for lists of Jews. Many Jews were sheltered by officials and ordinary citizens alike. 

Albania was the only European country that had more Jews after World War II than before it. After the war, about half of the Jewish population—around 300 people—left for Israel or other countries. The rest were not permitted to leave and remained in Albania until the communist regime collapsed in 1991. 

When Albania stood with Palestine

In 1949, Albania officially recognized Israel, partly because it agreed with the Soviet view that Israel could weaken British influence in West Asia. However, this did not lead to full diplomatic relations. From 1955 to 1967, Albania ignored Israel’s repeated attempts to establish diplomatic relations, though it maintained contact with the Israeli Communist Party (MAKI). 

Following events such as the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the Six-Day War in 1967, Albania adopted an anti-Israel stance. The country’s leaders portrayed Israel as a tool of imperialist Western powers, particularly the United States.

At the same time, Albania’s communist leader, Enver Hoxha, aligned the country with the Palestinian cause, viewing it as part of a broader anti-imperialist struggle. Albanian leaders viewed Palestine as resisting what they saw as an “imperialist proxy” in Israel. In turn, the PLO’s alliance with Albania was based on anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics. 

Relations between Albania and Palestinian groups began in 1967 and were influenced in part by shared ties with China. Albania eventually recognized Fatah, partly because of its international profile and its critical stance toward both the United States and the Soviet Union.

However, relations became strained after the 1972 Munich Olympic attack, which Albania condemned as detrimental to the Palestinian cause. As Fatah developed closer ties with the Soviet Union, Albania became suspicious of the Soviet influence within the Palestinian movement. Although the PLO continued to seek closer ties, including opening an office in Tirana, Albania remained cautious. 

In the early 1980s, relations depended largely on Albania’s broader West Asia strategy and the PLO’s relationship with the Soviet Union. Following Hoxha’s death in 1985, his successor, Ramiz Alia, introduced a more flexible foreign policy, enabling closer international engagement. During this period, a PLO embassy was finally established in Tirana.

A wall fallen, a map redrawn

A few years later, following the collapse of communism, Albania shifted its focus toward the West and established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1991. That same year, most of the remaining Jewish population moved to Israel. 

Under the new Democratic Party government, Albania initially reduced its ties with the PLO. However, after joining the Organization of the Islamic Conference, now known as the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation, in 1994, Albania renewed relations with Arab countries. In 1996, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat visited Albania, even as it continued to strengthen its relationship with Israel. In 1998, Albania opened its embassy in Tel Aviv.

Today, Albania recognizes the Palestinian Authority and supports a two-state solution. However, in 2011, Prime Minister Sali Berisha opposed Palestine’s bid for full UN membership, arguing that a negotiated agreement with Israel was preferable.

During his visit to Israel that same year, Berisha emphasized the historical connections between Albanians and Jews, and voiced his concerns about regional security, especially regarding Iran’s nuclear program. Israel opened its embassy in Tirana in 2012.

Deals, drones, and abstentions

Over the past two years, Albania and Israel have signed numerous agreements, covering sectors such as agriculture, education, energy, culture, tourism, defense, and drone technology. Trade between the two countries has also grown quickly. According to Albania’s Institute of Statistics, Israeli exports to Albania increased by over 150% between May 2023 and May 2024.

Israeli investment in Albania is expanding, especially in finance. In early 2025, reports indicated that investors associated with Israel’s One Zero Digital Bank were considering entering the Albanian banking market. Later that year, JET Bank, the country’s first fully digital bank, was established and is owned by British-Israeli businessman Idan Avishai. Other figures of Israeli origin in its leadership include Oliver Hemmer and Rami Solomon.

Meanwhile, Albania has come under scrutiny from human rights researchers. Reports tracking global fuel shipments to Israel during the war in Gaza list Albania as one of 11 countries supplying fuel. These exports are officially presented as commercial, not military. 

However, critics point out that fuel is essential for military operations, including for vehicles and aircraft. According to international humanitarian and criminal law, states and private actors are expected to ensure that their activities do not directly or indirectly contribute, to serious human rights violations, including genocide.

There has also been an increase in military cooperation between Albania and Israel. In late 2025, Albania signed a multimillion-euro arms deal with Israeli defense companies, including Elbit Systems. The agreement includes artillery systems, mortars, and tactical drones, as well as plans to develop domestic production in partnership with KAYO, Albania’s state-owned company. 

Since June 2023, the two countries have officially cooperated in cybersecurity and training, building on the assistance Israel offered Albania following the Iranian cyberattack in July 2022, which targeted Albanian government digital services and websites. 

On 12 May 2026 the Albania-Israel Summit was held in Tirana, for ‘strengthening cooperation in innovation, technology and cybersecurity’ and brought together 40 Israeli companies. Also in May 2026, Elbit registered its Albanian branch with the National Business Center, which will carry out the same activity as in Israel. Earlier in 2025, Elbit and KAYO agreed to reopen the Albanian aviation academy to train military and civilian pilots. 

Political ties have deepened as well. In November 2025, Albania established an “Israel Allies Caucus” in its parliament as part of an international network linked to the Israel Allies Foundation. The group is co-chaired by representatives from both major parties, reflecting broad political support for closer relations with Israel. Israeli sources described the initiative as an example of “faith-based diplomacy,” citing Albania’s history of protecting Jews during World War II as the basis for this relationship.

Between 2022 and 2023, Albania served as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. During this period, Albania’s position on Gaza received significant attention. In October and December of 2023, the UN General Assembly voted on resolutions calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. Albania abstained from voting on both resolutions. 

This pattern continued into 2024 and 2025. Albania abstained from several key votes, including those on ending Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, advancing Palestine’s status at the UN, and a French-Saudi initiative outlining a pathway to Palestinian statehood.

The price of belonging

Albania’s growing alignment with Israel is part of a broader foreign policy pattern. Since the fall of communism in 1991, Albania has positioned itself as a close ally of Western powers. The country has sought NATO membership, achieved in 2009, as well as European Union integration and strong ties with the United States. Closer relations with Israel fit within this strategy. Some analysts argue that strengthening ties with Israel is also a way of strengthening connections with Washington.

This approach was further illustrated in February 2026 when Albania joined four other countries in committing troops to an international security force for Gaza. The initiative is part of a new organization, the “Board of Peace,” which is backed by U.S. President Donald Trump. The organization focuses on post-war governance in Gaza. Its charter was signed at the World Economic Forum in Davos and was later tied to the UN Security Council Resolution 2803 as part of the Gaza Plan. However, its structure has raised questions. Trump holds a lifetime leadership role with veto power, and permanent membership requires a $1 billion contribution. Critics argue that this “pay-to-play” model is unusual for a peace initiative and reflects U.S. political and economic interests.

Prime Minister Rama’s policies highlight a long-standing feature of Albanian foreign policy: close alignment with powerful Western states, sometimes at the expense of independent decision-making or consistent application of international law. High-profile economic deals reinforce concerns about this approach. For example, Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Donald Trump, is leading a $1.4 billion luxury resort project on Sazan Island. Approved with limited public debate, the project aims to transform a former military base into a high-end tourism destination, according to reporting by The New York Times. Critics argue that such projects, coupled with Albania’s pro-Israel stance as a predominantly Muslim country, serve to whitewash and boost Israel’s international image while obscuring its domestic governance issues.

Rewarded for loyalty

In September 2024, Israeli President Isaac Herzog became the first Israeli head of state to visit Albania. He was warmly welcomed by Prime Minister Edi Rama and senior officials. The visit marked a clear step forward in strengthening ties between the two countries. Some analysts argue that such visits also serve Israel’s broader goal of achieving international legitimacy, particularly in regions like Southeast Europe. According to Rexhepi “[t]he Israeli president is travelling to Europe’s peripheries to exert legitimacy, showcasing at home that their leaders can still travel abroad.” Others note that engaging with a Muslim-majority country like Albania helps Israel project a more favorable image in the wider Muslim world.

Albania’s diplomatic positioning at the UN has coincided with closer political ties to Israel. In April 2025, Prime Minister Edi Rama received Israel’s Presidential Medal of Honor. He was praised for his “moral clarity” and steadfast support of Israel during what President Isaac Herzog called “our darkest hour.” This was a reference to the October 7 Hamas attack and the ensuing war. Rama has repeatedly condemned Hamas in public statements, at times comparing the group to the Nazis, and arguing that peace is not possible while Hamas remains active.

Cooperation has also expanded at the ministerial level. In October 2025, Albania’s foreign minister visited Israel, and both countries signed agreements to strengthen cooperation in diplomacy and culture. These agreements include training opportunities for young Albanian diplomats. The visit received significant publicity on social and mainstream media platforms, including stops at Holocaust memorial sites and locations associated with the October 2023 attacks. However, critics point out the absence of public statements addressing the high number of Palestinian civilians killed by Israel.

On the road to Brussels

For countries like Albania, whose EU membership bid remains contingent on goodwill from Brussels and Washington, endorsing, or at minimum not challenging Israeli actions serves as a form of political currency. Albania’s economic, political, and diplomatic moves point to a wider foreign policy strategy characterized by coloniality by proxy. 

This is most clearly manifested through Albania’s absurd participation in the deeply problematic “Board of Peace,” which reflects its willingness to engage in frameworks shaped by larger powers. It also reflects a deeper, often implicit expectation embedded in the architecture of European integration: that aspiring members on the periphery must demonstrate their worthiness through institutional reforms, economic benchmarks, and geopolitical alignment with core Western powers. 

Scholars such as Piro Rexhepi argue that countries in the Balkans, shaped by a history of external imperial domination — from the Ottoman Empire to European colonial interventions — often seek security and recognition by aligning with dominant powers and navigating contemporary global hierarchies. For countries on the political fringes of the “core West,” access to the Western-backed liberal order is also conditioned by silence, oblivion, or, at worst, complicity in the genocide in Gaza. 

In this context, Albania is not merely an eager partner of Israel. It is also performing the role that Western geopolitical expectations have prescribed for it. In this role, Palestinian suffering is not treated as a moral emergency demanding a response. Rather, it is treated as an inconvenient variable to be managed, minimized, and ultimately ignored on the road to Brussels.

The post Coloniality by proxy: Albania’s road to Brussels runs through Tel Aviv appeared first on Untold.

OK.

‘No creativity, please, no wordart, or graphics, don’t stand out, unreadable.’ 

OK.

‘Don’t clutter your CV with photos, tables, columns, headers, or footers, unreadable.’ 

OK.

How many of these little nuggets have you read or heard about when the topic of résumés comes up? I heard them all and many, many more – from ‘experts’ and fellow job seekers alike. Everyone wants that edge, but not too edgy. Clarity, but using a specific format. Showcasing you, but … there’s always a but.

While researching this topic, I had my résumé open the whole time to see if it stood the test. It never did. I’d rephrase and rewrite sections according to what I read. Only to revert back or make new changes. Each article gives hope of the ‘perfect formula’ to pass the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and get the attention of the human on the other side.

But here’s where it gets interesting – there’s no unified ATS that all companies use. No. Each company uses a different system, with its own unique algorithms. And you, dear applicant,  need to figure out which ATS the company uses so you can tailor your résumé to pass it.

How about that for a plot twist.

ATS in Action

The way ATS works is simple: it reads résumés by electronically analyzing (parsing) the relevant information, like name, education, and experience, then sorts them for the recruiter in a searchable format. 

One of its common features is keyword search – the system looks for specific words already mentioned in the job description, e.g. a specific number of years’ experience, certain skills, or a location. It also tracks candidates through the whole process, from application to interview results, and saves their information even if they were not selected, for future opportunities.

Beyond screening, it also handles job postings, interview scheduling, compliance reporting, and candidate notifications – managing the entire hiring workflow from start to finish. The system is built to handle large numbers of résumés, which is why it’s widely used to streamline the hiring process and free up time and resources.

A Timeline

The hiring process was not as sophisticated as it is now. Companies sent job postings to newspapers, you read the ad and sent your résumé by post or in person, recruiters waded through the lot and chose the most suitable candidates and invited them – by mail or by phone – for an interview. 

Too slow. Something had to be done to speed things up. Enter ATS. 

In the 1970s, it was just basic data entry with limited reporting capabilities. The 1980s saw added features like résumé parsing for faster sorting and analysis. The drawback was that it was expensive and difficult to use, which made it only implemented by large enterprises.

With the emergence of the internet in the 1990s, job postings and applications moved online. The system saw more advanced algorithms like candidate evaluation and ranking.

From the 2010s onwards, the Cloud enabled smaller companies to use ATS due to scalable and flexible subscription payments. The system’s analytics and reporting capabilities became more advanced, tracking criteria like cost per hire and time to fill. As mobile technology evolved, more and more candidates began using their mobile devices and social media accounts to apply.

When it comes to integrating AI, ATS is no exception – many providers have already built it into their products. There are even predictions that the future might even bring virtual reality and augmented reality technologies that could change the interview process completely.

ATS as a Business

The business of ATS software is booming. 

A 2025 report shows that the global ATS market was worth $2.5 billion in 2024 – a 12.3% jump from 2023. The top ten vendors alone controlled over 50% of that market, led by iCIMS at 10%, followed by Oracle, Workday, and Greenhouse Software. Annual growth among the top vendors was sharp: in one year, Workday grew 15.3% and Greenhouse 13.2%.

Reading the profiles of these leading vendors, one thing is very clear – AI is the star of their products. iCIMS has expanded its AI footprint with conversational tools and assessment features, even piloting autonomous AI Agents to handle sourcing and interview tasks. 

Oracle integrates generative AI into its Recruiting Cloud, using embedded co-pilots for job description optimization and candidate ranking. Workday is building a multi-agent ecosystem through its Illuminate system. Greenhouse is evolving into an agent-oriented platform, enabling third-party conversational AI to autonomously screen and schedule interviews.

Together, these plans paint a picture of ATS companies positioning AI as the backbone of the entire hiring process – shifting routine tasks to automation, with more on the way.

A 2026 report by 360 Research Reports puts the market at nearly $5 billion and is projected to reach $13 billion by 2035. As of 2025, 94% of Fortune 500 companies use an ATS, and 78% of large enterprises have one built into their hiring process. Small and medium businesses are not far behind – 62% have adopted cloud-based platforms. AI-powered screening tools grew 46% year-over-year, and demand for mobile-friendly and analytics-driven systems has grown 59% since 2022. In the new analysis, Workday now holds 14% of global market share, while Oracle holds 12%.

Two things stood out in the 360 report key findings: a ‘56% rise in AI-driven candidate scoring and predictive analytics tools’, and ‘47% of new product launches focusing on AI, machine learning, and mobile optimization.’

What this means is that the AI-powered ATS train didn’t just leave the station, it’s almost at its destination. The demand for it is growing faster than you can say ‘bias.’ Companies implementing it will not look back now, even with four out of ten – according to the same report – saying they struggle with integrating and migrating data from older HR systems. 

AI in hiring is here to stay.

Built on Broken Data

The study by Douglas Guilbeault and colleagues reveals how generative AI like ChatGPT perpetuates gender and age bias in hiring. When prompted to create over 34,500 résumés for 54 jobs using typical male or female names, ChatGPT portrayed women as younger and with less work experience than men.

When asked to evaluate the same résumés, the AI ranked older men highest in quality, putting older women and younger applicants at a disadvantage – the same groups that already face discrimination in the real world. This happens because the model draws from internet data filled with stereotypes (e.g., men are better at ‘fixing things’ and therefore suited for roles like construction) – amplifying societal biases rather than reflecting objective reality.

Guilbeault observes that AI companies are aware of the problem. But their fix is to add filters to block the most obviously biased outputs. He argues that this barely scratches the surface – it misses subtler biases like the age and gender gaps the study found. Real progress means tackling bias at the core of how these models are built, not patching after the fact. Until then, his advice is simple: be cautious. These tools can make you believe the issue of bias is resolved when it’s really not.

Another study tested several LLMs from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta by having them score over 360,000 randomized résumés with different gender and racial identities. Compared with equally qualified White men, most models gave higher scores to female candidates (both Black and White) but lower scores to Black male candidates. These differences translate into real hiring impacts: women would have a higher chance of being selected, while Black men faced reduced odds.

Together, the two studies show that AI bias in hiring cannot be solved with patchwork fixes. It shows up in how résumés are generated, how they’re scored, and whose careers pay the price. With these inherent biases baked into the data, why do we expect AI-powered ATS to be fair in résumé screening?

Gaming the System

Writing a résumé should be an easy task – you put in the basic information an employer needs to consider you for a job, right? Wrong. It’s more than that, much more. I thought I knew a thing or two – I’ve had one for years. But after a career break, getting back into the job market, writing my résumé was anything but easy.

There is so much advice out there on how to write one, so I won’t repeat it here. What I want to focus on is something most of that advice misses – it’s not the usual suspects. Many websites advertise ATS-friendly templates complete with checker and scorer services, and if it doesn’t meet the minimum score, you need to rewrite it. Fine, I can live with that. What I’m not fine with is having to look for which ATS the company is using to tailor my résumé according to its algorithms.

For a simple experiment, I tried a LinkedIn job search, clicked on the ‘Apply’ button – not ‘Easy Apply’ – and it took me to the original website for the job. The platform the job was sourced from uses iCIMS. It was easy to see, I found it at the bottom of the page: ‘Powered by iCIMS.’ It’s also in the URL: ‘nameofplatform.icims.com/jobs/’

‘What do I do with that info?’
Easy, you google ‘how to optimize résumés for iCIMS’, which will give you many articles that try to explain how that specific system works. For example, it prefers simple fonts – Arial, Calibri, Times New Roman – and verbatim keywords from the job posting. This doesn’t just work for iCIMS, but for Workday, Oracle, and others. And if you can’t find the ATS yourself, Jobscan – for a fee – can do that with simple steps and give you optimization tips as well.

Is that something you needed to know? Absolutely, yes.
Will it make job searching easier for you? A resounding no.

Being a minimalist, I thought since my résumé has the basics, what more would an employer need? But I was mistaken. It’s the ATS I need to get past to reach the actual human. I hope you think of this new information as intel, not extra work.

But sometimes job candidates take it too far. 

I recently read about how Amazon is banning job seekers from using AI tools during interviews. Given the volume of candidates it receives, the company issued a set of guidelines to its internal recruiters to create ‘a fair and transparent recruitment process.’ Unless explicitly permitted, applicants may be disqualified if they used AI tools during the interview.

The problem became so widespread that Amazon shared tips on common signs the applicant is using an AI tool. Sometimes candidates sound as if they are reading instead of speaking naturally, even correcting themselves when they misread a word. Their eyes may follow text or drift away rather than focusing on the conversation. They might give confident answers that don’t directly address the question, or appear distracted and confused when reacting to AI‑generated outputs that don’t make sense.

And honestly? That’s only fair. You already have a foot in the door – showing your true self and answering naturally is the right way to go.

That said, and as a fellow traveler down the same road, I completely understand. Each step – learning about the job, tailoring your résumé, waiting for a response, and finally getting the ‘we invite you for an interview’ email – all that takes its toll, and you want the edge, any edge to ace that interview.

But if you’re considering using AI at that specific stage, think about it. What if it’s just a chat to tell you about the company and field your questions? What if it’s a work test? Who’ll be doing the actual work if not you? 

What if the company uses a platform like HireVue? Instead of a standard interview, candidates complete short game-based tasks designed to measure things like pattern recognition, working memory, and problem-solving. You could be tasked with performing actual job scenarios to test whether you can do the work, not just talk about it. What then?

The Human Cost

When hiring systems shut out qualified people, the economic consequences go far beyond the individual. Historically marginalized communities, including women and people with ethnic backgrounds, end up missing out on jobs – meaning fewer chances to grow in a career, build stability, or move toward long‑term security. 

Over time, this kind of exclusion widens existing wealth gaps and keeps certain groups stuck in cycles of underemployment and limited opportunity. And because well‑paid jobs often come with benefits like health insurance and retirement plans, being pushed out of those deepens inequalities even further.

Disclaimer: The following might be sensitive for some. If you find that it resonates with you to the point of disrupting your daily life, please, seek professional help.

Taking the consequences a step inward to what it does to the person on the receiving end – a psychological phenomenon called ‘job rejection fatigue.’ It’s the ‘emotional and mental exhaustion that builds up from receiving repeated job rejections over time.’ This doesn’t happen from one email – it’s the compound effect of several disappointments. It affects not just your confidence but also your health and social relations. 

But how does it compare to the stress that naturally comes from job searching? The simple answer: they’re two different beasts. When you’re looking for a job, you’re evaluating everything – from the role itself, to how many applicants, to your fit, to the company, etc. The uncertainty of the process causes stress. Job rejection fatigue is very specific to those rejection emails. Every single one piles it on till you reach a point when you fear opening the email to read the verdict.

The common advice you hear in this situation is ‘don’t take it personally.’ It doesn’t work and here’s why. The phenomenon is deeply connected to evolution: when the early human was rejected from the tribe/group/clan, it meant potential death. Those who took it ‘seriously’ survived, and you’re their descendant. So, it’s only an instinctive response – feeling the weight of it the way you do.

Here are the common signs to watch out for:

Emotional Symptoms: decreased motivation to apply, anxiety before opening emails, doubting your qualifications or career choices.

Behavioural Changes: reduced application quality, delaying search tasks, avoiding networking events, or withdrawing from social gatherings.

Physical Symptoms: changes in sleep patterns or in appetite, increased headaches, muscle tension, or fatigue even after getting rest.

If ignored, it might affect your life in the long run:

Relationship Strain: feeling irritable, withdrawn, volatile, or negative about your prospects can affect the people in your circle.

Career Stagnation: ‘settling’ for a role that doesn’t align with your qualifications or goals, and accepting terms without negotiating for salary or benefits.

Long-Term Confidence Issues: continued anxiety even after landing a job, imposter syndrome – doubting your abilities even when you’ve clearly earned your place – not pursuing better opportunities, nor building connections that might lead to better prospects.

If caught early, job rejection fatigue is manageable, here’s how:

Start with your mindset: think of every ‘no’ not as a judgment on who you are, but as a sign that it was the wrong fit. 

Change your tactics: instead of exhausting yourself with many applications, focus on a few thoughtful ones. This way you stay connected to your intentions and goals. 

Practice mindfulness: have small rituals to process disappointment – take a walk or do breathing exercises, just set aside some time for your body to recover. 

Take stock of how far you’ve come: be it skills, clarity, or resilience – you haven’t been standing still. It’s just a dry spell not a failure.

You need to always remind yourself that there’s more to you than a job seeker – you have your routines, your people, your hobbies, the parts of your life that shine despite someone else’s decision. Through all of it, give yourself grace; so much of hiring is outside your control, and the effort you’re making is already evidence of what you’re made of.

Fighting Back

One of the most famous cases is Derek Mobley v. Workday, Inc. 

In 2023, Mobley sued Workday alleging its AI tools discriminated against him based on race, age, and disability. The case was first dismissed because Workday was classified as an employment agency, but was later accepted in 2024 after a federal judge ruled that the company had a role in the decision‑making process by using workforce data from its customers’ companies to train its AI without accounting for the bias already present in that data.

In May 2025, a California district judge certified the case as a collective action suit – meaning anyone affected by the platform’s AI decisions could join. By July 2025, the case expanded to include individuals affected by HiredScore, an AI tool used by Workday customers to score, sort, rank, and screen applicants. The court also ordered the company to produce a list of their customers.

A more recent case was filed in California by job applicants Erin Kistler and Sruti Bhaumik against Eightfold – an AI-hiring platform – in January 2026. The platform works by assessing applicants and predicting whether they’d be a ‘good fit’ for a job based on résumé and job listing data.

According to the lawsuit, Eightfold builds profiles on job seekers that go beyond listing their qualifications. They assign personality labels, such as ‘team player’, rank the quality of their education, and predict where their career is headed. It’s accused of doing so by collecting this data without the applicants’ knowledge, consent, or the chance to correct any mistakes.

Kistler and Bhaumik use an already existing law – the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). They argue that Eightfold’s profiles function just like credit reports: sensitive data, collected and used to make decisions about people’s futures. FCRA makes sure that sensitive information collected by credit bureaus and similar agencies is only shared with people who have a legitimate reason to see it. It also requires companies to investigate disputes and to tell consumers if a credit, insurance, or job decision goes against them because of what’s in their report.

At the time of writing, a ruling hasn’t been issued for either case.

For many, lawsuits are a last resort – who wants the stress, the hassle, and the cost of a long litigation process? But sometimes it’s the only way to get any justice at all. 

If successful, those involved could get some closure. More importantly, job hiring platforms would be pushed to put their house in order – auditing their tools and cleaning up biased training data before it hurts someone’s future. 

‘…, There’s a Way’

In 2021, Dr. Sandra Wachter, professor of technology and regulation at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, developed a bias test – the Conditional Demographic Disparity (CDD). It’s designed to reveal when one group is rejected more often than it is accepted.

Here’s what it would look like in hiring: we have equal numbers of men and women applying for the same job. Now think of their applications falling into two piles – the rejected pile and the hired pile. If women keep landing in the rejected pile more than the hired pile, while the opposite happens to men, something is clearly wrong. That imbalance is what the test flags as demographic disparity. The group losing out is marked as ‘disfavored,’ while the group benefiting is marked as ‘favored.’ The data simply speaks for itself.

A strong example of how effective this test can be comes from a 2024 audit in the Netherlands. Investigators found that the Education Executive Agency (DUO) was unfairly flagging students with non‑European migration backgrounds for extra checks, leading to indirect discrimination. The issue was serious enough that it was sent to the Dutch Parliament, and the minister for Education, Culture and Science issued a formal apology once the findings were published.

Wachter’s CDD has already proven it works. The real question is why it hasn’t been widely adopted – it’s in companies’ best interest to fill positions with suitable candidates the first time around, without waiting for a lawsuit to force the issue.

Another solution comes from a study where participants were given AI-generated résumés with White, Asian, Black, or Latino-sounding names or other indicators of race, and asked to recommend who should be invited for an interview.

The results show that when people made hiring choices alongside AI recommendations, they often mirrored the system’s biases. With fair suggestions, participants chose fairly – but when the AI displayed moderate bias, people followed it almost completely. Even under severe bias, they still followed the AI’s lead about 90% of the time.

The researchers concluded that human decision-makers tend to trust AI guidance unless the bias is very obvious, and propose a solution: the implicit association test – a psychological tool used to reveal hidden or subconscious biases people may not realize they have. According to the study, biased decisions dropped by 13% after taking it. They recommended adding such training alongside educating recruiters about AI’s limits as a way to reduce hiring bias.

There are also recommendations for companies to better streamline hiring without compromising transparency or efficiency. The frustration of job seekers who spend six to twelve months looking might make some turn to litigation, which could be incentive enough for hiring teams to take staff training for better practices more seriously.

Companies should optimize their tools for fairness and not just efficiency by reevaluating historical data the AIs are trained on – it might be perpetuating bias. The assessment and predictive tools meant to test the applicant’s ‘cultural fit’ with a prospective employer might discriminate against certain demographic groups.

With the EU AI Act and California’s SB 53 (Transparency in Frontier AI Act) treating the use of AI in hiring as a ‘high‑risk’ activity, companies must now exercise stricter oversight throughout the process and meet compliance requirements – otherwise they risk facing severe legal consequences.

The bottom line for companies: audit current screening processes, check whether AI is independently making decisions, and ensure each step is fair and job-related. The goal is a system that catches and mitigates inevitable human mistakes – perfect hiring doesn’t exist.

When I read about these methods and recommendations for the first time, I put myself in the shoes of employers and thought implementing them might be difficult, expensive, or time-consuming. But then again, do companies really thrive on never-ending hiring rounds, turning away the best person for the job, negative reviews, or liability lawsuits? 

If not … 

Your move.

What’s ahead

Some problems just don’t have an easy fix – AI-powered ATS is shaping up to be one of them. The signs are there, the effects are becoming more visible every day, and the consequences are easy to predict. ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way.’ It’s the will that is missing.

In some cultures including my own, work is not just about having an income – it’s tied to the self-respect and social standing that come from an honest day’s work. Being unemployed and actively looking should not be an extra burden on top of the demand of making ends meet. It cannot turn into a game of charades: I’ll pretend to apply to a human, a human will pretend to hire, and AI is right in the middle making all the decisions.

How about making life easier for everyone by dropping all pretenses. No one is buying it anymore. All those webinars, podcasts, articles, and advice might be helpful if the system were open and its decisions understood. Not knowing why you were rejected is frustrating enough. Getting a rejection email that lists possible reasons and you pick which one applies – that’s not transparency, that’s busywork.

Looking for an edge in the job market should come from your qualifications, potential, talents, skills, and experience, not from fixing a résumé with the right fonts and keywords so an AI can read it – that’s not building a career, that’s choosing wallpaper.

Let it stop with us. 

Make the next person sending out applications feel that they’ll be evaluated for their achievements. That the process is fair and the decisions explainable. That the barriers are not invisible. That the system actually works.

The post Applicant Tracking Systems: The AI That Broke Hiring appeared first on Untold.

***

Sometime in the 1960s, the famous zajjal (Lebanese folk poet) Zein Shu’ayb (1922 – 2005) from south Lebanon performed with his troupe Zaghloul al-Damour, a poetic duel that was filmed and broadcast on Lebanese television. 

The recording survived and decades later, like many of Zein’s performances, it resurfaced on YouTube and was remixed on hip-hop and rap beats, circulating again in new videos. Listening to it today, the rhythm feels familiar to us, almost like a rap song, with its fast delivery, verbal challenge and repeated lines. Yet Zein Shu’ayb’s words echo a much older poetic tradition, which was performed in village gatherings before large mass audiences. 

In these various remixes, vernacular poetry that existed for centuries circulate easily on digital media, showing how public storytelling changes form without disappearing. Before hashtags and social media, history in the Arab world was already performed, debated and shared in public through voices like these.

History does not live in archives or behind campus walls. It is a public good — accessible, open and shared. It is an active and living force involving personal and communal practices that extend beyond researchers and university professors. This is the essence of “public history,” which brings the past into our streets and digital spaces.

Today, the accessibility and circulation of information define our age. It lives in coffee shops and museums, on theatre stages and YouTube channels, in family albums and neighbourhood archives. A growing popular interest in the past has given rise to thousands of podcasts and social media channels each year. As digital technologies make it easier to share interpretations of history, it becomes increasingly important to reflect on how historical knowledge is produced and communicated to wider audiences.

In the Arabic speaking world, these practices long predate the term “public history.” Moving between contemporary examples and older traditions, from the Hakawati to Zajal and Qawl, communities have transmitted memory, identity and political commentary through public performance for centuries. What is today described as “public history” is, in many ways, a continuation of these older traditions — now unfolding in digital and institutional spaces as well revealing how deeply rooted these practices are in the region.

Making History (More) Public 

The term “public history” emerged in the United States in the 1970s, when Robert (Bob) Kelley, a historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara, used it to describe a new training programme aimed at expanding career opportunities beyond formal education. Over time, the term came to refer more broadly to historical activities conducted outside universities, including curated exhibitions, walking tours and other forms of engagement.

Although initially connected to Western networks in the US, Canada, Australia and Europe, public history has become increasingly international and diverse. The popularisation of the term in the Western world does not mean that the practice originated there. Communities across the Global South have long engaged in forms of public history. More recently, these practices have been formalised through national associations such as the Rede Brasileira de História Pública (2012), the Italian Association for Public History (2017) and the Japanese Association of Public History (2018).

Defining public history is not straightforward. It can take different meanings in different contexts. At its core, however, it seeks to make historical narratives and heritage more accessible while encouraging communities to participate in shaping them through family archives, local initiatives and collective practices.

History in the Public Space 

Initially understood as history produced outside academia, public history often takes place in cultural institutions such as libraries and museums. When these institutions focus on historical topics, their outreach and engagement activities become forms of public history.

History museums have long been part of the cultural fabric of the Arab world. The Egyptian Museum (founded in 1858) and the National Museum in Lebanon (founded in 1942) can be seen as early institutional examples of public history through their public programming.

More recent initiatives are also accessible online, including the Women and Memory Forum in Egypt (since 1995) and the Palestinian Museum (since 2018). Public history can also be displayed and performed in theatres, on walls and in streets through guided tours and festivals. In its diverse forms, it creates spaces that connect society with material culture and heritage.

Communicating with the Public 

Making history public means communicating it beyond specialist audiences, reaching those who may not engage with academic books or research.

Public history employs a wide range of media, including exhibitions, documentary films, guided tours, board games, comics, graphic novels, websites and newspapers. With the rise of digital technologies, it has expanded into social media, podcasts and online collections.

In the Arab world, examples include the Qatar National Library’s podcast series and the community archiving initiative Keys to Palestine. Individual initiatives also contribute to this landscape, such as Charles Al Hayek’s Heritage and Roots channel and his LBCI television programme “بقصة لبنان” (“Lebanon in a Story”), now in its fifth season with co-presenter Yazbek Wehbe.

YouTube channels and podcasts have become particularly prominent platforms. The Al Jazeera+ series Al Jahbaz features content creator Bisher Najjar re-enacting moments from the history of the Greater Syria region through performance and satire, with references listed in each video description.

As with cultural and media institutions more broadly, political agendas can influence which historical narratives are curated and how they are presented to the public.

Public Participation 

Public history is by definition a collective process. Exhibitions, digital platforms and archives require time, skills and collaboration among curators, designers, educators and media professionals.

Some initiatives extend participation further through “co-creation,” involving members of the public in collecting and preserving objects, photographs and oral testimonies. Citizen committees may design and lead projects about their neighbourhoods or specific events.

In this way, public history can help restore agency and power to people. Rather than relying solely on national discourses constructed by states and authorities — which often marginalise certain communities — it may begin with smaller stories that complicate larger narratives.

One recent initiative in the Arab world is Shubra’s archive, developed in Cairo’s Shubra neighbourhood to document and share local history with its residents.

Many participatory initiatives rely on oral history. The American University of Beirut’s Ras Beirut project documents the history of a neighbourhood through residents’ voices. Other initiatives have recorded the social history of Palestine, including the Al Rowat storytelling platform, Nakba through oral history, and accounts of leading female figures, persecuted queer figures and political exiles. Some participatory projects operate “under the radar” to avoid external scrutiny or surveillance.

Oral history is often seen as a means of empowering marginalised and under-represented communities to influence and enrich official narratives. It also fosters critical engagement with contemporary social and political issues rooted in the past. The early Arab Nationalist Movement used the term tathqif to describe engagement with the public that combined education with political awareness.

An Ancient Practice 

Public history practices in Lebanon and the Levant can be traced back centuries, including mediaeval traditions and earlier Jahiliyya poetry that recorded and performed history within communities and at larger gatherings.

Three examples are particularly illustrative: the Hakawati, al-Zajal and al-Qawl.

The Hakawati is a storyteller who recounts tales from Arab heritage in coffee shops or open-air settings using vernacular Arabic. While traditionally male, women such as Shalabieh al Hakawatieh (Sally Shalabi) now also practise this art.

Similar traditions exist across the Arab world under different names, including Nabaṭī poetry in the Arabian Peninsula, Humayni poetry in Yemen, Malhūn in Morocco and Dubeit in Sudan. These traditions share features such as vernacular language, collective participation, historical transmission and public performance.

Al-Zajal, a Lebanese vernacular poetry tradition inscribed on UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List, is another example. One early documented case is attributed to Sulayman al-Ashluhi, a Christian monk from Akkar, who composed verses after the fall of Tripoli in 1289, recording the capture of the County of Tripoli (1102-1289), one of the Crusader states, by the Mamluks. In doing so, it recorded historical events in a form accessible to local audiences.

While al-Zajal refers specifically to the Lebanese folk poetry tradition, al-Qawl encompasses spoken word practices more broadly across the Arab world. Both traditions share several defining principles.

First is the use of vernacular language. Qawl is rarely written in classical, standardised Arabic, as its aim is to reach broad audiences, particularly in rural areas. It expresses local traditions and dialects, in contrast to the formal literacy often associated with urban centres. This gives Qawl a popular dimension and facilitates the transmission of knowledge in forms that resonate culturally and socially.

Second is the use of rhythmic stanzas and rhyme. All documented examples of Qawl employ this technique. As a means of publicly delivering knowledge, Qawl adopts strategies attentive to emotion and collective experience. Its musicality enhances memorability and echoes earlier literary traditions such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, Homeric poetry and Ugaritic texts, where rhythm supported oral transmission.

Closely connected to this is the central role of historical knowledge. History is a defining component of Qawl. Even when idealised, evocations of the past express identity, pride, community cohesion and socio-political satire. By embedding history in vernacular poetry, communities create local methods of transmitting memory from one generation to the next through public performance. Qawl has been used to record events, mark turbulent periods and commemorate political celebrations.

Finally, Qawl is defined by its public manifestation. Individuals or collectives perform as a troupe before large audiences, often in the form of poetic challenges accompanied by musical instruments. The practice promotes dialogue and acknowledges differences. Its verses may evoke tolerance and shared identity, but can also recount coercion and violence. Spontaneous, informal and emotionally charged, Qawl enables historical knowledge to be experienced collectively and retained across generations.

Through these vernacular traditions, history remains a shared and embodied practice — performed, contested and transmitted in public long before it was named as such.

Public History in Arabic 

Translating “public history” into Arabic is not straightforward. The term may be rendered as Tarikh Aam, but alternatives such as Mahali (local), Ahli (people’s) or Mujtama’i (community) capture different nuances.

The English expression combines both making history accessible and engaging in history with the public. Arabic allows more subtle distinctions between these dimensions. The verb تأريخ (to historicise) differs from the noun تاريخ (history) only by the addition of a hamza, reflecting the tension between history as inheritance and history as an active process.

If one wants to play with the Arabic language when translating the expression “public history” to reflect both its active and passive dimensions, one can simply add parentheses to the hamza, to show the possibility of both active historicization and the sharing of history in one word: 

تا)ء(ريخ 

As for the term “public” in Arabic, in the linguistic heritage of colloquial Levantine and broader Arabic-speaking lands, the term Ya ‘Ammi (literally “Oh kinsman”) is used to denote a sense of community. This also has common roots with the West Semitic “M” or “Am” (Canaanite, Hebrew, Phoenician), which denotes the idea of a group or people. As such, this mirrors some meanings associated with the term “public” in English. 

For other Arabic-speaking practitioners, the terms Ahli/Mahali (people’s/local) or Mujtama’i (community) feel more grounded in people’s everyday lives, in contrast with Āmm, which can also mean “general” and is not as commonly used in the Egyptian dialect and context, for instance. Ultimately, whether one opts for the more formal translation Tarikh Aam or decides to be more playful with the Arabic language, this article hopes to inspire more public conversations and discussions across Arabic-speaking communities. 

Why Public History? 

Many practices in the Arab world correspond to what is now termed “public history,” some dating back centuries. Using the term can help support and empower those engaged in these practices.

Public history reconnects scholars, archivists, curators, designers, podcasters, tour guides, heritage specialists and community groups who may otherwise remain separated by geography, discipline or institution. Rather than distinguishing between academic and non-academic, professional and amateur, it encourages collaboration to produce richer and more inclusive histories.

Finally, instead of distinguishing between academic and non-academic, professional and amateur, public history encourages universities, scholars and researchers to connect with local groups, communities and practitioners to produce a richer and more inclusive history.

It reminds us that history is not confined to the archive. It is shaped, performed and shared in public.

The post From Hakawati to Hashtags: Making History Public in the Arab World appeared first on Untold.

This was not merely a rhetorical flourish. It signaled the final abandonment of a diplomatic convention that had guided Indian prime ministers for decades: the practice of visiting both Israel and Palestine on the same trip. Every previous prime minister who traveled to Tel Aviv also made the journey to Ramallah, a tangible demonstration of India’s commitment to a two-state solution. Modi broke that tradition. His lone visit to Israel, without any stop in Palestine, cast serious doubt on whether New Delhi still supports the creation of a Palestinian state.

The implications of this shift have grown only starker since the war on Iran began. While the Indian government has issued tepid calls for restraint, it has offered condemnation neither for the killing of Iranian leaders nor of the unfolding catastrophe in Iran. This silence is particularly striking given the deep ties between the two countries. Iran, a fellow BRICS member, remains one of India’s largest trading partners and has offered crucial diplomatic support on Kashmir in international forums—standing with India against Pakistan when it mattered. Indian investment in Iran grew substantially throughout the 2010s, including the development of a strategic port that promised significant benefits for both economies.

Despite its deep investments in the relationship with Iran over decades, India’s unequivocal positioning with Israel and the United States in this war signals a meta-shift in its foreign policy—one increasingly guided by the BJP’s Hindu nationalist worldview. To understand the magnitude of this shift, we must first understand what Indian foreign policy was, and where it came from.

Idealist Foreign Policy

India’s foreign policy was shaped by the crucible of anticolonial struggle, and its contours were drawn long before independence was actually achieved. The first stirrings came as early as 1927, at the League Against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression in Brussels, where Indian leaders and activists played a pivotal role. 

During the Second World War, even as Indian leaders intensified their campaign against British rule, they never wavered in their commitment against antisemitism and fascism. When the Spanish Civil War erupted, Indian volunteers traveled thousands of miles to fight for the Republicans. Jawaharlal Nehru, who would become India’s first prime minister, raised funds in Britain and India to support the Republican war effort. 

At the very moment when Modi’s ideological predecessors were delivering speeches in the streets of Bombay cheering the persecution of Jews in Europe, Nehru was facilitating the arrival of Jewish refugees in India from Europe.

This idealism—forged in anti-imperial struggle and tempered by a commitment to human dignity—shaped independent India’s foreign policy from its inception. In the postwar world, divided between two hostile camps, India joined with other newly independent states in refusing to choose sides. The Bandung Conference of 1955 and the Belgrade Conference of 1961 gave birth to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which became the most powerful foreign policy doctrine in the decolonized world. India was not merely a participant but a principal architect, both of the movement itself and of its implementation.

Anticolonial Principles

Crucially, NAM was never the “pragmatic neutrality” its critics caricatured it as. It was an idealistic stance that firmly advocated for peace, nuclear disarmament, and decolonization. This was not abstract rhetoric but lived policy. India headed the international committee that brokered a ceasefire in the Korean War. It opposed the Israeli-French-British attack on Egypt over the nationalization of the Suez Canal. It condemned the Soviet invasion of Hungary. It stood against the Vietnam War. It played a mediating role in the Congo crisis. It refused all diplomatic recognition to apartheid South Africa.

The finest hour of Indian foreign policy, however, arrived in 1971. When civil war erupted in Pakistan following East Pakistan’s declaration of independence, India—then one of the poorest countries in the world—sheltered ten million refugees for nearly nine months. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi traveled across the globe, pleading for international attention to the crisis and the unfolding genocide in East Pakistan. When diplomacy failed and the threat of US intervention on behalf of its Pakistani ally loomed, the Indian army intervened alongside the Bangladeshi liberation forces. In a swift thirteen-day war, they broke the Pakistani military’s grip, and the new nation of Bangladesh was born.

But the truly remarkable feat was not the military victory—it was what came after. India withdrew its forces and left Bangladesh to its people and its chosen leaders. It made no attempt to occupy or annex its neighbor. At a moment when it could have pursued expansionist ambitions, it chose restraint. This was foreign policy as an anticolonial principle in action.

Sympathy for Palestine

India’s approach toward Israel-Palestine was not an exception to this foreign policy outlook—it was its logical extension. The anticolonial tradition expressed itself naturally in sympathy for Palestine. Mahatma Gandhi himself drew a direct colonial analogy, declaring that Palestine belonged to the Arabs just as England belonged to the English—recognizing the national sovereignty of Palestinians over their land. Nehru, the committed antifascist who understood intimately the agony of European Jewry after the Holocaust, nevertheless refused to see the occupation of Palestine as a just solution to that crisis. His sympathy for Jewish victims did not translate into support for Palestinian dispossession.

This principled stance found concrete expression at the United Nations in 1947, when India voted against the partition of Palestine—defying both the United States and the Soviet Union in the process. The vote was not merely a foreign policy calculation but a reflection of the ideological position the anticolonial leadership had staked out during the independence struggle: a principled opposition to the division of lands and peoples on the basis of religion. India opposed partition in Palestine for the same reasons it had opposed the partition of its own subcontinent.

India formally recognized Israel in 1950, but this diplomatic gesture did not signal an abandonment of its commitment to the Palestinian people. Nehru visited Gaza in 1960, over Israeli objections and despite security threats. In 1974, India became the first non-Arab state to formally recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization. Full diplomatic relations followed in 1980, and when the PLO declared independence in 1988, India extended immediate recognition. Yasser Arafat was a frequent visitor to New Delhi, received with state honors at a time when the West still designated him a terrorist.

The Unipolar World

The 1990s brought two simultaneous transformations that would strain this tradition. First, India finally opened its markets to the global economy, abandoning the democratic-socialist framework that had guided economic policy since 1947. The repercussions for foreign policy were immediate: idealism gradually gave way to the logic of economic pragmatism. Second, the fall of the Soviet Union rendered the Non-Aligned Movement seemingly obsolete in a unipolar world. 

These twin shifts found their clearest expression in the warming of India-US relations. After decades of Cold War distance, Washington began courting New Delhi as a trusted regional partner, supplanting Pakistan, which had served as the US outpost since the 1950s. China’s rise as an economic and military power only accelerated this realignment.

The Israel-Palestine issue could not remain insulated from these pressures. In 1992, India established full diplomatic relations with Israel—a step it had resisted for four decades. The Oslo Accords, which followed shortly after, seemed to vindicate this shift: the PLO itself had now agreed to a two-state solution, the very framework India had endorsed for a while. But India’s understanding of what two states might mean differed markedly from the West’s. 

Where the United States and its allies deployed the two-state formula as a mechanism to contain Palestinian aspirations—creating an appearance of movement toward justice while facilitating continued Israeli expansion in the West Bank—India continued to view it as a genuine compromise in the service of peace. This is why, even after Oslo, even after establishing relations with Israel, India remained firmly aligned with Palestine until quite recently. While the West bankrolled occupation and looked away as Gaza was bombarded, New Delhi maintained its traditional stance until 2014.

Blueprint of Ethno-Democracy

In 2014, India elected its first majority BJP government with a sweeping mandate. For the first time, a prime minister had both the ideological conviction and the political capital to fundamentally reshape Indian foreign policy according to Hindu nationalist priorities. Since the late 1980s, Hindu nationalist forces began gaining larger mass support, a trend that ultimately culminated in the demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992. The rise of Hindu nationalism coincided with the neoliberalization of the Indian economy, initiated by the Indian National Congress. Inequality in Indian society increased manifold following the opening of the market, which, as in other parts of the world, fueled right-wing politics. In 2014, after a brief stint in power from 1999 to 2004 as part of a coalition with regional centrist parties, the BJP returned to power—this time with a clear majority on its own and a clear agenda to transform the political discourse and social fabric of India.

The BJP’s affinity for Israel can be understood through two interlocking factors. The first is ethnonationalism. The BJP’s longstanding project is the transformation of India into a Hindu state—a nation in which religious identity determines belonging, and minorities are rendered permanently subordinate. 

In this project, Israel serves as both inspiration and model. What the BJP admires is the architecture of what has been called an “ethno-democracy“: a state that formally guarantees the supremacy of one religious group while tolerating the presence of others only on condition of their political marginalization. Israel grants Jewish citizens superior status within a self-defined Jewish republic; the BJP wants the same for India’s Hindu majority, with Muslims relegated to second-class citizenship.

The blueprint for this vision is already visible. The Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 offered a path to citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from neighboring countries—Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians—but pointedly excluded Muslims. The message was unmistakable: in the BJP’s India, religious persecution renders Muslims uniquely ineligible for refuge. 

More recently, the government has begun replicating elements of the Israeli settler-colonial model in Kashmir. By stripping the region of its limited autonomy and its constitutional protections, New Delhi has opened the door for Indians from outside Kashmir to settle there, acquire property, and permanently alter the region’s demographic composition. The objective, pursued systematically, is demographic transformation through internal colonization.

Empire of Islamophobia

The second factor is Islamophobia. It is no coincidence that the perceived enemies of the Israeli state and of the BJP’s India are the same: Muslims. By aligning itself overwhelmingly with Israel, the BJP sends a message to India’s own Muslim population—whose historic solidarity with the Palestinian cause is well known—about where they belong in the new Hindu nationalist order. 

The Palestinian struggle for independence, which the Indian state once supported and celebrated, is now routinely designated as terrorism. This rhetorical move aligns India with Israel’s self-perception as a victim of “Muslim terror”, creating a shared narrative of existential threat. The two states, in this telling, are not aggressors but survivors, not occupiers but the occupied.

This empire of Islamophobia extends well beyond Tel Aviv and New Delhi. It is a global network of ethnonationalist movements and governments. Modi’s bonhomie with Donald Trump and Netanyahu is not, as it is sometimes described, a pragmatic accommodation to the realities of a unipolar world. It is a deliberate ideological choice—an expression of solidarity among right-wing movements that share a common enemy and a common vision of who must be punished in the name of national renewal.

But this shared vision is not merely rhetorical. It is material and operational. Israel has become one of India’s largest suppliers of defense technology, with bilateral military trade reaching into the billions. The Indian government has allegedly deployed Israeli spyware—most notoriously the Pegasus system—to surveil political opponents, journalists, and activists, weaponizing technology supplied by Tel Aviv against domestic dissent. 

And while much of the world has grown hazardous for Israeli soldiers facing prosecution for war crimes committed in Gaza, India has remained a safe haven. Approximately 80,000 Israelis travel to India annually; a significant proportion are active-duty or former IDF soldiers, confident that they will face neither legal consequences nor public accountability on Indian soil.

A New Trinity

Today, Indian foreign policy has traded its foundational principles—anticolonialism, peace, Third World solidarity, justice—for a new trinity: ethnonationalism, Islamophobia, and opportunism. The consequences of this transformation are now visible for all to see. India has failed to take a meaningful moral or political position on any major international crisis in recent years. 

When Russia invaded Ukraine, India did not use its historic relationship with Moscow to press for peace. Instead, it enabled its capitalist duopoly of businessmen Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani to profit handsomely from buying discounted Russian oil and reselling it to European markets—effectively bankrolling Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war machine while claiming neutrality. 

When Israel launched its assault on Gaza, eventually recognized by international jurists as a plausible case of genocide, India offered neither resistance nor even condemnation. When civil war erupted in Sudan, New Delhi’s deepening complicity with UAE elites—major players in the conflict—precluded any meaningful stance. 

When the US effectively kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, India remained silent. And now, as the United States and Israel pursue an unjustified and illegal war on Iran, the BJP-led government has offered passive support while its rank and file actively cheers the destruction on streets and social media.

For a time, it seemed the BJP could sustain this foreign policy misadventurism without consequence. The Iran war has shattered that illusion. The war has created an unprecedented energy crisis, sending oil and gas prices soaring and dealing a severe blow to an already fragile economy. The material costs of aligning with Washington and Tel Aviv against Tehran are arriving ahead of schedule.

But the deeper cost is strategic and moral. India’s foreign minister and his aides repeatedly pitched the country’s approach as a “decolonial foreign policy“—a cynical appropriation of the language of liberation to dress up what is, in practice, pure opportunism. The gap between rhetoric and reality could not be wider. India, which led the Third World in the 20th century, which spoke for anticolonial struggles everywhere, now stands virtually alone on the world stage. It has no genuine allies, no reliable friends or neighbors, no principled partners. It has only the mercy of Trump, the indulgence of Putin, and the embrace of Netanyahu. 

This is not non-alignment. This is not pragmatism. This is the foreign policy of a right-wing movement that has made its peace with empire, ethnic supremacy, the punishment of Muslims everywhere—and in doing so, has left India isolated, diminished, and morally unrecognizable.

The post From Bandung to Bibi: How Modi’s India Abandoned Non-Alignment for Ethnonationalism appeared first on Untold.

Imagine this: you’re sitting at home watching the news. An employee in a major beverage company is coming out of the courthouse in an ongoing, much publicized legal battle with her employers. All she did was inform government officials of a specific component that has been added to a recent product without proper tests. After going through the proper channels and filing a complaint at the company, she was told that it would be investigated, but nothing happened. 

She took action. Because someone had to.

The company argues that she signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that prevents any employee from divulging trade secrets. Her lawyers counter that when it comes to public health, NDAs are not legally (nor ethically) binding. 

You have been following this case from the start, and you’re waiting for the court-ordered independent lab results to settle the matter. 

Now, ask yourself this: which part of that scenario did you care about most? You’d only be human if the first thing that came to mind was personal interest. When it is a health-related topic, everyone’s first priority is – and should be –  their own. The second thing might be a coin-toss between how the court would penalize the company if wrongdoing was proven, and how government officials would try to revise laws on food additives.

Coming last would be the employee who reported it. Why? Because we all assume she’ll be fine.  She actually did the right thing and her actions will save lives. If the courts rule in her favor, she’ll be lauded as a heroine. She presented evidence: lab results, testimonies, and her own eyewitness account. What more is there to think about?

She’ll be fine.

And you’d be right to think that way. In the United States, whistleblowers in the food industry are protected under the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). The company can’t retaliate against her in any way for whistleblowing: by dismissal, demotion, or transfer. Should that happen, she’d be within her legal right to file a complaint, win it, and likely be compensated and reinstated back to her position.

Let’s use the same scenario but shift the industry; this time it’s an AI company. Here, the story takes a different arc. 

The common theme among AI whistleblowers differs from that of the food and beverage industry. In the absence of clear laws and reporting channels, the decision to speak out against AI industry giants is often weighed against livelihood, personal and professional reputation, and, in one case, life itself.

Stories from the AI Trenches

Sounding the alarm takes not just evidence, but courage and a firm moral belief that you’re doing the right thing: telling the truth. 

Meet a few brave individuals who faced hard obstacles to let the world know what goes on behind closed lab doors.

Leopold Aschenbrenner: Former OpenAI safety researcher, fired from his position for allegedly sharing documents externally. He warned of “egregiously insufficient” security against foreign threats, citing OpenAI’s failure to adequately protect critical algorithmic information and model weights. He became an advocate, urging a shift away from fast, unsafe deployment towards robust safety measures.

Suchir Balaji: Former researcher at OpenAI and perhaps the most tragic story on this list. He resigned in August 2024 after stating the company’s use of copyrighted material violated U.S. law and posed commercial harm to creators. He was set to testify in intellectual property lawsuits against OpenAI; but was tragically found dead by suicide on November 26, 2024. 

Timnit Gebru: Co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team, dismissed in 2020 after writing a research paper that exposed how current AI training methods could deepen biases against minorities and marginalized communities. Her dismissal gained widespread coverage, exposing corporate retaliation, prompting her to found the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR).

Louis Hunt: Former CFO and VP of Business Development at Liquid AI. He resigned from his position and publicly challenged the claim that AI models don’t replicate copyrighted works. He  presented evidence of generated outputs that were exact copies of texts from The New York Times, Stephen King’s books, and Harvard Business Publishing articles.

Margaret Mitchell: Founder and co-lead of Google AI ethics unit who was fired in 2021 for alleged misconduct. She testified in the September 2024 Senate hearing on AI oversight, stressing the need for clear instructions to employees navigating NDAs, and accessible whistleblowing channels to provide support to those who wish to come forward with their concerns.

William Saunders: Ex-OpenAI technical staff member who testified at the September 2024 Senate hearing. He advised on: 1) establishing a list of government contacts who understood the reported issues and could act on them, and 2) identifying legal protections insiders need when flagging actions that don’t break laws, but put public safety at risk.

Helen Toner: Former OpenAI board member on the nonprofit arm, who testified at the September 2024 Senate hearing. She highlighted how vagueness in current AI whistleblower laws discourages people from coming forward, specifically those with complaints about AI development that often don’t fit existing legal categories designed for traditional industries.

Anonymous and Named Whistleblowers: Group of eleven-thirteen current and former employees at leading AI companies who in June 2024 wrote an open letter “Right to Warn” calling for principles to create a safe environment for employees to voice their concerns on potential risks. In July 2024, they filed a complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requesting an investigation into how NDAs restrict scrutiny of safety behaviors (e.g., the rushed testing of GPT-4o). 

This list is not exhaustive, many more names can be mentioned, including, David Evan Harris, Jacob Hilton, Geoffrey Hinton, Daniel Kokotajlo, Ramana Kumar, Jan Leike, Neel Nanda, Carroll Wainwright, and Daniel Ziegler, among others. 

Why Blow the Whistle

Merriam-Webster defines a whistleblower as “an employee who brings wrongdoing by an employer or by other employees to the attention of a government or law enforcement agency,” followed by the following note: “A whistleblower is commonly protected legally from retaliation.” 

If we analyze the stories above based on that definition, we see events unfolding in two stages. Stage One: the employee notices wrongdoing and first reports it internally. When the response from the company dismisses the complaint or addresses it inadequately, the employee either reports their concerns to the government/the media or publishes their findings as independent research.

The complaints themselves span a wide range, from ethical and governance concerns to more technical issues of alignment and safety. In addition, the alarms raised aren’t about one company’s specific attitude towards AI training, testing, and deployment; they bring to light an industry-wide, systemic pattern of behavior that if left unchecked could lead to non-reversable consequences.

For an insider to have that first-hand experience and courage to go through the steps to prevent such dangers, their actions should be celebrated as a reflection of moral integrity, not cause for retaliation. This brings us to the second part of the definition where the key term is “commonly protected”. Commonly means usually/often and that is an apt description in the case of AI whistleblowers. 

Stage Two is where we fail them, because there is simply no protection. The stories show that all of them lost their jobs, either by dismissal (with or without stated reasons) or through resignation (as a form of protest). They became industry pariahs just for speaking up, and some couldn’t find employment immediately after their stories broke out. 

If you’re an employee in an AI frontier company and read about the consequences faced by those who actually wanted to help, would you risk your career/livelihood, your industry standing, and your future to report AI risks? 

Nuclear Whistleblowing as a Model

In recent years, AI research has seen a surge in academic papers, books, interviews, and podcasts that wrestle with growing safety concerns. These works highlight AI’s dual-use and emphasize its black box nature – the opaque decision-making processes that continue to baffle even the scientists building these systems. 

In response, many AI governance and ethics experts compare the risks posed by advanced AI systems to those of the Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) materials and agents in their severity and potential for catastrophic and even existential harm.

Therefore, as a model for the AI industry, I turn to the nuclear field. Its whistleblower laws and regulatory frameworks have long maintained vigilant oversight over both plant operations and worker safety.

The Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 (ERA) established the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which regulates civilian (not military) nuclear facilities and materials. The Act was substantially strengthened in 1992 through the Comprehensive National Energy Policy Act, which added significant whistleblower protections including Section 211.

The key provisions in this amendment include the following:

1. It defines the protected activities for which employees cannot face discrimination. 
2. It establishes a clear complaint and investigation process for whistleblowers who face retaliation. 
3. It requires that these protections be posted permanently in the workplace for constant employee access
4. It directs the NRC or the Department of Energy (DOE) to conduct swift investigations into whistleblower allegations of substantial safety hazards.

Here are examples of how this works in practice:

In May 2013, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) found that Enercon Services Inc. wrongfully fired a senior engineer at Wolf Creek Generating Station for reporting safety violations. The engineer’s employment had been terminated in January 2012 after pointing out that soil coverage for buried safety pipes didn’t meet federal requirements. He was also asked to write a report justifying inadequate backfill material, but he refused.

OSHA ordered the company to reinstate the engineer with back pay, benefits, and compensatory damages. Enercon appealed, claiming the termination was for legitimate business reasons, but investigators found the engineer’s concerns were valid and that the field errors weren’t his fault.

In 2016, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a comprehensive review of DOE whistleblower protections and found that while the legal framework exists, enforcement and implementation needed strengthening. The report’s six recommendations, which were mostly accepted, demonstrate that Nuclear whistleblower protections are actively monitored, regularly evaluated, and continuously improved to address gaps, and ensure the law’s promise is realized.

In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Murray v. UBS Securities that whistleblowers under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) don’t need to prove their employer intended to retaliate. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals had required plaintiffs to prove employer’s intent, but the Supreme Court vacated that decision. It held that if an employer treats someone worse (by firing, demoting, or changing their working conditions) because of whistleblowing (a protected activity), that constitutes a violation. The employer’s motivation is irrelevant.

This ruling is significant because the Supreme Court noted that the Energy Reorganization Act protections already worked this way. Under ERA, whistleblowers only need to show their protected activity was a factor in the adverse action. Then the employer must prove by clear and convincing evidence they would have taken the same action anyway. The Murray decision reinforced what nuclear whistleblowers already have: strong legal protections that shift the burden away from those who speak out.

The established path for Nuclear whistleblowers could serve as a blueprint for their AI colleagues, who operate in a similarly high-risk domain.

The Push for AI Whistleblower Protection: A Timeline

We now have a question: if AI risks are widely acknowledged as severe, from systemic bias to existential threat, why does the law still fail to protect those who report these risks? The answer is quite simple: existing legal frameworks typically require evidence of fraud or illegality – thresholds that may not encompass AI safety concerns. This leaves insiders vulnerable as they attempt to alert the public and policymakers. 

The following timeline traces key events from 2024 to 2025 that have shaped the need for whistleblower protection. 

In May 2024, news of OpenAI’s restrictive NDAs became known. Following public criticism, CEO Sam Altman admitted he was unaware of their extent and expressed embarrassment. He confirmed the company’s revisions of these agreements to remove provisions that threatened to deprive departing employees of their vested equity. This acknowledgment came after reports that OpenAI’s NDAs prohibited ex-employees from criticizing the company or disclosing safety concerns, sparking broader scrutiny of AI industry practices.

In June, thirteen current and former AI employees wrote an open letter “Right to Warn” urging frontier AI companies to promote an environment of safety-first in AI development and deployment. They stressed the current practice of forcing new hires to sign an NDA, the terms of which demand that they cannot voice concerns or disparage the company, even after leaving.

Moreover, they raised the point of widespread retaliation against whistleblowers, which adds to the growing concern that AI companies fear losing funding and investments more than protecting humanity from a technology that could possibly destroy it. By not allowing criticism, the companies silence well-meaning experts who could steer innovation in the right direction.

On July 1, the same group filed a formal complaint to SEC’s chairman Gary Gensler and to Senator Chuck Grassley’s office. In it, they provided evidence that OpenAI’s NDAs were restrictive to any protected disclosures of concerns related to AI safety, and asked the chairman to conduct an investigation into whether that practice broke SEC rules.

On July 31, OpenAI sent a letter to senators outlining robust safety measures, including dedicating 20% of computing resources to safety efforts like red-teaming and risk evaluations. The letter also affirmed support for whistleblower protections by introducing anonymous reporting options, for example: the Integrity Line.

On August 1, Sen. Grassley sent a letter to Sam Altman demanding answers about OpenAI’s restrictive NDAs with a deadline of August 15. The questions included:

1. Whether OpenAI changed the restrictive language of their NDAs, and provide proof of it.
2. The number of employees who requested to contact federal authorities, including all the relevant details.
3. The number of SEC investigations into OpenAI, including basis and outcome.

Sen. Grassley’s aim was to identify the purpose of the NDAs: whether it is for protecting trade secrets, or preventing employees from voicing their concerns.

On September 17, Sen. Blumenthal chaired a hearing by the Senate Committee on the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law. He and several senators heard testimonies from, and directed questions to, expert witnesses on current AI regulations from an insider’s perspective. The hearing covered topics relevant to AI safety implementation and whistleblower protection.

At the start of 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14179 in January titled “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” which revoked Biden’s AI safety order (EO 14110 of 2023). The new EO mandated the creation of an AI action plan within 180 days, and explicitly set the policy of maintaining U.S. “AI dominance” by removing regulatory barriers to innovation. This shift in policy marked a decisive turn towards deregulation, one that positioned acceleration as a national priority.

In May, Sen. Grassley and bipartisan cosponsors introduced the “AI Whistleblower Protection Act” (S. 1792) in response to mounting concerns about retaliation against AI employees who raise safety issues. The bill would prohibit retaliation against both employees and independent contractors who report AI security vulnerabilities or safety violations. As of October 2025, the bill has yet to advance beyond the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

Following the executive order mandate, the White House released the AI Action Plan in July. It advances the deregulatory vision by explicitly prioritizing speed and innovation, while dismantling what it calls “onerous regulation” and “bureaucratic red tape.” By eliminating safety requirements, the plan effectively grants the private sector carte blanche to accelerate AI deployment with minimal oversight.

In October, California passed SB-53 “Transparency in Frontier AI Act”, the first U.S. state law establishing frontier AI transparency and whistleblower protections. Among other provisions, SB-53 introduces direct whistleblower protections for covered employees tasked with assessing or managing critical safety risks:

• It mandates that large AI developers establish anonymous reporting channels.
• Employees are shielded from retaliation when using these channels or when reporting externally to state or federal authorities.
• Protection applies when the whistleblower reasonably believes their employer’s actions pose a substantial threat to public health or safety; especially in cases involving catastrophic risk.

These provisions mark a shift from viewing whistleblowers as disruptors to recognizing them as vital protectors of public interest.

From corporate controversies to whistleblower advocacy and legislative breakthroughs, the road to stronger safeguards has been anything but easy, especially when the drive for rapid deployment outweighs the call for scrutiny. Yet through the combined efforts of courageous individuals and responsive institutions, robust protections are finally within reach.

Line of Defense

In her testimony at the September 17 2024 Senate hearing, Dr Mitchell compared AI training to baking:

“With Data as essentially ingredients, training is cooking, and the model is the output … we’re missing an approach where we have recipes, a deep understanding of what the pieces are that result in this output.”

In a landscape where the builders themselves don’t fully grasp the systems they create, insider disclosures may be the only path to effective regulation.

As the race to develop and deploy AI accelerates, safety and alignment concerns take a back seat at frontier companies. Governance frameworks are racing to catch up by creating laws and policies to protect public welfare, but the gap between innovation and governance remains wide. We need whistleblowers now more than ever. 

But how can we rely on insiders to shield us from high-stakes AI failures when they lack industry-wide protections and remain vulnerable to retaliation? Whistleblowers are our primary line of defense in this field. But shields need protection too. Without enforceable legal guarantees, we’re asking people to make sacrifices they shouldn’t have to.

Where is the justice in that?

The post Whistleblowing as a Shield: Protecting the Voices That Keep AI Safe  appeared first on Untold.