In April 2025, this perfect crescent of sand located 300 kilometers from Athens, celebrated as one of Greece’s most spectacular beaches, was transformed into a highly secured film set. Its crystal-clear waters served as the backdrop for The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster scheduled for theatrical release on July 17, 2026.

Right here, three massive triremes sailed the bay carrying Matt Damon as Odysseus and Zendaya as the goddess Athena, while the famous Nestor’s Cave, opening up beneath the castle, was used as Polyphemus’ lair. 

The region of Messenia, with its Venetian and Ottoman castles, a rural hinterland dominated by olive trees, and still-wild coastlines, was chosen by the production precisely to evoke the epic nature of the myth. Yet, behind the Hollywood postcard and the undeniable beauty of these places, this land is proving to be increasingly fragile, exposed to deep environmental, social, and economic wounds.

This is not the first time. The release of a major film has become a familiar mechanism by which cinema rapidly reshapes the destiny of places, and rarely gently. After Game of Thrones, Dubrovnik saw over 1.2 million visitors descend on a city of 42,000 residents, prompting UNESCO to warn its Old Town could no longer absorb the daily influx. 

After The Beach, Maya Bay received up to 5,000 visitors a day until its coral reef was decimated and its beach structurally destroyed forcing a years-long closure. Messenia is the next candidate, and the wave has not yet arrived. 

A Picture-Perfect Postcard on the Verge of Collapse

“Based on data analyzed over the past 30 years, the average temperature in Messenia, in line with the country’s trend, has increased by 1.5 degrees Celsius,” explains Dr. Kostas Lagouvardos, Director of Research at the National Observatory of Athens. “This is a very high figure, compounded by a substantial increase in heatwaves and the near-total disappearance of snow.” 

Lagouvardos warns that when combining these data points, it becomes clear that the climate emergency is no longer a future threat, but a present reality pushing the territory toward progressive aridity. 

The combination of increasingly scorching summers and snowless winters drastically reduces groundwater recharge, exposing the region to chronic water scarcity precisely during the months of peak tourist influx. This alteration puts a strain on local communities, threatening biodiversity and the area’s famous olive groves.

From the Navarino fortress, the view spans the entire area: the beach, the curve of the dunes, and, right behind them, the Gialova lagoon. This ecosystem, protected by the Natura 2000 network, hosts 17 habitats and over 73 protected species. It is a picture-perfect postcard that hides an equilibrium on the verge of collapse. 

According to the European project COASTAL, the entirety of Messenia relies 100% on groundwater, which is being drained by intensive extraction for both hotels and crops. 

Receiving no more fresh water, the lagoon suffers from critical salinity for 30% of the year, which suffocates its biodiversity. The ecosystem is caught in a vice: in summer, it is overloaded by wastewater from mass tourism; in autumn, by residues from olive mills. Added to this is the chemical cocktail of nitrogen and phosphorus washed down by rain, from the fertilizers used in intensive agriculture and neighboring luxury golf courses. The result is an algal bloom that deprives the water of oxygen.

Tourism Monoculture Invading the Territory

Beyond the lagoon, the panorama opens into an even wider gulf: the Navarino Bay. To the right lies the town of Pylos; to the left stands the massive Costa Navarino complex. This network of resorts and exclusive private residences, owned by TEMES, a company belonging to the Constantakopoulos family, features four 18-hole golf courses, an agora with a private marina, and swimming pools in almost every home. 

It is a gated paradise that has hosted the British Royal Family, world leaders, and VIPs such as Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo, who purchased two villas here, and Cristiano Ronaldo, who signed his transfer to Juventus on this very spot.

“Despite being presented as an eco-friendly luxury tourist facility, it is not,” says Ioannis Spilanis, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Environment of the University of the Aegean and Director of the Sustainable Tourism Observatory of the Aegean. “The water consumption of such a model is simply incompatible with the resources of this region.”

But the tourism-driven environmental impact of the area extends beyond the Costa Navarino complex. For a few years now, Messenia has been at the center of heavy investments. In 2010, the airport of Kalamata, the region’s capital, handled just 50,000 passengers; today, it consistently exceeds 180.000 arrivals with direct flights from Central and Northern Europe. 

Furthermore, the airport was recently leased for 40 years to a consortium of companies, including Pileas SA, a subsidiary of the Konstantakopoulos Group, the same family that owns Costa Navarino, and the German giant Fraport, to triple passenger flows. 

A short distance away, since 2023, the hills of Messenia have turned into an open-air construction site. The new Southwest Highway, a project worth over 300 million euros, will cut travel times to the resorts and the Methoni fortress, another set for The Odyssey, where Tom Holland, playing Telemachus, meets the wise Nestor.

“Although Messenia has not yet reached the saturation levels of some islands and we cannot talk about true overtourism, the pattern is the same”, Spilanis warns, “it is a tourism monoculture that invades the territory, depriving communities of their uniqueness.”

The Environmental Impact of Visibility 

In Pylos, just a few kilometers from Costa Navarino, Georgia Visviki, a lawyer and consultant for the Legal Service of the Municipality of Pylos-Nestor, sits in her office. The blue of the sea is visible from her windows, while wedding guests are gathering in the small harbor out front. 

“Everything has two sides,” the lawyer says, “on one hand, these investments bring capital and jobs, even if seasonal. On the other hand, I fear the environmental impact, given that waste is already a problem today, in addition to the loss of cultural identity.”

Visviki is also the president of the Pylos Women’s Association, an organization dedicated to preserving the traditions and culture of the area. “This has always been a multicultural area, open to the outside world, first by the Venetians and Ottomans, and later by the Italians,” she explains, “we have unique music and dances, and a cuisine rooted in our land, made of wine, olive oil, lemons, and oranges.”

In Pylos, the traces of these passing civilizations are still alive, carved in stone. A prime example is the Church of the Transfiguration, located inside the New Fortress, which preserves intact the architecture of its previous life as an Ottoman mosque. 

“What we want is balanced development, a sustainable tourism that does not exploit the local community but integrates with the territory,” Visviki concludes, “the movie will bring a further wave of visibility, and the region is not yet ready to handle it.”

The Tracks of Rural Resilience

Heading north through Messenia, surrounded by olive groves and greenhouses, and moving inland, one reaches the village of Dessillas, boasting 130 years of history, perched on a hillside. 

At the old station, a large group of visitors crowds around the railway lines.

“We are inaugurating a new trail that follows the railway lines between Dessillas and Diavolitsi,” explains Marios Gkrogkos, from the Amiamo Dessillas association. “It is a way to build a bridge between the memory of this place and its future, proving that abandonment can be fought through culture and community participation,” he adds.

In a region with high rates of depopulation, the association has performed a small miracle of rural resilience. They didn’t just clean up the old tracks to make a walking trail, but they have also converted the historic abandoned station into a public library, restoring a social hub to the village. 

This slow-paced walk along the railway ties is not just a local attraction, but the core of a regional debate on slow mobility and the recovery of historic infrastructure to counter depopulation. 

This initiative aligns with the vision of the Ethos social cooperative in Kalamata, which is active in the “Peloponnese Trails” project. “Reactivating the railway in Messenia wouldn’t require new investments, since the network already exists. It would provide vital lifelines for the villages,” Ethos representatives explain, “residents could move back into family homes, commute to Kalamata, save on rent, and alleviate the housing crisis in the cities, while also creating jobs.” 

It is a gamble on authentic identity that clashes with the Hollywood spotlight. “The Odyssey will offer nothing extra to Messenia. On the contrary, we believe it is Messenia providing value to the film, and not the other way around,” the Ethos representatives conclude.

Human-Scale Tourism

Indeed, the beauty of Messenia reveals itself in every village. Heading south toward Koroni, one encounters the hamlet of Vounaria, which for nearly a century was one of the neuralgic centers of Greek pottery. It was an artform that seemed abandoned since 1990, when the last historic kiln closed its doors. But in 2018 it breathed again thanks to the determination of Maria Basilogiannakopoulou.

“I realized that even in Athens, there was strong recognition of the value of this craft, so I convinced myself to return to the places I used to visit as a child,” the artisan explains, “the type of tourism we have here causes great damage. People mistakenly think that money can only be made from that, and so they end up abandoning century-old traditions.”

In Vasilitsi, in the far south of the region, stands another outpost of cultural resistance. The house of Marilena and Voisilios is located just a few meters from the village square. Passing through the gate, visitors enter a garden that leads to their taverna. Inside, an ancient loom, historic photos, and dozens of 20th-century radios are preserved. 

“Our daughter is a primary school teacher, and every year she brings her students here,” Marilena explains, “We organize loom weaving courses, we created an educational vegetable garden, and we take field trips into nature.” 

The couple decided to return to Vasilitsi after living in Athens for several years. “This area is a paradise,” Voisilios says, “but a tourism monoculture cannot be faced alone; we need to network. If we truly valued our culture, which is unique, local youth wouldn’t be forced to work as waiters at Costa Navarino.”

Traces Not Scars

Right across from the couple’s home lives Aris Christopoulos. Together with five other partners, he founded Apo Kardias, a farmers’ collective dedicated to producing organic olive oil. The collective, officially established in 2021, owns several plots of land in Cape Gallo, the southern tip of Messenia, which falls within the Natura 2000 network. 

“We export mostly to Germany. I don’t think tourism is an absolute evil; it all depends on the model implemented,” Aris explains, while driving his pickup truck. The paved road gives way to an increasingly twisting dirt track. Reaching the top of a hill, the horizon opens wide: Nothing but olive trees and the Mediterranean Sea. 

“We sell abroad, especially to people who have been here and developed an emotional bond with our land,” Aris adds, “we don’t want mega-projects or gigantic resorts, but a human-scale tourism, connected to the territory and capable of leaving deep traces, not scars.”

Traces or scars; it is within this fragile boundary that the destiny of Messenia is being played out, a region currently suspended at a deep identity crossroads. On one side is the mirage of mega-resorts and luxury housing developments, which risks turning the land into a beautiful but empty shell. On the other hand is the silent resistance of those who reopen abandoned stations, restart old looms, and defend olive groves. 

The spotlights on the film set have turned off, but the movie’s release will trigger an inevitable media and social media backlash. It is a pressure for which no land can truly call itself ready, as the cases of Dubrovnik after Game of Thrones or Maya Bay after The Beach have already proven.

The post More Scars Than Traces: Christopher Nolan Filmed His The Odyssey in Messenia, But Can the Region Survive the Spotlight? appeared first on Untold.

The political charge around the tournament has been visible from the start: questions about Iran’s participation, a Somali referee denied entry to the United States, and a FIFA president who recently awarded Donald Trump a self-invented peace prize for agreeing to host, among many other such incidents. 

None of this is surprising. What is less often noticed is how much further the connection between sport and politics runs, below the surface of any given controversy. The sports that US American, Canadian and European societies have made their own are not just entertainment or national tradition. They are, when examined closely, near-perfect mirrors of the political orders those societies actually accept, not just the ones they describe in their constitutions and celebratory rhetoric. And in a year when Western leaders are publicly arguing over who writes the rules of the next global order, those mirrors are worth looking into.

The reason sport is such an honest mirror for politics is simple: a popular sport survives, generation after generation, because something in its structure resonates with what a society already believes about how the world works. We keep the games whose hidden logic matches the one we live inside. The interesting thing is that each sport, like each political order, has a public face and a less visible one, and the gap between the two is where the real action is. 

Sociologist and football historian, David Goldblatt, has shown this for football. This essay extends the argument to three sports, three countries and three visions of world order being contested right now.

Three Traditions

A productive analytical framework for reading the deeper connections between sports and politics comes from the English School of international relations, developed through the foundational works of Martin Wight, Hedley Bull and Barry Buzan. The English School identifies three traditions, or, in Wight’s formulation, “inner voices” that are always present in international society but compete for dominance. 

The Hobbesian, realist tradition or “international system” understands international relations as persistent conflict in which states pursue power and security; rules hold only as long as the strong choose to honor them. The Grotian, liberal-institutionalist tradition or “international society” understands international relations as a society of states bound by common rules and institutions — imperfect, contested, but real and worth defending. The Kantian or “world-society” tradition, drawing on Kant’s vision of perpetual peace, understands international relations as ultimately constituted by individuals and transnational communities, driven by shared humanity and the possibility of a community beyond state borders. 

The three traditions function not merely as analytical categories but also as competing theoretical narratives (another mirror to explore), each with its own logic of legitimacy, its own account of what rules are for and its own vision of who belongs to the community they govern. According to Buzan, “all three of these elements are in continuous coexistence and interplay, the question being how strong they are in relation to each other.” (p. 476). 

At Davos in January, three Western leaders stood up in three consecutive speeches and placed their bets. Trump spoke Hobbesian: The US is strong, allies must pay, and rules are tools of leverage rather than shared obligations. The language was about interest, strength and reciprocity as raw power. Mark Carney spoke Grotian: the existing rules-based order and global trade is worth defending, middle powers must coordinate to defend it, and if the US will not lead then others must build the architecture themselves. Ursula von der Leyen spoke both Grotian and Kantian, anchoring European strategic autonomy in shared values and in a vision of common humanity that reaches beyond national interest. 

The Munich Security Conference in February continued the argument with a sharper military edge related to Ukraine, NATO’s coherence, European defense spending and the question of whether American security guarantees still meant what they once meant. However, the Hobbesian reality is not lost on Carney and Von der Leyen. 

American Football: The Socialist Sport of a Capitalist Country

American football is the national sport of the world’s most ideologically committed capitalist power, and it is structurally one of the most redistributive professional sports systems ever built. The NFL draft gives the best young talent to the worst-performing teams first, explicit redistribution from success to failure in the name of competitive balance. No team is ever relegated; all thirty-two franchises hold permanent, protected places regardless of how they perform. 

National broadcast revenues are split equally among all franchises, so the Green Bay Packers receive the same television income as the Dallas Cowboys. Salary caps stop the wealthiest teams from simply buying dominance. On the field, eleven players move in scripted coordination where improvisation is not usually seen as positive creativity, but as an error that could cost the game; and the players who perform their collective roles best are held up as exemplars and super humans. 

The Super Bowl halftime performers work for no fee, their reward being the honor and exposure to the largest audience of the year, while the league monetises their presence. In English School terms, this is the Grotian and Kantian story made flesh with shared rules, redistributed rewards, a collective ritual that briefly makes two hundred million people feel they belong to the same thing. Karl Marx, had he worn a helmet, would have recognised the structure.

Then ask who actually benefits, and the Hobbesian story reasserts itself. A thirty-second Super Bowl advertisement costs $7 million; the communal ritual serves as packaging for the delivery of enormous value to a small number of corporations. The halftime performers significantly increase their personal global brand value. And the players absorb costs that money does not adequately cover: chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease now documented in the overwhelming majority of former NFL players’ brains studied after death, is the price the system extracts from its workforce. 

The collective infrastructure is real; so is the upward flow of its rewards, and the downward distribution of its costs. Trump’s admiration for Putin, Xi and Kim Jong-un fits exactly here. These are leaders who have mastered a version of the collective arrangement in which the institutions remain, the language of solidarity remains, and the man at the top takes the surplus while those whose labor makes the system run absorb the bodily cost. 

When Bad Bunny headlined Super Bowl LX as the first native Spanish speaker to do so, a Puerto Rican artist who had publicly criticized Trump’s immigration enforcement, Trump posted on Truth Social minutes after the performance that it was “absolutely terrible” and “a slap in the face to our country.” The White House endorsed a rival conservative counter-show headlined by Kid Rock. Bad Bunny played on the screens at Trump’s own Palm Beach watch party regardless. 

Canadian Ice Hockey: Solidarity, Deterrence, and the Enforcer

Canadian ice hockey looks, at first glance, like the Grotian story in athletic form. The game is built around collective performance; no player stays on the ice for more than 30 to 90 seconds at the highest level; the goalie depends entirely on everyone around him. Hockey also carries codes of honour that operate above the written rulebook, obligations to teammates that no contract fully specifies: you stand up for each other, you play through pain, you do not leave someone exposed. In that sense it reaches toward the Kantian story too, a community of people held together by values that go beyond the formal rules.

But hockey’s most important figure is the enforcer, the physically intimidating player whose job is not to score but to protect teammates and to make opponents think twice. He is valued not for what he produces but for what he prevents, and his usefulness rests entirely on the other team’s belief that crossing him will carry a real physical cost. That is the Hobbesian story with skates: order maintained not by shared values but by the credible threat of force. And hockey has a formal outlet for when that threat is not enough: the gloves come off, the officials step back, and after roughly a minute of sanctioned combat the game resumes. 

This is not a failure of the system. It is the system acknowledging its own limits, managing an escalation that might otherwise break the game entirely. Mark Carney was a hockey goalie at Harvard, the position with the clearest view of the entire rink and the least room for error when the system fails. His Davos speech was goalie politics: the old referee has left the ice; middle powers must coordinate; deterrent capacity must be credible. 

Canada has responded to Trump’s tariffs and sovereignty provocations in a recognisably hockey register, with retaliatory measures, economic nationalism, and hockey games between the two countries that became politically charged in a way not seen for decades. Whether Carney’s coalition of so-called middle powers can collectively fill the enforcer role on a rink where the biggest player has decided the rules are optional remains unanswered. The Winter Olympics ice hockey final earlier this year, which the United States won, was an uncomfortable early data point.

European Football: Fair Play, and Who it Actually Applies To

European football presents itself in the most explicitly moral terms of any major sport. UEFA’s campaigns carry banners for fair play, inclusion, respect and LGBT+ rights; players wear armbands for various causes; federations issue statements on nearly everything. The institutional architecture is just as elaborate: Financial Fair Play regulations attempt to impose fiscal discipline; anti-racism protocols enforce social norms; transfer rules are meant to protect young players from exploitation; promotion and relegation mean that incumbents are not permanently protected. 

It is, in design, the Grotian story, a rules-based architecture with genuine Kantian aspirations, open in principle to all, with real consequences for those who fall short.

The darker side shows exactly why those norms are sometimes little more than a shell. When the rulebook meets serious money, wealthy clubs hire lawyers and wait out the regulators, and bet on paying a fine lower than the broadcast and tournament revenues. The talent pipeline running from Lagos, Dakar, Buenos Aires and São Paulo to the richest leagues in Europe has been described as neocolonial extraction dressed as opportunity. 

There is an old joke attributed to Henry Kissinger that no foreign leader knows which number to call when they want to speak to Europe. European football has the same problem: owners, league presidents, national federations, and UEFA itself all claim authority, and on the hardest questions, the system often produces no decision at all. The EU operates the same way. Its trade relationship with Israel has continued through a military campaign in Gaza that the International Court of Justice found plausibly involves violations of the Genocide Convention, with calls to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement largely unheeded. 

Hungary’s (Orban’s) obstruction of EU sanctions on Russia while remaining a full member in good standing is the political equivalent of a superclub’s Financial Fair Play workaround: technically within the system, operationally undermining it, and tolerated because expulsion costs more than accommodation. It is seen in other areas as well when EU ministers are planning further climate policy rollbacks during a historic heatwave. 

The normative language is sincerely held and routinely bent, and the Hobbesian reality underneath the Grotian and Kantian surface is that the rules apply most firmly to those with the least power to resist them.

The FIFA World Order

The figure who may understand all of this most clearly is not at Davos. Gianni Infantino runs FIFA with 211 member associations, more than the United Nations. He is managing the world’s most-watched sporting event with more than six billion viewers. His recent award of a self-invented FIFA Peace Prize to Trump prompted an ethics complaint from London-based human rights NGO FairSquare later supported by the Norwegian Football Association and 50 members of the European Parliament. But the show goes on. 

Infantino grasps something the Davos crowd is still arguing about: global order is not built only in security councils, diplomatic communiques, and trade agreements. It is built in attention, in the shared events that six billion people choose to organise their summers around, in who controls the right to host and the image of a leader lifting a trophy. 

Interestingly, European football is already a dominant sport or growing fast in China, India, South Africa and Brazil, which means the sport that best mirrors the rules-based European order may be on its way to becoming the dominant game on every continent. The winner of that game is not Trump, not von der Leyen, not Carney. His name is Gianni Infantino.

The Game Worth Watching

None of this is to say that the NFL caused US inequality, or that hockey is secretly a Canadian foreign policy manual, or that FIFA is a shadow government. The point is the other direction: popular sports are relevant to study because their underlying structure resonates with what a society already believes about how the world works, including the parts it does not say out loud. Sports as familiar tropes then become powerful for people to better understand and engage the political game. 

Heard through these three sports, the speeches at Davos stop sounding like competing policy platforms and start sounding like three coaches, each raised on a different game, each convinced that their version of the rules is the one the world should adopt. The contest between those three visions is the real game of 2026, and it will outlast the World Cup by years. 

What kind of order do people accept when they gather around a common good? History suggests that the answer could be more inequality, more hypocrisy and more rule-bending than anyone would admit in advance, as long as the game is compelling enough and they feel they belong to something larger than themselves. 

Some leaders are betting on this. But the spectators at a World Cup are also, in the end, citizens and history also suggests that the messiest transitions in political history have tended to begin when the crowd decided the result on the pitch was not going to stand and took matters in their own hands. For now, the game goes on.

The post Beyond FIFA’s World Cup: The Rules We Actually Play By appeared first on Untold.

Mustapha is one of over 100,000 workers–mostly migrants from North and West Africa–who tend the vegetables grown under more than 32,000 hectares (320km2) of plastic-covered greenhouses in the Spanish province of Almería, nestled along the south-east coast of the Mediterranean. The region produces over 3 million tonnes of produce (tomatoes, courgettes, cucumbers, peppers, aubergines and more) destined for export to western Europe–Germany, France, and the UK mainly. 

Most of the 14,000 farming families have grown food in these greenhouses since Franco gave them small parcels of land in the 1940s, with the sole purpose of achieving national food security. Some are now extremely wealthy. Some struggle to make a profit. Probably, all of them employ migrant workers and the vast majority are likely to be doing so illegally–low-paid undocumented labour is the only way many of them can make ends meet. 

Food Imperialism

The Spanish government has recently announced the regularisation of almost 1 million undocumented workers–many of the workers in Almería who are given papers will try to move on from exhausting greenhouse work to better-paid jobs in restaurants and hotels. The empty jobs will soon be filled by people surviving the grueling journey on foot from Istanbul or by small wooden boat from West Africa to the Canaries. There are always people whose livelihoods have been destroyed by poor trade agreements and overfishing back home.

This is food imperialism – the way in which corporations and nations in the Global North exert control over the Global South by dictating what food is produced and exported to ensure the world’s wealthiest citizens have a constant supply of affordable, year-round produce on their supermarket shelves.

Our food system is the product of hundreds of years of unequal distribution and control of global power. The British Empire controlled the production of sugar and palm oil to feed its malnourished and tired workers back home–relying on slave labour and productive lands in the tropics to provide the expendable resources needed to continue to reap profits as they deplete these lands and waste their people. A lot has changed since the empires of old–today’s empires belong to the likes of Unilever and Cargill. Food is still treated as a commodity to generate profits, but the playbook of actions needed to keep the bloated food system functioning is less of a secret these days.

When my co-hosts and I began interviewing experts for our new podcast series, Edible Empire, we wanted to map out this modern playbook and uncover who really pays the hidden costs of our food. What we found is that today’s corporate giants rely on the exact same mechanisms of control as the empires of the past. As political economists like Professors Raj Patel and Harriet Friedmann point out, the global food system has always been structured around these regimes of power, transitioning from colonial monopolies to corporate ones. Today, as Professors Jennifer Clapp and Phil Howard warn, an unprecedented concentration of corporate power means a handful of firms now dictate global agricultural policy, market access, and ultimately, what ends up on our plates.

Palm oil is a perfect example of food imperialism–the ubiquitous, often hidden ingredient across foods and cosmetics, driving catastrophic deforestation across Southeast Asia. Researchers like Professor Jonathan Robins have documented how this versatile crop came to be embedded in global capitalism, while activists and researchers on the ground, such as Farwiza Farhan and Professor Helena Varkkey, see the direct ecological and social fallout—vital rainforests cleared and Indigenous livelihoods lost to feed Western consumerism under the guise of sustainable development.

The same pattern plays out in the intensive dairy farms half a world away in Aotearoa New Zealand, where the work of researchers like Drs Mike Joy and Milena Bojovic highlights the severe local ecological degradation caused by industrial farming. The harm extends far beyond New Zealand’s borders, however; as artist and researcher Dr Crystal Bennes notes, this intensive system relies on phosphate fertiliser extracted from the illegally occupied territory of Western Sahara, where half the population has been displaced to refugee camps in Algeria. It is a textbook example of hidden externalities: wealth is accumulated in the Global North, while the geopolitical, social, and environmental damage is borne by vulnerable populations in the Global South, hidden from view from consumers.

Awareness is Everything

Neoliberalism has created extreme freedom in food markets, allowing continued profiteering as ecosystems collapse and livelihoods fail–Mustapha left his home in The Gambia because his family could no longer find enough fish to sell at the market, and no money meant no food. He stepped into a small wooden fishing boat and took the 11-day journey to Tenerife knowing that 1-in-5 people who took that journey would die. 

He was a lucky one—he made it to Spain and found a job (most days) in the greenhouses in Almería. Living in a slum made from discarded pallets and greenhouse plastic, he could save enough money to send a little home to support his sisters and parents. But as investigators like Hazel Healy and Brigitte Wear have revealed, the fish back home continue to be exploited by the Global North. Their populations have been destroyed by industrial overextraction for the production of fishmeal. These pellets have been fed for decades to carnivorous salmon in thousands of farms dotted around the fjords of Norway—salmon that are then exported to wealthy countries around the world. As West African marine ecologists and activists like Dr Aliou Ba and researchers like María Alonso Martínez have documented, this creates a bleak cycle where local food security is stolen to supply luxury seafood abroad.

This is food imperialism.

Ultimately, our damaging food system relies on a lack of public awareness to continue; the inner workings of these complex, global supply chains are too easily hidden from view. But awareness is everything, and there are alternative paths forward. Thinkers and activists like Anitra Nelson, Million Belay, Ali Thomas, and Chris Smaje offer powerful visions of hope rooted in degrowth, food sovereignty, minimising food waste, and agroecology. They show that smallholder farming and local food networks can dismantle this corporate stranglehold, replacing exploitation with equity.

To challenge this system, we first have to see it clearly. We need to understand where our food comes from, and recognize that the choices we are presented with on supermarket shelves are not really choices at all.

Neal Haddaway, Benjamin Eitelberg, and Emma Strutt are the creators of Edible Empire, a new podcast series exploring the hidden costs of the global food system. You can listen to the full interviews and subscribe to the series at www.thesalmonandthetomato.org/listen. 

The post Edible Empire: How Our Food Supply Chains are Destroying the Planet appeared first on Untold.

Sometimes you feel out of place, but being in the middle is not a loss. It’s the point from where you can see two worlds, while others see only one. I feel I’m a crescent that doesn’t need to become sun to shine. 

These were the words of Tamara Al Zool, the 23 years old who goes by her art name TÄRA. She has reached millions of Italians through the mainstream TV-program Le Iene in May with a monologue on identity that soon became viral on social media. 

A week later, her debut EP “Zefiro” went out on a date that could not be more important for her: May 15, the day of the Nakba, a day and a history she has always known from her parents and grandparents who lived it. Today, touring Italy and Europe with concerts and events, she is taking on the Italian music scene with a style that, according to Rolling Stone MENA, “Italy has no category for”. 

To learn more about her artistic journey, UntoldMag sat with TÄRA for an exclusive interview. 

 

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Born in Italy to Palestinian parents, TÄRA is making waves with her own genre. She calls it Arab&B, a new type of R&B where she mixes Arabic, English, Italian (and at times also French) in such a natural way that one would not imagine that at one point in her life, she had challenges in feeling her identity.  It would not seem so either when, two years ago, at her very first appearance on TV for the music program X Factor Italia, she made it very clear why she was there: “I came to X-factor to represent, to be a voice”, she said, wearing a keffiyeh as she performed Ariana Grande’s song 7 Rings with some parts reinterpreted in Arabic. 

Palestine – and all that comes with it, from the ongoing genocide to resistance and memory –, the Arabic speaking world, and the Mediterranean as a whole are constant themes in her songs, through which the listener can soon appreciate that TÄRA makes music with universal messages. Like in “Diaspora”, which draws a line between the Palestinians expelled from their land and the Southern Italians who leave their homes behind out of necessity. 

In the “Petra” music video, shot in Tunis, within 3 minutes the music takes the listener through a romantic journey from Maghreb to Mashreq. Not to mention her rendition of Ya Helwa Ciao, her Arabic rendition of Bella Ciao, the song adopted by the Italian Resistance calling for freedom and an end to fascism, so popular among Palestinians (and generally among minorities fighting for their rights). 

Stefano Nanni: Identity is a recurrent topic in your songs. But who is TÄRA before and after becoming the artist, and has that helped in affirming your own identity?

TÄRA: The beauty of all that I’m living is that before, during and after, it’s always me. I can definitely say that my public persona is not a ‘character’ but genuinely who I am, expressing my values without fear. 

It has not always been easy to belong to different worlds at the same time, but I learned with time that being in the middle is an additional perspective rather than a deficiency. And I think I grew in awareness and courage to translate my innate self into art. Being able to represent all these middle lands is certainly not an easy task, but it’s like my whole world is made of many different points of view. 

For example, in the song “Petra” we chose Tunisia as a destination because it perfectly encompasses my multifaceted world, highlighting the beautiful similarities among seemingly different cultures and transcending societal divisions.

SN: Still on identity, in the very powerful music video “Beauty standards”, you seem to affirm something also about the type of aesthetic you want to embrace. 

T: With this EP I am going through a whole journey, including certain beauty standards because it is a theme that I have personally experienced, having felt ‘not beautiful enough’ according to certain norms imposed by society. 

I am sure many other girls have experienced and continue to experience this type of ‘discomfort’ – that’s what I call it. With that video I wanted to represent, through a short monologue, how the beauty you have today, even if it may not conform to mainstream models represented by the media, actually carries history and tradition. 

It is important to acknowledge and remember that the people before you have fought to make you be here, so you have to bring these unique features, with pride, not shame.

SN: Do you feel somehow that your music is able to represent people who often had no one to identify with? And can it contribute to more unity?

T: Let’s say that my goal is precisely to represent those often unrepresented: The too many Italians with foreign roots caught in the middle like me. If in my own small way, my music succeeded in attracting even two or three persons who feel I am doing something positive for them, then I am very happy and I hope it will go even better. 

I don’t want to sound too utopian, but it would be nice to get to a point where we don’t even have to make all these divisions among all of us anymore, and then be able to live in unity simply as human beings. I have a strong desire for my music to foster unity among all people, dreaming a world without such divisions, where cultural beauty is celebrated by all humans. I hope that my art will play a role in all this.

SN: How are you handling success? Did your direct relations with fans change by becoming so popular? 

T: When it comes to my relationship with fans I think it is even improving, as I continue to live the direct connection with them through social media, receiving immense support and love. I think it is a very beautiful way of living this experience. 

At the same time, it is obvious that social media can be a double-edged sword, as the toxicity of certain users brings also a lot of negativity. Sometimes it’s hard to confront that, especially hate speech and comments about Palestine, but I am learning to use indifference as a more effective strategy, because in the end, those who want to hate stick to anything in front of them.

Generally, about success, I think I’m living a fairly quiet relationship with it, actually. I see it as a means, I have the privilege to access a wide audience, to share the messages I want to transmit, especially about Palestine and the genocide we’re still suffering. So why not do it? Indeed, in certain places like on mainstream TV there seem to be certain rules about not talking about certain topics, but I am approaching them, as much as possible, with my naturalness and my identity, without hiding anything. 

SN: On the power to use popularity to take a stance, recently in Italy there were some controversies about the words of Francesco De Gregori, a very popular singer, who said that he “feels embarrassed when an artist takes a political position”. What do you think of that?

T: I have honestly not read what he said, and I don’t want to decontextualize his words, but my opinion is a totally different one: I want my art to give a voice to the voiceless and to minorities. 

As an artist, I believe I have the power and responsibility to educate younger generations and empower those who might otherwise feel silenced. I don’t want to live in a world where somebody grows up fearing that exposing themself is something that leads them to something negative. I don’t want that, I want something different.

The post Giving Italy a Sound It Has No Category For: An Interview with Palestinian-Italian Singer TÄRA appeared first on Untold.

Calypse is us, and at the same time she speaks to us: the conscience of a generation condemned to resist and survive.

The comic has been created by the UntoldMag collective together with artist Francesca Cogni.

The post Abu Calypse, Episode 4: “Rarer Than Diamonds” appeared first on Untold.

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.

And this is precisely where the problem begins.

Because Jared Kushner didn’t arrive in Albania with a shovel in his hand. He didn’t  personally put up wire fences. He didn’t personally declare himself a strategic investor. He didn’t  personally change the logic of protected areas. He didn’t personally place the Albanian state at the service of luxury tourism. Kushner may be the international symbol of the arrogance of money. But the door to Albania is not opened from Manhattan. It is opened from Tirana.

And in Tirana, for more than a decade, the political key has been called Edi Rama.

Ypi’s article clearly sees the danger: Albanian nature is being turned into a luxury commodity, the coastline into an investment catalogue, the islands into yacht dreams, while the people remain spectators on their own land. 

But where it should strike by name, the article begins to speak through fog. It speaks of the “Albanian government”, of “global capitalism”, of “oligarchy”, of “the rules of the system”. All of these are true. But the system does not sign documents by itself. Oligarchy does not vote laws by itself. Global capitalism does not command the Albanian police by itself. And “transition” does not appear at press conferences to defend the resort.

This is done by the government. This is done by power. This is done by Rama.

The Absent Seller

In this sense, Ypi’s article is critical, even though it feels somewhat as if it has been guided by someone, but it is not severe. It is elegant, but not sufficiently fair. It carries a certain hypocrisy of sensitivity toward the protesters, while remaining soft toward the political architect of the model those protesters are opposing. It understands the revolt, but it does not fully name the blame.

The title itself is meaningful: “Look at the protests Jared Kushner has caused in Albania”. But no, the protests are caused by Edi Rama. The protests are caused by a captured state. The protests are caused by a governing model that has turned Albania into a workshop of permits, towers, concessions, and strategic investors. 

But in Ypi’s article, the blame is placed on Kushner. The foreigner is a convenient villain. He is easier to hit. He is safer to mock. Especially for a British or European audience that knows the Trump family as a symbol of arrogant wealth and narcissism.

But for Albanians, the problem does not begin with Ivanka “discovering” an island from a yacht. The problem begins with a Prime Minister who behaves as if Albania were private property to be presented at investors’ tables. The problem begins with a state that bows before billionaires and rises against its own citizens. The problem begins when the government says “there is no final agreement”, while on the ground fences, private guards, machinery, and mass violence already appear.

This is the moment where the article should have become sharper. It should have asked: who allowed this? Who defended it? Who normalised it? Who used European integration as a cover for the privatisation of public assets? Who has turned “development” into the most beautiful word for the disappearance of Albanian nature and property?

Ypi says beautifully that Albania is not for sale. But she does not go all the way in saying who is behaving like the seller.

A Theoretical Fog

The article also carries an old habit of academic left-wing thought: whenever the blame becomes too concrete, it is dispersed into abstractions. It is not Rama, it is capitalism. It is not the government, it is globalisation. It is not laws made for clients, it is ‘the rules of the game’. It is not power, it is ‘the system’.

This is comfortable. In fact, very comfortable. It is like sleeping peacefully in the large bed of theory, where the ideological ghosts of the 20th century whisper that individuals do not matter, only structures matter. Somewhere in that theoretical calm, even the shadow of Joseph Stalin (with whom Ypi has personal experiences) through history and memory  may appear as the distant echo of a world where everything was explained through system, class, and history, while personal responsibility disappeared into the fog of dialectics.

But Albanians do not have the luxury of living in theoretical fog. They live in a country where decisions have names, signatures have dates, companies have owners, permits have institutions, police have orders, and the government has a prime minister.

Therefore, when we speak about Narta, Sazan, Zvërnec, Rrjoll, and the Albanian coastline, it is not enough to speak about a “development model”. We must speak about a model of governance. And Rama’s model of governance is clear: Albania as a luxury showcase for foreigners, as a construction site for the connected, as a tourist postcard for propaganda, and as a country of emigration for its own citizens.

Albania 2030

The greatest irony is that Rama sells this as modernisation. Whenever a major project appears, we are asked to see it as a step toward Europe. As if Europe were a private resort. As if European integration were measured by the number of luxury hotels. As if flamingos, lagoons, monasteries, public property, local communities, history, and national culture were provincial obstacles to the grand dream of “Albania 2030”.

In reality, this is not Europe. It is a new orientalism with a European façade. It is the idea that a small country must accept anything, as long as the investor is big enough. It is the philosophy of submission with a smile: give the land, give the sea, give the island, give the law, give the silence, and in return receive the promise that one day you will look modern in tourism brochures.

Here Ypi’s article has one great merit: it understands that the protest is not simply about the environment. It is about dignity. It is about public property. It is about the fundamental question: to whom does Albania belong?

But again, she stops before the next question: who is treating Albania as if it no longer belongs to Albanians?

The answer is not only Jared Kushner. The answer is not only Ivanka Trump. The answer is not only global capitalism. The answer is also the Albanian power structure that opens the door to this model, publicly defends it, calls it development, sells it as vision, and then accuses citizens of being old-fashioned, politicised, or enemies of progress.

At this point, the article is softer than it should be. It criticises the socialist government, but it does not dismantle Rama as a political figure. It does not place him at the centre of responsibility. It does not treat him as the architect of a system where the strategic investor is more important than the strategic citizen, where public property is weaker than private capital, where the police often appear more careful with power than with the people.

The Ugliness of Power

Ypi writes beautifully about the young people, the protest, the songs, the flowers, the cleaning of the streets. This part is humane and fair. The Albanian protest deserves to be seen as civic, peaceful, and dignified. But the beauty of the protest must not soften the ugliness of power. 

A people who give flowers to the police do not absolve the state when the state remains silent before violence. A protest that cleans the square should not be used as moral decoration for an analysis that does not fully clean up political responsibility.

The article also strikes at the old opposition, and here it is right. The Albanian opposition has for years failed to build moral trust. It has often been part of the same theatre, the same bargains, the same culture of transition. 

That is why the protest is strong precisely because it is not its property. The protest is cleaner than the parties. More credible than exhausted leaderships. More alive than the television studios where the same people are recycled, people who have commented on every crisis and helped produce them.

But if the opposition is captured by the past, the government is captured by the present. And the present has a name, power, mandate, and responsibility.

In the end, Ypi calls Albania a light for Europe. This is a beautiful idea. But Albania cannot be a light for Europe if, inside the country, the state behaves like a real estate agency. It cannot be a light if the government sells nature and public property as promotional assets. It cannot be a light if the people must take to the streets to remind the prime minister that the country is not his property.

Albania can become a light only when protest does not remain poetry for European newspapers, but turns into concrete accountability: suspension of projects lacking transparency, a full investigation of decision-making with arrests and imprisonment, including of PM Edi Rama, real protection of protected areas, judicial oversight, publication of the project documents, an end to private violence, and the end of laws made for select investors.

Therefore, Ypi’s article should be read, but also challenged. It is valuable because it carries the voice of the Albanian protest into an international newspaper whether suggested by someone or not, we will not enter into that story, because we know it. But it is insufficient because it leaves Rama more protected than he should be. It attacks the system, but not enough the man who has built, decorated, and sold this system as “Renaissance”.

In Albania, the problem is not only that Jared Kushner wants a resort.

The problem is that Edi Rama behaves as if Albania was born to offer that resort to someone.

And this is why the protest must not stop at the slogan “Albania is not for sale”.

It must go further:

Albania is not for sale, because Albania is not the property of the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister must be investigated and arrested immediately if he does not resign.

*This article was originally published in Albanian in AlbaniaHistory on June 12. This English translation is published with permission. 

The post A Convenient Villain: How Blaming Kushner for Albania’s Protests Stops at Edi Rama’s Gate – A Response to Lea Ypi’s Article in The Guardian appeared first on Untold.

“You know, Diana, we are in Germany. We can’t use words like genocide or apartheid. We don’t know who will be in the audience, and I want to protect you. If an extreme right person interrupts, I’ll have to interfere and control the conversation. I am totally with you, I understand you, but you know the history here, the culture of memory. Someone might be offended, or not understand you.”

With these words, a German scholar, well established and working in a reputable institute, tried to convince me to choose my words.

It was October 2024, one year into Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Lebanon was also under attack.

And I had just realized that the panel I was invited to, addressing Beirut’s history, would talk about the city without addressing the war Israel was waging against it. So I told him it made no sense for me to speak only about history or music while ignoring the ongoing destruction, erasure, and genocide in Palestine and Lebanon.

He then invited me for a coffee to “discuss” my intervention.

The panel was meant to celebrate Beirut as a city always on the edge, a city that loses itself year after year. The city of intellectuals and culture, the city of cafés and books. A city worth mourning, but only in its metaphors.

Not the suburbs. Not the South. Not the Bekaa. Not that Lebanon.

Not the people whose histories disturb. Their ways of mourning, their rituals of grief, their resistance, are not worthy of their attention, nor part of this story. Maybe they are too mournful, too religious, not refined enough for their taste, for this imagined Beirut, cleaned, curated and made to fit a certain language.

So of course, better to leave aside the ongoing destruction by Israel, the ethnic cleansing, the dehumanization of an entire community. The stories of entire villages in the south being erased. The noise of the histories and memories I would bring into the conversation.

On that same day, a rocket hit Ras el-Nabaa, less than 200 meters from my parents’ home, where my aunts and their families were staying. Just meters away, seconds away… yet a million lifetimes away from me. Bombs, erasure, families gone, memories shattered.

The silence goes on, relentless.

And yet, here I was, sitting there, safe in Berlin, listening to him asking me to watch my words. To be careful with my language, not to disturb the fragility of German history.

He kept reassuring me that he would “protect” me, in case some “extreme right wing” guy, the usual monster everyone fears, would interrupt the panel. Because my words would offend him. Would offend them.

Our words scare them. Our history still unsettles them.

But for him, there was no problem using this fear. No problem disciplining me through his own imagined violence. His history, his memory, was something I was expected to accept. To carry.

***

Since October 7, I have heard so many European scholars, people who built their careers on our region, tell me quietly, in private, that they are “with Palestine”, or that they are ashamed of their government.

Quietly. Always so quietly.

But when it comes to speaking publicly, to standing against what is happening in their own institutions, their silence is so loud. They speak about freedom of expression. They love that phrase. But when it comes to Israel, or to questioning German memory and the structural racism it created in their institutions, suddenly it disappears.

Since I became German, some even laugh about it. They come to me, joking, almost hysterically, creepily: “Now you are part of it. Our German guilt. Our memory.”

They laugh and laugh. And my world turns upside down. They laugh while my memories shatter, piece by piece. They laugh while everything around me loses meaning. They laugh while I live this constant dissonance. Here, in Berlin, everything is calm, yet so disturbing. There, everything is collapsing, yet it makes so much sense.

They laugh and laugh, in silence, living their everyday lives, convinced they are safe in their own small, individual worlds. As if safety was natural. As if it was not built on distance. On silence. On what is not said.

***

It is 9am. A peaceful, sunny day in Berlin. March 2026.

I am sitting in the office. I hear a sound.

Drones.

I feel it in my body. I move in my chair, and I look around. Does anyone else hear it? No one reacts. I look again. I am in Berlin.

I have told myself, with a lot of guilt, that the sound of drones is something new to me. That I wasn’t used to it, nor internalized it. Not yet. Not like my family and friends there. They had become hunted by that sound. I kept telling myself this was not my trauma.

But my body tells me otherwise.

It reminds me that it has already absorbed this fear, the fear of something hunting us from above. It didn’t forget the shiver it creates. Fear travels with us. It does not stay there, nor respect borders. It sits in the body, quiet sometimes, then suddenly very loud.

My body has carried this for years. The fear of planes haunting the sky. We used to call it umm kāmel. It watched us. Today they call it zanāni. Now it hunts, speaks, erases you like a bug.

My heart starts beating fast. I look outside. I am still in Berlin. It’s just the neighbor cutting the grass in this nice, fancy and quiet neighborhood. But in my body, it is a drone. Following me here. Into this calm, safe life.

I ask my colleague: do you feel something?

She says yes.

For a second, I think maybe she feels it too. Maybe she understands something of this. Maybe I am not that hunted.

Then she says: yes, this weather… this long winter in Berlin. It’s so depressing.

Yes, I say. The winter.

***

It always comes back to the same moment. The same questions. The same hunted memories.

February 2024. Sitting at a table with German scholars. More than 20,000 people already killed in Gaza.

One of them, a specialist of the region, was speaking loudly, almost proudly. He was talking about the Israeli war on Gaza, its repercussions in Europe, and the pro-Israel stance of universities. He criticized those who expected more from German scholars.

Then I said: “But German scholars are not really fighting back, nor willing to take a clear stand. Maybe this is the moment to give something back to the places you build your carriers on. Even a little.”

Something changed.

His eyes turned red, his face tightened. He looked straight at me and asked me:

“But do you condemn Hamas?”

The post “Now You Are Part of It. Our German Guilt. Our Memory” appeared first on Untold.

Following the controversial agreement between Italian PM Giorgia Meloni and Albanian PM Edi Rama to process asylum seekers outside the EU, two detention centres in the port of Shengjin and the village of Gjader were opened in October 2024. 

Despite being located in northern Albania, the camps are completely under Italian control and have shifted to serving as ‘deportation hubs.’ 

Shrouded in secrecy, little is known about the deal. Albanian and Italian authorities rarely answer Freedom of Information Requests about it. The public only knows what officials announce sparingly to the press. The number of migrants behind the grey walls of the detention centre is ever-changing, and no official records are made public. 

Currently, 90 people are held in Gjader. Usually picked directly at sea and dumped in cells, but called “guests” in the official forms. 

Access to the centres is extremely restricted for human rights observers. Through the few testimonies of survivors, Italian and European MEPs who visited, it was revealed that detainees face isolation and languish without communal or recreational spaces.

For Fioralba Duma, an Italo-Albanian activist and member of the grassroots migrant and civil rights collective Mesdhe Collective in Albania, detention centres are impossible to be humane. “This is a ‘black hole’ site invented for this occasion. The environment in detention centres is extremely pathogenic,” she adds, recalling the case of an Albanian man committing suicide in migration detention in the UK. 

Whilst no deaths have been recorded so far, former detainee Younouse Kone revealed to journalists that he witnessed two suicide attempts in the short time he spent in Gjader. Likewise, the facility’s ‘Critical Incidents’ sheet, shown only to MEPs, listed multiple incidents of self-harm. 

Albania’s Complicated Journey with Democracy 

After a successful tourism campaign, rebranding Albania’s image from a poverty-ridden, isolated country of emigration to an idyllic getaway, drawing investment by the likes of the Kushner and Trump families, Prime Minister Edi Rama has been on a fervent crusade to raise Albania’s status as a ‘success case’ in a region often marred by political and economic instability. 

Tracing back to Albania’s troubled past, the agreement is problematic. According to Sidorela Vatnikaj, a Tirana-based activist with Mesdhe, “if Albania were really a fully democratic state, the deal wouldn’t have happened. Albanian citizens only got to find out about the deal once it was signed by Rama, and Italian media started to report on it.” 

“This is a worrisome sign for the state of public transparency and an indicator of how the Albanian government could be acting in other issues. It shows that anything can happen without the public’s consent. The Rama-Meloni deal is the most visible violation of democracy and the state of law,” Vatnikaj explains.  

Indeed, the campaign hasn’t gone unchallenged. For Vatnikaj, one of the most acute problems was how mainstream Albanian media reported on their movement. “Albanian media framed our march as ‘anti-immigrant’ mobilisations trying to create a false narrative that these are ‘racist’ protests.”

Ranking 83rd on the World Press Freedom Index, media independence in the country is compromised by conflicts of interest between the business and political worlds and inadequate legal frameworks. 

Duma also notes that the group has suffered intimidation, directly affecting local organisers, one of whom, based in Lezhe, had their mother fired from her civil service position due to her activism – later reinstated after a complaint. 

Two other Albanian activists were detained for going to the opening ceremony of the Shengjin detention centre when Meloni was present, and hanging a protest banner from the rooftop of a building and using a sound system to play the announcement of the occupation of Albania by Italian troops during WWII. “We have the right to protest this, and we did so peacefully without causing any damage, yet our comrades were still detained”, Duma explains.

Activists believe that the deal is enforcing neocolonial dynamics, with Vatnikaj pointing out that the arrangement breaches Albania’s sovereignty for the sake of its ‘special relationship’ with Italy: “In essence, we handed over parts of our land to a completely Italian-run, Italian-funded administration. Are we actually an equal and respected part of the European community when we are being used as a “dumping ground” for migrants?”

For Duma the deal is a form of blackmail: “It implies that we have to accept things like that because of the financial or political support we have received from Italy regarding EU accession talks” or the supposed ‘welcome’ Albanians received in the 1990s as migrants in Italy, which in Duma’s words had nothing to do with the government and all to do with mutual aid groups, local communities, churches and individuals helping out of kindness.

How Activists Fight Back

“These camps were built for our parents in Europe,” one of the Mesdhe activists explains whilst giving a speech during a protest. The agreement now forces Albania to confront the fact that most of its citizens remain a target for ‘fortress Europe’. 

From violent pushbacks to detention, exploitation and criminalisation, the generations of Albanians who experienced the aftermath of regime collapse and mass displacement have had their life trajectories changed by such restrictions. The society they left behind was also deeply changed by their absence, with whole villages being almost emptied. 

For Albanian activists, this reality fuels their incentives to protest regressive government policies that do not represent the country’s historical experience. 

Duma says that for the Albanian activists, the agreement is viewed through the lens of whether it adheres to Albania’s historical memory as a displaced people and to Albanian values of hospitality. Vatnikaj adds that the deal goes against Albania’s very core as a nation, where “every family has a story to tell about the hardships Albanian immigrants have faced abroad”. 

Activists mobilised quite quickly in response despite the novelty of the situation. When the first ship arrived, they “welcomed” it with a banner reading “The European dream ends here.”

However, it took hard work before the group managed to get outside the walls of the Gjader detention camp in November 2025. Vatnikaj recalls that when they first started organising, they needed to figure out many things, as immigration in that context hadn’t been an issue in Albania before: “We mobilised around the unifying message of standing for human and migrant rights”. 

Solidarity beyond borders has been essential for the movement. Vatnikaj explains that Albanian activists are working with collectives in Italy and Europe, marching together, and organising assemblies: “We need knowledge, and we need people to fight with. Cross-border solidarity is essential.” 

In Duma’s experience as an Albanian migrant in Italy, striving to connect Albanian and Italian activist circles has been a lifelong aspiration. This goal has powered her resolve to create a shared space where activists can make meaningful exchanges. “Italian activists have helped us a lot with capacity-building and information-sharing. Now we have been building these platforms to join forces and create solidarity networks, with second-generation migrants in Italy being a crucial link between Italian and Albanian-based activists. Having them by our side is giving us hope. It is a really powerful gesture that they have joined us, and now we can say we are friends in the truest sense,” she adds. 

As a result of one of those assemblies, the idea for the collective march was born, which is now set to become an annual action for as long as the detention centres remain. . 

Activism has also been happening on an institutional level through advocating as a coalition with Italian parliamentary deputies and producing research on the topic. Activists have also been pursuing a legal challenge to the agreement, despite an underwhelming response from EU legal circles. 

Some wins on individual cases have also been scored when Italian courts or the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled against their deportation to Albania, and it has been proven a fruitful avenue, as many of the detainees sent to Albania have been returned. 

The Way Ahead 

With economic development resulting from tourism and construction, the issue of migration, that has always preoccupied public discourse, is now shifting from Albanians as migrants themselves to the country slowly becoming a destination for seasonal and manual labour, as workers from as far as the Philippines or Colombia come to the country in hopes of making a living.

Vatnikaj with her collective have been assisting Nigerian migrants coming to Albania to work highlighting a small shift towards Albania becoming a destination for foreign workers: “It is not uncommon to have their rights violated, so now immigration becomes a more visible phenomenon and for us we can demonstrate how exploitation and abuse can manifest in the Balkans”. 

Whilst activists prepare for further mobilisations, Duma says that it is paramount for them to expose the suffering of those in the migration routes who are often trivialised: “The far right has done a lot of damage by infiltrating people’s minds and making them accept this situation as a positive thing that needs to be done.” 

Vatnikaj adds, ”Between Albanian, Italian and European officials, this agreement is talked about as a success, but to us, activists and ordinary people alike, this is a moral failure.”

Vatnikaj now finds herself disillusioned with the ideals she was raised with. Growing up hearing that in Europe, states respect human rights and civic freedoms, many of these beliefs don’t hold anymore. “As migrants, we have experienced abuse, discrimination and racism abroad, and it is hard for me to believe that our country is now doing the same,” says Vatnikaj. 

Emerging from a decades-long dictatorship, many grew up hearing phrases such as “Albania needs to be part of Europe because Europe is a Utopia. Europe is the dream,” because of the presumed respect for democracy, prosperity and freedom. “Now that we see how those in the margins are treated, we don’t really have any state to look up to as the blueprint for all those freedoms. It feels like we lost our dream,” Vatnikaj explains.

With Western countries looking to expand and emulate this model, this is an uphill battle. The deal between Italy and Albania is not the first attempt by an EU government to use a third country as a return hub. In attempts to externalise asylum and create offshore processing centres, after a short-lived arrangement with Rwanda, the UK is courting Macedonia, after being rejected by Albania for a similar arrangement. In that dim backdrop, activists continue their fight. 

The post “These Camps Were Built for our Parents”: Albanian Activists Resist Italy’s Offshore Detention Experiment appeared first on Untold.