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

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

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

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

The Economics of Dumping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Major corporate players are embedded in this supply chain. The French firm CHIMIREC established a Moroccan subsidiary in 2020 to produce “Energy Substitution Fuel” (ESF) for cement manufacturers. When contacted, CHIMIREC Maroc denied any involvement in European waste imports and exports, stating it processes exclusively domestic waste. LafargeHolcim’s Ecoval subsidiary is the country’s primary industrial waste treatment provider. Ciments du Maroc, owned by Germany’s Heidelberg Materials, operates a grinding center near the Jorf Lasfar port, a documented entry point for European waste shipments. LafargeHolcim and Ciments du Maroc did not respond to requests for comment.

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

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

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

The Loopholes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Human Cost

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the government approved more than two million tons of new waste imports from various European countries in August 2024, activist Mohamed Benata of the Environmental Assembly of Northern Morocco called it “incompatible with the spirit of citizenship” and unconstitutional. In 2016, similar outrage over Italian waste imports sparked widespread protests and social media campaigns, forcing the government to suspend the imports. Yet despite this resistance, the waste continues to arrive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe

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

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

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

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

Beyond the Package

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

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

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

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

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

Hidden Costs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unequal Maps

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

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

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

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

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

Follow the Data

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

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

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

So we decided to create it.

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

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

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

Expansion and Deforestation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food Insecurity

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

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

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

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

Elusive Answers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he told the room what SpaceX is actually for: “We want to make Star Trek real. We want to make Starfleet Academy real.” 

This was not an aside. It was a mission statement, delivered to the people who sign US defense checks. He went on to describe a future of “big spaceships” exploring alien civilizations. “That is the goal!” he said. “And that is what I think the public thinks of when they think of Space Force!”

The speech was revealing – not for what it promised, but for what it concealed. It was the clearest example yet of a pattern that has been building for decades: Silicon Valley’s tech elite borrowing the ideas, images, and authority of science fiction while throwing out everything that made those stories politically meaningful. 

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, in their recent book Muskism, argue that the right question is not “who is Musk?” but “what is Musk a symptom of?” – treating him not as an individual but as the representative of a whole worldview, just as we speak of “Fordism”. That worldview is expressed through science fiction: not as decoration, but as the medium that makes its accumulation strategies feel natural, necessary, and inevitable. This is not to say that Science Fiction precedes or causes these projects – it is part of the cognitive and institutional scaffolding within which certain ambitions become thinkable and certain power grabs feel like common sense.

No example makes this clearer than Musk’s own words. Because Star Trek, the franchise he claims to be bringing to life, stands for almost everything he and SpaceX are not.

In Gene Roddenberry’s vision, the future is not built by billionaires or defense contractors. The United Federation of Planets has abolished money. Humanity has left capitalism, nationalism, and militarism behind. The Enterprise does not explore space for profit or military advantage; it explores for knowledge, diplomacy, and shared understanding. Starfleet is not an army; it is a peacekeeping and science organization. This is not background detail. It is the whole point of Star Trek.

Strategic Looting

What Musk is doing – what Silicon Valley has perfected – is what I call “strategic looting.” They take the look and feel of science fiction while throwing out its politics. They want the Enterprise, but with defense contracts. They want the warp drive, but not the equal society that made it possible. They want the adventure, but not the social change that gave it meaning.

Musk is not alone in this. It is how the whole tech industry operates. These companies have learned that science fiction’s hopeful imagery can be put to work while its warnings are quietly ignored.

Peter Thiel named his surveillance company Palantir after the all-seeing stones in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – objects used by those hungry for power. Tolkien wrote them as instruments of corruption; Thiel turned them into a brand for a company whose main early investor was In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, and whose business is selling mass surveillance to governments and militaries. The goal, as Slobodian and Tarnoff show, was never to escape the state but to vassalize it: to make the government’s exercise of power dependent on purchasing services from a private monopoly. The look is borrowed. The warning is thrown away. The contract is signed.

A Manifesto for Silicon Valley

The depth of this project has now been made explicit. In April 2026, Palantir posted a 22-point manifesto on X – a condensed version of CEO Alex Karp and head of corporate affairs Nicholas Zamiska’s book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, which racked up 35 million views in days. 

The document calls for reinstating the military draft, declares that Silicon Valley owes a “moral debt” to the United States, argues that the “engineering elite” must build AI weapons rather than “obsession-driven apps,” and dismisses non-Western cultures as “middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.” 

As I argue at length in a recent article in Science as Culture, the book is not really philosophy. It is a sales pitch. Establish that Silicon Valley owes a debt to the American state. Call out Google, Amazon, and Meta as companies that wasted that debt building social media. Present Palantir as the one company that actually paid up. The conclusion follows: Palantir is not just a tech firm – it is the rightful heir to state power. 

Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat put it plainly: 

“Palantir sells operational software to defence, intelligence, immigration and police agencies. These 22 points aren’t philosophy floating in space; they’re the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it’s advocating.” 

The Tolkien name provides the mythology. The manifesto provides the politics. The defense contracts provide the money.

In each case, the pattern is the same: take the technology, the imagery, the sense that the future is inevitable. Throw out the warnings, the criticism, the politics that gave those stories their meaning. William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) invented the word “cyberspace” and imagined it as a corporate battleground where human beings are just another resource to be mined – that vision becomes a product demo. Foundation’s galactic civilization becomes a justification for private space colonies. And now, Star Trek’s dream of humanity working together becomes a pitch to generals.

Materialized Science Fiction

The setting of Musk’s speech matters. He was not at a fan convention or a tech conference. He was speaking to the people who run the US military and decide where its money goes. When he said Space Force should make people think of Star Trek, he was not talking about exploration. He was pitching a military vision wrapped in the language of a show millions of people love.

This is “materialized science fiction”: the process by which science fiction stories are turned into real projects, with their original meaning stripped out and replaced with something that serves those already in power. These tech billionaires do not misread their source material by accident. They understand it well enough to know exactly which parts to keep and which to discard. The distortion is deliberate.

Slobodian and Tarnoff’s Muskism offers the most rigorous account yet of what this political project looks like in practice. By 2025, they show, SpaceX accounted for 95 percent of all orbital launches in the United States – a position that made the Pentagon and NASA “deeply reliant on Musk,” making SpaceX the de facto gatekeeper for government access to low Earth orbit. They call the endpoint of this logic “sovereignty-as-a-service”: “the logic of the modern internet platform, scaled up to the level of the nation state”. 

The wager of Muskism, they write, is that “sovereignty, going forward, will be infrastructural before it is territorial — defined by access to bandwidth, compute, launch cadence, and orbital real estate as much as by borders and bureaucracies”. What is sold as independence through technology is, in practice, entry into Musk’s walled garden – to which he holds the master key. 

Their analysis is indispensable. But my argument here goes one step further. For Slobodian and Tarnoff, science fiction functions primarily as what they call “financial fabulism” – “science fiction in the mouth of the right entrepreneur could conjure capital from thin air”. That is true as far as it goes. The argument here is that Science Fiction does not only conjure capital at the pitch stage; it continues to accompany and amplify the accumulation strategies as they unfold – part of the cognitive and institutional scaffolding within which certain ambitions remain thinkable, certain power grabs feel like common sense, and certain futures get built while others get closed off. 

Muskism names the symptom. Materialized science fiction explains one of the mechanisms by which it reproduces itself. 

A Tool for Grabbing Power

In a recent essay, Slobodian and Tarnoff push the argument further: where Fordism offered mass consumption and post-Fordism offered financialized aspiration, Muskism offers something qualitatively different. Not a social contract but what they call a “fan contract” – loyalty rewarded with amplified reach and a share of the attention economy, combined with the threat of expulsion for those marked as outside the walls. If Fordism and post-Fordism were, in different ways, organized to secure social peace, Muskism, they argue, is oriented toward social war.

What connects Thiel’s surveillance business, Zuckerberg’s digital world, Andreessen’s push against regulation, and Musk’s military space programme is not just a love of science fiction. It is a shared political goal: replacing democratic control with tech industry control, and using borrowed science fiction prestige to make that look acceptable. In their hands, science fiction stops being a literature of hope and becomes a tool for grabbing power.

Star Trek’s Federation was not built by tech billionaires or defense contractors. It came from humanity choosing, together, to cooperate rather than compete, to share rather than exploit. That choice came after humanity nearly destroyed itself. The Enterprise does not fly to escape Earth’s problems. It flies because those problems have already been solved.

Musk’s version turns this inside out. His spaceships are not a reward for fixing things here. They are a way to avoid fixing them. Why tackle climate change when you can go to Mars? Why fight inequality when you can promise abundance in space? Why repair democracy when you can build a private kingdom on another planet? 

A Guest List for the Few

As Slobodian and Tarnoff observe, Mars functions in Muskism as a “failover mechanism” for the civilizational collapse Musk learned to expect from science fiction – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy opens with the destruction of Earth; Asimov’s Foundation begins with the collapse of a galactic empire. 

As the Argentine novelist Michel Nieva argues, the appeal of Mars to Musk is not solving the problems of capitalism but relocating its logic to a new address. And as The Atlantic has reported, the question of who boards the Starship is not rhetorical – it runs directly through Musk’s pronatalist politics, his amplification of eugenicist accounts, and his dismantling of USAID while children died in South Sudan. 

Slobodian and Tarnoff go further: Musk is an indicator species for a broader Silicon Valley vision of a post-human future in which humans merge with machines, are gradually supplanted by AI, and the colonization of space is carried out not by people but by “cyborgified” organisms that are only distantly human. The guest list for the Starship, it turns out, may not include humanity at all. 

There is an additional irony here. The historian Jill Lepore has shown that Douglas Adams wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for the BBC in 1977 with an explicit target in mind: the mega-rich and their privately owned rockets, settling colonies on other planets because no world was ever quite good enough. The typewriter Adams used had a sticker on it. It read: “END APARTHEID.” Musk grew up in Pretoria listening to the same BBC broadcast, claims the book as a formative influence, and is now building exactly what Adams was satirising. 

The science fiction story gives cover for walking away from the present. It also, it turns out, comes with a guest list.

From Utopia to Pitch Deck

When the world’s richest man stands before military leaders and says he wants to make Star Trek real, he is not being a fan. He is doing politics – winning contracts, shaping policy, building support for a vision that has very little to do with Roddenberry and everything to do with power. The audience was not the public. It was the people who control the defense budget.

Musk used Star Trek’s imagery because it carries weight: it makes privatized space exploration sound like a shared human adventure rather than a billionaire’s project. It makes working with the military sound like boldly going where no one has gone before. The same logic governed DOGE. To explain his approach to dismantling the federal bureaucracy, Musk cited Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: in the film, Captain Kirk wins an unwinnable training simulation by reprogramming it. “The only way to achieve success,” Musk said, “is to reprogram the matrix such that success is one of the possible outcomes. That’s what we’re doing”. The same logic runs across the whole industry.

The irony is that Star Trek saw this coming. The Ferengi – a species that puts profit above everything – were written as a warning, not a model. The Borg – a collective that strips away individual freedom – were the opposite of everything the Federation stands for. Corporate-run worlds were shown as places to be feared.

None of this means pretending Star Trek had no flaws. Critics, most notably the media scholar Daniel Bernardi, have rightly pointed out that the Federation’s vision of universal values often looked like American values in disguise – that its “we come in peace” approach echoed the language of the very colonialism it claimed to have left behind, and that alien cultures were usually judged against a human, Western standard. 

That criticism is fair. But even a flawed utopia contains more political imagination than a defense contractor’s pitch deck. The question is not whether Star Trek was perfect. It is what gets lost – and what gets used as a weapon – when even its imperfect values are stripped away.

This is what materialized science fiction looks like from the inside: not the utopia the stories promised, but the infrastructure of a political project that has no use for utopia. And yet here we are: a tech elite pitching Star Trek to defense contractors while running companies that harvest data like a natural resource, treat workers as replaceable, and fight every attempt at oversight. They have cut these stories open, taken the parts that suit them, and thrown away everything else.

Until the politics catch up with the aesthetics, what we are getting is not science fiction made real. It is a small group of very powerful people using science fiction’s authority to close off the futures it once imagined – billionaires in borrowed costumes, acting out the adventure while gutting the story that made it worth telling.

The post Billionaires in Borrowed Costumes: How Silicon Valley Loots Science Fiction to Justify Its Power Grab appeared first on Untold.

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

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

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

Idealist Foreign Policy

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

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

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

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

Anticolonial Principles

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

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

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

Sympathy for Palestine

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

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

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

The Unipolar World

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

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

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

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

Blueprint of Ethno-Democracy

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

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

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

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

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

Empire of Islamophobia

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

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

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

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

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

A New Trinity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mass mobilizations challenged autocratic structures, thereby disrupting or attempting to disrupt hegemonic state-society relations and catalyzing a shift towards participatory contestation and demands for democratic reform. 

The new context of heightened socio-political volatility was exploited by regime elites and non-state actors, particularly fascist and fundamentalist factions, to proliferate discourses based on othering, social conservatism and ultra-nationalism often reinforced through securitization regimes, the proliferation of digital surveillance, and restrictive legislation. 

What emerges is a form of digital fascism: the algorithmic extension of state power that invisibly shapes public discourse, weaponizes data and not only silences dissent but also “preemptively works to erase the very possibility of rebellion”.

Social media, Hate Speech and Anti-Black Violence in Tunisia 

Anti-rights ideologies in the SWANA region, including anti-immigrant and xenophobic rhetoric, are interconnected with far-right currents in the global north, as seen for example in the alignment between Tunisian President Kaïs Saïed and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. This ideological synergy is reinforced through formal political cooperation: Meloni’s visits to Tunis and EU-led negotiations on “enhanced cooperation on migration management” illustrate how European powers leverage Tunisia’s economic and political vulnerabilities to outsource border control. 

In practice, these anti-rights ideologies are not merely rhetorical: they translate into concrete state-sanctioned repression. While Meloni has mobilized fears of demographic change and the influx of ‘illegal’ immigration to consolidate power in Italy, President Kaïs Saied has adapted parallel narratives to target Black African migrants within Tunisia. 

Saied’s racist and xenophobic rhetoric, including his February 2023 speech describing “hordes of irregular migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa” as part of a criminal plan to alter Tunisia’s demographics, triggered widespread anti-Black violence, with mobs attacking migrants and asylum seekers and police complicit in arbitrary arrests and deportations. Social media amplified these narratives, providing platforms for hate speech and conspiratorial ideologies, particularly those propagated by groups like the Tunisian Nationalist Party. The combination of state-sanctioned incitement, online amplification, and impunity for perpetrators has created an environment where egregious anti-Black violence is normalized.

One of the most critical issues fueling technoviolence is the inadequacy of content moderation systems, especially those relying heavily on automation. In the region, the linguistic complexity of dialects such as the Maghrebi Arabic dialects confounds these systems. Internal Facebook surveys reveal that only 6% of hate speech in the SWANA region was detected by Instagram’s automated moderation. Such a failure could be explained, as per the findings of Mona Elswah’s 2024 report Moderating Maghrebi Arabic Content on Social Media, by the lack of diversity in natural language processing teams that develop automated content moderation systems at social media companies, combined with insufficient training datasets for Maghrebi Arabic dialects and the recruitment of non-native annotators.

Livestreaming Death in Sudan

In the meantime, Meta has become even less safe. In early 2025, CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a series of policy changes including the “simplification” of content policies, removing restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender, ending its third-party fact-checking program, and relaxing its filtering algorithms. While these changes were framed as promoting free expression, Amnesty International echoed the warnings of various human rights experts who have raised concerns about Meta’s role in fuelling mass violence and genocide in fragile and conflict-affected societies. Researchers have highlighted that these rollbacks could be particularly dangerous in fragile democracies and conflict contexts, where the absence of fact-checking and robust moderation allows political actors, state-backed influencers, and coordinated campaigns to exploit social media for harassment, racialized violence, and disinformation.

A recent investigation by Sudanese independent platform Beam Reports revealed how the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan are using TikTok to glorify atrocities during the genocide in Darfur. Following the takeover of Al-Fashir, RSF fighters committed widespread massacres and civilian-targeted violence have occurred, with fighters like the notorious commander “Abu Lulu” openly boasting on TikTok Live about killing thousands. These livestreams, often featuring RSF uniforms and direct claims of violence, attract thousands of viewers who send virtual gifts and comments praising the attacks. Clips are then reshared across TikTok, Facebook, X (Twitter), and Telegram. 

TikTok’s platform and algorithms have played a central role in amplifying these atrocities. Despite earlier warnings from Sudalytica in May 2025 about monetized hate speech and propaganda networks, the company has mostly failed to remove accounts or moderate content in Sudan. According to Beam Reports co-founder Raghd Orsud, while TikTok has banned RSF commander Abu Lulu’s account following the report, the broader harm persists, as months of atrocity-glorifying and hate content spread unchecked. Orsud clarifies how a single takedown is insufficient and calls for systemic action: “TikTok must deploy moderation teams fluent in Sudanese Arabic, establish a crisis-response channel for Sudan, preserve and securely archive violating content for accountability while preventing further spread, and proactively block re-uploads”.

The Complicity of Big Tech in Palestine 

In Palestine, researchers and digital rights advocates have documented a longstanding pattern of systemic censorship and bias on Meta platforms, which disproportionately removes Palestinian content while under-moderating hate speech and dehumanizing rhetoric targeting Palestinians, as 7amleh and Sada Social reported. This includes the deletion of posts documenting war crimes, photos of victims, and even content flagged simply for including Palestinian symbols, while similar content from Israeli sources often remains untouched. As documented by Palestinian organizations 7amleh and Sada Social, and highlighted in the 2021 Business for Responsibility (BSR) report and subsequent advocacy by the Stop Silencing Palestine coalition, these practices are embedded within the company’s algorithms and policies, reinforced by high compliance with Israeli government takedown requests. 

A more recent report by 7amleh criticizes Meta for failing to adequately protect Palestinians from incitement and hate speech in Hebrew. It highlights that Meta’s policies are biased and have contributed to enabling harmful discourse during Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza. The report also points out Meta’s disregard for the provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice on January 26, 2024, which explicitly called for preventing and punishing “direct and public incitement to commit genocide”.

Social media platforms’ role is embedded in the “Empire stack”, where Big Tech operates in tandem with state power, extending digital forms of domination. This alliance merges with the interests of the military-industrial complex, and in the SWANA region, technologies are not only tested on marginalized populations but also generate enormous profit, as these tools are then marketed and exported to governments and security agencies around the world. 

The region has been both a laboratory and a lucrative marketplace for powerful corporations, profiting from the global circulation of surveillance systems, predictive policing tools, and AI-enabled warfare technologies, a dynamic that has fueled the accelerating AI arms race, where innovations tested in the region are deployed worldwide in both military and civilian contexts.

Silicon Valley has been actively enabling Israel’s occupation and genocide of Palestinians by recruiting Unit 8200 veterans, investing in Israeli surveillance and AI-driven military technologies, and integrating these tools into global cloud and cybersecurity infrastructure. Grassroots worker-led advocacy initiatives such as No Tech for Apartheid and NoAzure for Apartheid have emerged to challenge the complicity of Big Tech in apartheid, settler-colonialism and genocide particularly in Palestine, calling on companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon to end all ties to the Israeli military.

In August 2025, an investigation by the Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call revealed that Israel’s Unit 8200 was using Microsoft’s Azure cloud to collect and analyze vast amounts of Palestinian phone communications in Gaza and the West Bank. Following the report and protests by human rights organizations and the No Azure for Apartheid campaign, Microsoft announced on September 25 that it had suspended certain subscriptions and access to its cloud and AI services for the military unit while reviewing the allegations. 

While Microsoft’s decision to disable specific Israeli military subscriptions and services in response to the Guardian’s reporting was welcomed by human rights NGOs as a positive step, it remains insufficient. The organizations have called on Microsoft to conduct a comprehensive review of all its business relationships with Israeli government and military bodies, suspend or terminate any products or services contributing to human rights abuses, increase transparency about its due diligence and the scope of its review, and rigorously apply its AI and acceptable use policies to ensure it does not become complicit in mass surveillance, targeting of civilians, or other violations of international law. 

However, efforts to hold Big Tech accountable remain limited, as documents published in October 2025 revealed that when Google and Amazon negotiated a major $1.2 billion cloud contract with the Israeli government in 2021 (Project Nimbus), they agreed to extraordinary terms, including a secret “winking mechanism”, intended to circumvent legal obligations in other countries while ensuring uninterrupted access for Israeli government and security agencies. Another recent example comes from internal Meta documents shared by whistleblowers, which show that the company repeatedly downplayed and buried research demonstrating the harmful effects of its platforms further highlighting the depth of Big Tech complicity in human rights abuses and the limitations of accountability and tech justice efforts.

In the words of Nadine Moawad, in a region like SWANA, “tech policy problems are compounded with a litany of daily struggles, most devastating of these being occupation, war, conflict, and displacement which affects, we sometimes forget, two billion people, a quarter of the world’s population. People Like Us are often, sadly, irrelevant to or tokenized in global policy”.

The post Targeted by Design: Technoviolence, Xenophobia, and Algorithmic Injustice in SWANA appeared first on Untold.

On the technological side, search engines are being replaced by Artificial Intelligence, the World Wide Web by social media apps, while cryptocurrencies keep rising.

The title of the book was inspired by Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe’s work investigating the extractivist, destructive and world-threatening character of contemporary global capitalism. In this context, Lovink maintains that digital platforms and their owners (X, Meta, Google, Airbnb, Uber, just to mention a few) have reached a (predictable) point at which their logic of treating the world as “an immense reservoir” is ultimately translated directly into political violence. 

We can see this in different forms: when data collection is used to control borders or target civilians, the trivialisation of violence to normalise it and disturb dissent, and deletion to destroy voices and entire communities.

Enrico De Angelis: The book starts with a consideration: we have already lost the battle to change the techno-social aspects that you described in such detail in your previous work. You say there are no imaginative follow-ups on the horizon, no paradigm shift in sight: “The Universe ignores us”. And yet, while Franco Berardi (who is also included in this dossier) calls for a radical withdrawal to enable the emergence of a new horizon, you propose another approach. Also radical, but you say it is the moment to fight back. What should we do? Wait for the moment to leave the platforms ‘en masse’? Or, as you propose at the end of the book, are there other, smaller steps that can be implemented immediately, even by non-tech-savvy people?

Geert Lovink:  The exodus of social media platforms will have to happen together, as Team Human, for a reason, in an urgent setting. Sadly, this will only be done during a period of shock. Addiction and attachment are real. So far there are no effective strategies for the literally billions of users to voluntarily abandon Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or Google. Ever since 2011, when we started our Unlike Us campaign, where we emphasised the unity of social media critique and alternatives, we have known that the individual guilt trip is going nowhere. Nudging is nonsense. We came to the conclusion that platform/app dependency can be overcome with the ‘tools’ approach. Tools that we use and then put aside. There will be an end to the techno-misery: “We want to see the sunshine after the rain.”

Attempts to reduce excessive smartphone time through awareness campaigns, offline weekends, and blocker apps that help you focus did not make a noticeable difference. The consumer behaviour approach is simply the wrong one. The addiction aspect cannot be ignored, but the medical ‘detox’ angle simply doesn’t work in this context. The desire for social connection in a time of loneliness, the growing travel time within urban sprawls, and the coordination issues of meeting others should not be ignored. Do we need Meta and Google for that? We don’t. Getting your phone out in the elevator is a habit. Uncooling the phone will be a task of the generation after Gen Z.

All the above has been known for years—that’s the sad part of this topic. Regression and stagnation are real. As we are still stuck on the platform, we need to be brave to question the exit strategies on offer so far. 

I am confident that Gen Z will be able to revolt—not just to demand a return to access to social media, as was the case in Tibet and other places where authoritarian regimes, in a desperate attempt to remain in power, limited access to certain apps or even cut off the internet as a whole. But their demand was to get the apps back. They could not live without them. We need to leave our sorrow and open radical vibe labs and experiment. Just try stuff. Besides Signal, DuckDuckGo, cryptpad.fr, and more, get inspired by the Facebook Museum of the Utrecht media arts organisation SETUP, a temporary booth installed in the hall of Utrecht Central Station. Or think of Francesca Bria’s Eurostack initiative that showcases the complexity of interrelated levels of tech, from apps to datacentres, when we demand ‘tech sovereignty’. Let’s add more to this list.

EDA: You write that platform brutality is worse than any other media representation of violence because it is remote, invisible, and indirect.

GL: So far, average users do not notice data extraction. We need to learn from the violence debate over the past decades and apply it to the internet field. The start here is the realisation that the ‘free’ and innocent phase, in which we signed a social contract with Silicon Valley, exchanging free access to apps and online services in exchange for our data, is over. A violent turn has happened over the past five years. 

The question is to what extent we will ‘feel’ the abstract and structural violence that is unleashed. This goes beyond the complaints over annoying ads. Many users, primarily young people, are suffering from mental health issues related to 24/7 use of social media. At what point will this damage have a real and physical impact? 

We witness loneliness, depression, apathy and indifference and the rise of right-wing politics, especially among young people, but often this is still perceived as happening elsewhere, to others. Economic uncertainty, mental breakdown and cognitive poverty are such that it is perceived as cool to be conservative (as a virtual mask or psychic armour). 

Platform brutality is the case when all this is no longer happening to others, and real consequences are no longer information that you swipe away.

What happens when structural violence excludes you, but you cannot find out, or do not even notice? You’re out. No carrier. What’s wrong with this app store? Information is made invisible, just for you. You have no access, but have no idea why, or for how long. You do not get a home loan, visa, job, fellowship or discount. It can be discrimination or just an inconvenience. Or getting worse tomorrow, with an impact only much later. 

Randomness is often part of the tech exclusion logic. Search and you will not find; prompt and you will be offered the wrong information—all presented with the best of customer service intentions and impeccable UX design. I have pointed at the sliding scale of violence, from the creation of a profile, the categorisation of one’s identity, nationality, race, face, fingerprints and iris, genes, to the creation of confined groups, the selection and isolation of them, ultimately to the point of expulsion, removal, extradition or even extermination. 

The inflation of the term ‘genocide’ doesn’t help here, as it is solely focused on that very last part, not on the sliding scale we’re all already part of. Social media databases are the most incredible self-created data repositories of one’s preferences, opinions, and social network ever created—and are immediately at the disposal of authoritarian forces, assisted by the Californian Big Brother. 

Take this example that passed by recently: As 404 Media reports, Google has chosen a side in Trump’s mass deportation effort. “Google is hosting an app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, and tell local cops whether to contact ICE about the person, while simultaneously removing apps designed to warn local communities about the presence of ICE officials.”

EDA: From the perspective of social and political movements from the global south, the issue with the platforms can be even more problematic. Let’s take the example of Gaza. On the one hand, as you also remind us, platforms have become directly entangled with the exercise of violence, including their role in deleting content and spreading fake news and bias. At the same time, since mainstream media coverage was also extremely biased, dissent was mainly circulated on those platforms (“TikTok is the problem”). Or, to quote you: “Can event-driven social movements afford to leave behind Big Tech, knowing they own the heads and minds of millennials and Gen Z?” How to respond to this urgency, to the paradox we are all facing? 

GL: Let’s not be moralistic and judge others from a distance. I have and will advocate for decentralised alternatives, but shy away from any suggestion on how people in hardship should communicate. You mention ‘content moderation,’ the infamous US ‘freedom of speech,’ and the censorship by Meta and Google, but the underlying problem there is the tech’s linking of content to IDs. There cannot be dissident content without an encrypted, anonymous delivery mechanism. We need to communicate more and leave less online. A tech renaissance of store-forward? The sky is the limit.

Throughout history, people have given their lives to deliver messages. Please read Georges Didi-Huberman’s Images despite All about four photographs from Auschwitz. As a teenager, my mother smuggled resistance newspapers on her bike in Nazi-occupied Breda. That defined my upbringing. The lesson taught was to fight registration, ID cards and centralised databases (see the chapter on this in Sad by Design). 

The question I have to ask myself is how my generation of what some call ‘internet pioneers’ was allowed to move from pseudonyms and anonymous users to Web 2.0 profiles and rigid ‘real names’ policies (with Google as ‘identity provider’). This is a collective sin, or defeat, if you like. It compromised the word ‘privacy’ for good, which is a travesty on the internet. All this is bad, but it affects people in crisis and war zones the most. What’s evident is the power of the message, regardless of all the petabytes that are collected to be used against us. There’s never an indifference against the signs of life that matter.

EDA: You dedicate the longest chapter to dreams. You say we cannot dream anymore because of social media overstimulation, which crowds our brains and deprives us of the time to ‘digest’ dreams. But dreaming, as you remind us, is crucial when it comes to creating new imaginaries and, therefore, to planning for political change. You launched the “dreamful computing” project, which explicitly tackles this issue. Can you explain what you mean by this expression and how it can be translated into specific practices?

GL: ‘Access to dreams’ is going to be vital for any substantive change. This will be a new era for the interpretation of dreams, that is, no doubt, post-Freudian. However, there is a dark, technological side to this renaissance: the capture and manipulation possibilities that future digital neuroscience will provide. 

To me, the corporate move to enter dreams is summarised in this awful, boring image: their ability to advertise in our dreams. The more material my Sydney friend Ned Rossiter and I collect, the clearer it becomes to us that the dream space will be one of the next Big Tech battlefields. It will be interesting to push the current psychedelic research further – and democratise that field, as it has to be taken back from the pharmaceutical establishment, time and again. 

I follow Erik Davis here, in this context. It is also important to stress the potential of (collective) dreaming that goes beyond the necessary reproduction of the imaginary labour force, and all we have to process during our busy, noisy days. How do you see we can Reclaim the Dream? This is a sincere, open question, as we’re into this not that long. The psychedelic winter was a long one, with generations destroyed by destructive neo-liberal investments into the (online) Self. As Yasha Levine puts it on his Substack in media terms: “The parasocial technology took over from where television left off and pushed society even more radically into an atomised configuration”.

We need to move away from the narcissistic preoccupation, embodied by King Trump. The psycho-political situation even worsens as we enter the phase of techno-fascism, aka techno-feudalism, if you look at it from a political economy perspective. The mental health situation deteriorates so fast that many start to act together. Common tools with real-life gatherings are the answer to this planned isolation. Our dream computing project is part of that movement. “I am dreamin’ man, yes, that’s my problem. I’ll always be a dreaming man, and I don’t have to understand, I know it’s alright.” Neil Young sings while I write this. The helpless state of this dreamin’ man will soon be a thing of the past—that’s for sure.

EDA: At the Institute for Network Cultures you dedicate a lot of attention to tactical media, which for many can appear as almost an obsolete term. How can tactical media be relevant today, in the face of all the techno-social aspects and the invasiveness of the platforms that you describe?

GL: I am not emotionally attached to any term. I believe in the speculative potential of the concepts we design to make a difference, to become machines, to cause long-lasting techno-social effects. When we use the term tactical media today, we do so to strengthen collaborations among hackers, designers, artists, and researchers in social movements. The tactical media approach reminds us to be open to migrating ‘Killroy was here’ aesthetics that wander from one medium to the next, from one locality to the next. This is so powerful today because, most of all, we are stuck on platforms that narrow our visual language, close down dialogue and discussion, and are utterly impossible as mobilisation tools. 

I admit that the guerrilla mode of tactical media makes it hard for resistance to scale up. The tactical media approach believes in the power of sparks, memes, stickers on traffic light poles: subversive signs that give strength to make it through the day. They are known today as copium, which is the opening essay of Platform Brutality. The more depressed a situation, the more powerful humour and irony can become. The more we experiment with the reversal of signs and concepts, the better. Come together and set up spaces. The emphasis should be less on aesthetics and more on tactical forms of organisation outside of platforms. This could be irritating about fluid, non-committing tactics in a time when sustainable self-organisation is needed most.

The post Capitalism, War, and the Violence of Digital Platforms: A Conversation with Geert Lovink appeared first on Untold.

For a fleeting moment, it felt like homecoming. Then the stillness was shattered. Police vehicles rumbled in, officers fanned out, and the temporary shelters were pulled down. What began as a quiet meal in the forest was now a flashpoint in one of India’s longest and most contentious struggles – the fight over who truly belongs in its protected jungles.

Between tigers and the state

The Jenu Kurubas, whose name literally means “honey gatherers,” have lived in the forests of Karnataka for centuries. For them, honey collection, bamboo cutting, shifting cultivation, and medicinal foraging are not merely economic activities but cultural traditions passed down through generations. 

Families have shared the forest with its fiercest inhabitants, including tigers, elephants, leopards, and bears. After all, the animals and trees are their chief deities.

But beginning in the 1970s, as Nagarhole was declared a wildlife sanctuary and later a protected tiger reserve, this coexistence came under threat. Hundreds of Jenu Kuruba families were displaced, some for the creation of the Kabini Reservoir, others for the state’s expanding conservation ambitions in the following decade. 

Many were moved into resettlement colonies at the forest’s edge. And several other families ended up as bonded labourers in the nearby coffee plantations.

What they gained in tin-roofed housing, they lost in autonomy and subsistence. Agriculture proved difficult, and wage labour precarious. Cut off from the forest, their diets changed, livelihoods shrank, and social bonds frayed.

Jenu Kuruba’s is part of a larger problem when the Indian government scaled up its tiger conservation efforts in the past decades and designated wildlife parks under strict regulations. Either through negotiations or by force in some cases, they’ve been evicting the forest-dwelling tribes.

“There was an orchestrated effort in portraying us, villagers and tribals, as poachers,” said J C Thimma, a Jenu Kuruba tribal leader who has been at the forefront of the resettlement campaign.

“On the other hand, we have seen plenty of episodes where poaching has significantly increased as soon as the tribals move out of their lands in this region. There’s a clear-cut nexus between wildlife poachers and the state’s forces,” added Thimma.

The irony is not lost on the tribes. While they were pushed out of their ancestral lands in the name of conservation, luxury resorts, safari tracks and tourist infrastructure sprouted inside the same reserves. For the Jenu Kuruba, this reinforced the sense that their exclusion was less about ecology than about who gets to profit from the forest.

A violation of laws

A senior forest officer based in Nagarhole told UntoldMag on condition of anonymity that the tribe’s resettlement campaign is gravely misplaced, assuming that they will win.

“I do have a lot of sympathy for the Jenu Kuruba. I try to help them in whatever way possible. But I can’t see how they can win this fight of resettlement. In simpler words, they’re fighting against the might of the entire Indian state, judiciary, and forest departments from the local level to the national stage. It’s a fight they can’t win, for sure,” said the government official.

“The colonial forest regime was dismantled with the Forest Rights Act (FRA) in 2006. The new act overrides older laws like the Indian Forest Act of 1927 and even parts of the Wildlife Protection Act. Legally, tribal rights are protected – the real problem is not the law, but the state’s persistent disregard for it, and the lack of judicial oversight,” said CR Bijoy, an expert in natural resources conflict and governance issues.

“There are several cases in various courts where the courts have shown immense concern for clearing the forest encroachments without questioning whether the data on encroachment has been generated only after completion of the FRA implementation,” Bijoy added. “In Tamil Nadu, the Madras High Court had actually revised its earlier order banning grazing in forests to limit the ban to Protected Areas, when grazing is a specific right under the FRA.”

“What we see in Nagarhole is not mere high-handedness but gross violation of laws. State forces are enforcing eviction in direct contravention of the FRA,” said Bijoy.

Theoretical rights and practical struggles

India’s Forest Rights Act (FRA) of 2006 was meant to undo the injustices meted out to tribals by recognising the rights of Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers. It explicitly protects them from eviction until their claims are processed while allowing both individual and community ownership of forest land.

On paper, the FRA is a landmark legislation. However, in practice, its implementation has been fraught with resistance from forest departments and conservation lobbies. Of the five million claims filed nationwide, about half have been rejected or remain pending. Karnataka’s record is no better. Thousands of Jenu Kuruba claims are stuck in bureaucratic limbo.

The May incident in Nagarhole was, therefore, not just a symbolic return but a test of the FRA itself. By setting up shelters inside the forest, the community sought to enforce what they believe is already legally theirs. The police dismantling of those shelters laid bare the gap between statutory rights and state practice.

The Jenu Kuruba story is part of a larger nationwide struggle to balance conservation with justice.

This tension is playing out across India. In 2019, the Supreme Court ordered the eviction of tribal families whose FRA claims were rejected, sparking uproar until the order was stayed. In the states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, communities are waging similar battles to remain on ancestral land inside tiger reserves. 

Meanwhile, the federal government showcases ambitious tribal welfare programmes. The Dharti Aaba Janjatiya Gram Utkarsh Abhiyan, launched in 2024 with a ₹790 billion (USD 9billion) budget, promises infrastructure and livelihoods in 63,000 villages. Initiatives like Eklavya Model Residential Schools seek to bring modern education to tribal children. Yet, as activists note, these schemes rarely address the fundamental issue: the right to live in forests. Without that, development projects risk becoming hollow gestures.

What is at stake?

The confrontation in Nagarhole has implications that extend far beyond the forest’s borders. For the Jenu Kuruba, it is about survival, dignity, and cultural continuity. For the state, it is about defending a conservation model rooted in the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972, which empowers relocations for the sake of intact habitats. For India more broadly, it raises questions about whose vision of nature prevails.

Conservationists argue that human habitation in tiger reserves leads to deforestation, poaching risks and animal conflict. But a growing body of research suggests otherwise. Indigenous communities often act as stewards of biodiversity. Honey collection, fire management and sustainable harvesting practices of groups like the Jenu Kuruba may, in fact, strengthen forest resilience.

If the community succeeds in asserting its place within Nagarhole, it could inspire similar acts of reclamation across the country. If it fails,  through evictions or police crackdowns or other judicial letdown, the message to millions of forest-dependent people will be clear. Their rights will exist only on paper that does not translate into reality.

Political stakes are also rising. With nearly 300 million Indians dependent on forests for their livelihoods, any move perceived as trampling tribal rights risks fuelling unrest. Past interventions by bodies like the federally empowered National Human Rights Commission have shown that the government can be compelled to provide rehabilitation and redress. Whether such accountability emerges again in Nagarhole remains uncertain.

For now, the Jenu Kuruba continue to return to the forest, however precariously. Shivu Jenukuruba Appu, 29, a thin-framed, long-haired leader, told UntoldMag that the community is determined to fight until their campaign reaches its logical conclusion.

Even as the police dismantled their shelters, Shivu said: “The authorities are not even allowing us to bury the dead bodies of deceased Jenu Kurubas in our ancestral funeral grounds. This is our basic right. Still, we’re not abandoning this fight at any point. We are not going anywhere.”

At dusk in Nagarhole, the forest quiets, and the outlines of abandoned shelters blend into the trees. The Jenu Kuruba may have fewer roofs over their heads at night, but their resolve remains unbroken. Their fight is not only for land but for recognition. The acknowledgement that India’s forests are living homes, where people and wildlife have coexisted for generations.

The struggle, decades in the making, is far from over. And what happens here, in the shadow of the tiger, may determine not just the fate of one tribe but the future of India’s conservation story itself.

The post Whose Forests? Jenu Kuruba Tribes Fight for Ancestral Land and Forest Rights in India appeared first on Untold.

Against this backdrop, the Egyptian Parliament passed the Drinking Water & Wastewater Regulatory Law in late May 2025. The law essentially hands over control of the water infrastructure to private companies on a build-operate-transfer (BOT) basis. But aside from the law’s many troubling provisions, it lands amid an economic crisis. Inflation was last recorded at 16.2%, a steady increase in prices, a struggling workforce, and stagnant wages that have not remotely kept pace.

The macro frame is an IMF program that has made pricing, state dominance, and “leveling the playing field” core conditions. In other words, the state is yet again rewriting core tenets of its social contract with citizens at a time when household budgets are thinnest and lenders’ conditions are thickest.

Explaining the law’s provisions: what actually changes

Under the new Drinking Water and Wastewater Regulatory Law, regulatory authority has conveniently shifted from the Housing Ministry to a body that reports directly to the Prime Minister. The National Authority for Regulating Drinking Water and Wastewater Services (NARDWWS), established by presidential decree in 2004, is now entrusted with the power to set operator tariffs and consumer prices, and to issue licenses to private companies. 

The official draft of the law states: “The National Authority for Regulating Drinking Water and Wastewater Services is a public service entity affiliated with the Council of Ministers.” This affiliation seems to solidify the current regime’s inclination for centralized decision-making, continuing to raise serious questions about the transparency, or lack thereof, in regulatory practices. 

On licensing, the law explicitly allows private sector participation in “the construction, management, and operation” of drinking water treatment plants, sewage treatment plants, networks, pipelines, and storage tanks. Each license can be up to 15 years, and in exchange, private operators must sell water at government-approved rates. However, the law’s stated aim of cost recovery could lead to profit-driven motives overshadowing the public interest, potentially compromising access to affordable and clean water for vulnerable communities.

The annual regulatory fee is where the law gets creative. According to Article 54, operators are required to pay a small, volume-based annual fee. For the first five years, this fee is set at 1 piaster (EGP 0.01) per cubic meter. After five years, the fee increases by 20 percent each year until it reaches a maximum of EGP 0.02 per cubic meter by the tenth year. 

The annual payments are subject to a minimum fee of EGP 25,000 and a maximum fee of EGP 50 million. Some sources have referred to this fee as “2% of the [water] price per cubic meter,” but this is inaccurate. The law specifies that the fee is based on the volume of water produced, not the price. Fees are settled annually based on actual volumes and must be paid through non-cash methods, with the regulator issuing a yearly certificate.

Article 66 pushes for the nationwide implementation of prepaid water meters, where users pay in advance and receive warnings when their balance is low. If their credit runs out, their water supply stops, though official holidays are considered “grace periods” of sorts. As for the prices, they are ultimately set by the government, but since the new law essentially allows for private contracts and, by design, private companies need to make a profit, so costs may eventually rise for households or be absorbed by the state, which would likely reduce expenditure elsewhere. 

Many households in Egypt earn low wages and lack protective laws, making it harder for them to cope with rising water costs or service shut-offs. A huge share of workers are informal and excluded from wage laws, which means the people most likely to face shut-offs when their prepaid balance runs dry are also the least able to absorb repeated price bumps.

Finally, the law’s speech-policing clause. Article 73 fines anyone who “promotes rumors or false information by any means” about water quality between EGP 50,000 and 500,000, which ostensibly covers ordinary social media posts, not just newsrooms or journalists. 

Egypt’s track record with similar provisions is grim. Since 2018, a media law has treated personal accounts and blogs with 5,000+ followers as “media outlets,” exposing users to prosecution for “false news”; rights groups have documented repeated cases where that label was used to punish online speech. During the pandemic, authorities arrested health workers for allegedly “spreading false news” about COVID-19, underscoring how these laws reach far beyond professional media workers.

Reform by deadline: IMF strings attached and the military’s untouchable empire

Egypt’s 46-month $8 billion International Monetary Fund program is the catalyst to such a law and a calendar that matters. The latest IMF Article IV and Fourth Review Staff Report explicitly repeats calls for reforms around “leveling the playing field,” pricing transparency, and reducing state and military dominance. The fund’s press statements underscore stalled progress on structural reforms and the need to align prices with costs. The Fund also confirmed it is combining the fifth and sixth reviews to give the government more time, which only increases the incentive to show movement in regulated sectors like water.

The International Monetary Fund has repeatedly stated that state and military-owned firms enjoy privileges that crowd out private investment. Credible reporting around the Staff Report notes the continued dominance of state and military firms as a central obstacle to genuine reform; the Staff Report itself references around 97 military-owned companies across multiple civilian sectors. The Cabinet has promised partial sales of assets, but progress is slow and highly curated. However, selling a few stakes while raising utility prices, like water, may be politically easier than confronting tax exemptions, land access, and procurement channels that protect the military’s commercial ecosystem. That’s the trade-off the law sits inside.

The Jirian City megaproject concentrates that trade-off in one glittering canal. The megaproject in which the military is a partner will divert about 10 million cubic meters/day of Nile water to feed the new desert city’s human-made river. That is roughly 7% of Egypt’s annual Nile quota. 

While the Prime Minister describes the megaproject as “boosting land prices through innovative ideas,” when you’re living at ~500 m³ per person, sending up to seven percent of the Nile’s annual volume to a luxury-anchored development is a distributional choice. It redirects water from older delta cities toward real estate, and it will inevitably squeeze the same households the new law is preparing to meter, license, and police.

Treading a thin line

The United Nations recognizes water and sanitation as human rights, which means service must be available, accessible, and affordable for everyone, not just those who can prepay. Prepaid meters aren’t banned, but they cross the line if they lead to people losing water because they cannot load credit; the UN outright states that cutting off service for inability to pay is a retrogression and violates the right to water. 

States are expected to guarantee at least a basic essential supply, keep prices affordable, and build a real safeguards lifeline so that “smart” prepayment technology doesn’t become a barrier. And when private firms are involved, governments remain responsible for making sure contracts and profit motives don’t undermine affordability or exclude low-income users’ basic human right to water.

Egypt has been here before, in 2007–08, “thirst protests” erupted over shortages and injustices in allocation. If the new law’s primary ends up leading to higher prices, stricter shut-offs, and fewer safe channels to complain, it will more likely than not reproduce similar dynamics.

The road ahead

The law’s core is institutional plumbing to deliver what lenders want: clear tariff mechanics, a regulator with a Cabinet umbilical cord, and prepayment technology that moves credit risk from utilities to households. It does not tackle Egypt’s deep-rooted structural rot, especially the military’s commercial privileges or the megaproject habit that is about to divert 7% of Nile water to a desert city. 

If Egypt wants to make this law a foundation rather than a device to unlock IMF funds and attract private companies to partner with the state, it should guarantee a non-disconnectable human-rights minimum, publish real-time quality and outage data, and cut privileged empires before cutting household water.

The post Rewriting Egypt’s Social Contract Through Water appeared first on Untold.

On December 20, 2024, from the Casa Rosada, the Argentine government launched its ambitious Nuclear Plan, presented as the cornerstone of its strategy to transform the country into a global node for artificial intelligence. The scene was carefully staged: flanking Milei stood Reidel himself—president of Nucleoeléctrica Argentina S.A.—and Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, recently embroiled in controversy over his diplomatic role in the bombing over Iran. 

Libertarian paradise of minimal ethical constraints

Although there is little information available, the plan appears to be straightforward: power the growing demands of AI data centers with nuclear energy and offer tech giants unbeatable conditions—cold climate, skilled talent, and lax regulatory frameworks—to establish their infrastructures here. 

The chosen reactor, the ACR-300, is a modular Argentine design developed by the state-owned company INVAP, more efficient and economical than traditional large-scale reactors. The plan also includes developing an uranium value chain for export. Everything seems to point toward a high-tech, modern, and energy-abundant Argentina. 

The Nuclear Plan promises the construction of these modular reactors within five years. Yet in reality, not a single brick has been laid—nor does Argentina currently possess the necessary equipment to achieve such an ambitious goal. Nuclear experts have publicly ridiculed the proposed timeline as pure fantasy, condemning the project as a populist illusion—one designed to legitimize the ongoing dismantling of Argentina’s scientific infrastructure.

The tech guru behind this project is Reidel, who currently heads NA-SA, Argentina’s state nuclear operator, and manages three active plants. Though trained as a nuclear physicist at the prestigious Balseiro Institute, his career has focused on finance—including JP Morgan Chase—rather than atomic research. Argentine nuclear experts attribute the plan’s unrealistic goals to Reidel’s financial background over his scientific experience.

Beyond the spectacle, what was revealed was a doubly paradoxical wager: on one hand, a return to the nationalist developmentalist imaginary through atomic energy; on the other, an attempt to inscribe this project within the deregulated, extractivist, and subordinated logic of the new libertarian regime. Reidel puts it bluntly: Argentina’s comparative advantage lies not only in its resources or human capital but—above all—in its political willingness to eliminate regulations. 

In his view, Argentina’s true asset is its capacity to offer itself to the world as a libertarian paradise—a sacrifice zone with low wages, scant labor and environmental protections, and minimal ethical constraints around AI development. This would position it above other hubs like the European Union, shackled by its environmental and labor laws, or China, where the state maintains ironclad control over data. 

What is presented as innovation is, in reality, an acceleration of dependency: energy for export, foreign servers on domestic soil, and skilled labor stripped of strategic autonomy. 

This project does not represent a break with the Global South’s technological subordination but its renewal in new forms. Far from building digital sovereignty, Argentina risks cementing its role as a peripheral link in the data economy: an energy generator and provider of favorable conditions for others to process, control, and monetize artificial intelligence. 

As with the old extractive enclaves, value addition happens elsewhere. Milei’s gamble, disguised as modernity, repeats the old cycle of dependency, now updated with the buzzwords of cloud computing, algorithms, and computational efficiency.

The Algorithmic Chainsaw

The tensions of this model quickly surface. While a “quantum leap” in nuclear energy is announced, the same government defunds public education, paralyzes scientific research, and fires thousands of workers from the state innovation system. 

The ferocity of the attack against universities, science, and research is so brutal that critics call it “scientificide,” alienating even the very scientists who patented the ACR-300 reactor and the workers at INVAP. This chainsaw policy, as some label it, paradoxically dismantles decades of accumulated capabilities—the very foundations that feed the techno-utopian fantasy of turning Argentina into the world’s fourth AI hub and could make local technological development possible.

This AI fantasy of Milei’s government isn’t limited to energy. In June 2024, Milei met with executives from Google, Apple, Meta, and OpenAI to import a “State Digital Reform” model based on implementing Google Distributed Cloud. The plan incorporates the use of big data, machine learning, and algorithmic development for public services, spanning education to healthcare. However, in the context of mass state layoffs, this reform appears less like modernisation and more like algorithmic dismantling.

AI emerges here as the perfect instrument for a reactionary utopia: the self-destructing state, replaced by supposedly “objective” algorithms that eliminate conflict, politics, and democratic deliberation. This reactionary anti-statism lies at the heart of Javier Milei’s discourse, who described his presidential role with the phrase: “I love being a mole inside the State. I’m the one destroying it from within.” 

This is more than mere techno-solutionism—it’s a systematic ideological drive to dismantle any social space tied to concepts like social rights, economic regulations, public policy, or democratic deliberation.

Perhaps nowhere was the underlying logic of these techno-utopian fantasies clearer than in the statements of Damián Reidel himself when, before an audience packed with businessmen and investors, he let his unconscious slip: After mentioning Argentina´s multiple advantage for AI investitions, he concluded that “The only problem is that Argentinians populate it,” adding, “…but we’re taking care of that.” 

Far from being a bad joke, the phrase symptomatically reflects the ideological core of the plan: turning the country and its people into a sacrifice zone for subaltern techno-utopian fantasies.

Lithium Dreams and Subaltern Nightmares

This techno-utopian vision is intimately tied to the old extractivist dream, which Milei shares with liberals and much of the Latin American centre-left. In this extractivist imaginary, lithium occupies a privileged place as the new fetish of the post-fossil era. This white, crystalline material enables the miracle of batteries capable of storing high energy densities in portable devices. 

Because of this, it embodies capitalism’s fantasy of infinity, promising to keep the machine of consumption, accumulation, and speed running at all costs, even after fossil fuels vanish and the climate collapses. Once oil reserves are depleted within the next 50 years, lithium-ion batteries suggest that business can continue as usual, without incurring the ecological costs or making any concessions.

Around 2011, the narrative of the so-called “Lithium Triangle” gained popularity as a new El Dorado that would bring abundance to countries plagued by endemic economic crises. The Lithium Triangle is the region encompassing the salt flats of Hombre Muerto in Argentina, Uyuni in Bolivia, and the Atacama Desert in Chile, which holds approximately 70% of the world’s lithium reserves. There, mineral extraction is wrapped in an aesthetic of purity: vast white expanses, evaporation ponds, flowing water, crystalline dust, and deserts devoid of people.

Against black, dirty oil, lithium is presented as a white and clean alternative. Although lithium is extracted from rocks through open-pit mining with monumental water usage, the image presented when discussing this mineral is the crystalline, sterilised, desert-like landscape of the salt flats, suggesting a harmonious fusion of technology, capitalism, and nature. 

But behind this pristine imaginary lie less shiny realities: massive water consumption in arid zones, territorial disputes with local and indigenous communities, and production that, despite resource abundance, doesn’t represent a market comparable in scale to oil.

In Argentina, Milei’s government has pushed a radical deepening of the extractivist model. The 2024 Land Law and the Incentive Regime for Major Investments (RIGI) consolidate a legal framework that subordinates territorial and environmental rights to the interests of transnational capital. 

Designed with blatant short-term logic, this legislative package creates an exceptional regime for mining and energy projects exceeding $200 million, offering unprecedented benefits: thirty-year tax stability, currency exemptions, and a 10-point reduction in profit taxes.

The mechanism is as simple as it is alarming: companies have a four-year window (two initial, plus two extendable) to join this system, freeing them from virtually all constraints. The result is mining without effective oversight, explicitly renouncing extraordinary rents and prohibiting any policy that might limit investors’ absolute control over production. 

This isn’t just about economic incentives—it’s the deliberate construction of extractive enclaves disconnected from the national economy, perfectly aligned with the libertarian ideology that led Milei to declare during his campaign: “A company has the right to pollute a river if it so decides.”

Beyond the Libertarian Techno-Utopianism

The combination of AI and extractivism—nuclear energy to power data centres, lithium to feed batteries—forms a model of subordinated modernisation. The rhetoric of technological leapfrogging coexists with the hollowing out of the very state and scientific capacities needed to sustain it. 

There is no autonomous AI development without investment in education, science, industry, and public policy. And there is no just energy transition without regulation, redistribution, and planning. In this context, Milei’s government embodies in extreme form a tension that cuts across Latin America: the contradiction between the promise of technological modernity and the structures of dependency it reproduces. 

The paradox cuts deep: cries of “energy sovereignty” serve only to tighten the chains of geopolitical dependence, while proclamations of a “digital revolution” erect new corporate enclaves. Lithium, reactors, and AI as mirages of progress – dazzling facades obscuring a reality of growing inequality, poverty and ecological ruin. 

As Latin America becomes a testing ground for this toxic triad of libertarian economics, authoritarian governance, and technological fetishism, the path forward demands nothing less than reclaiming technology from exclusionary visions. True innovation must be democratised, harnessed not for corporate plunder but for liberation – aligning technological advancement with social justice, environmental stewardship, and genuine political freedom.

The post Silicon Pampa: How Milei’s Techno-Libertarian Dream Turns Argentina into a Data Colony for AI and Lithium appeared first on Untold.

A crowd has gathered in front of the KNDS weapons factory in Anagni — though nobody calls it that. Locals refer to it as the “ex Winchester,” named after the rifles and guns that were produced there from 1965 -the year of opening- until 2001. 

The crowd is protesting against an industrial plan by the Italian government and local authorities to place a new weapons factory in an area contaminated for more than a century by chemical and military industries. The Sacco Valley, where Anagni is located, is forced to fight an intersectional struggle: against weapons, for the environment, for health rights, and even for peace in Palestine.

Over the past twenty years, Anagni has become a centre for military waste management, in an area that has grown increasingly economically depressed. 

A diverse crowd

The people gathered there come from many different backgrounds politically and socially: Local representatives of trade unions, the left-wing Communist Refoundation Party, and the parliamentary Five Star Movement.

Different generations are united in this fight, too. In front of the factory gates stand people who remember when the industrial district was still prosperous and profitable for entrepreneurs. Then there are those who began fighting for an alternative model of development between the 1990s and early 2000s — now in their fifties — and many in their thirties, a generation increasingly seeing emigration as their only viable option. The Sacco Valley has made them pay the price for decades of unsustainable development. Unlike their grandparents, they have never known real prosperity. Many of them are unemployed.

“A predatory investment”

The Winchester factory received generous European financing of 24 million euros. This funding is part of the ASAP (Act in Support of Ammunition Production), part of Rearm Europe, the European plan that has invested more than 800 billion euros in weapon supply and production. KNDS, a German-French joint venture in the defense sector, has owned the ex Winchester for four years, since the merger between Nexter and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann happened in 2021. It’s a joint-venture at 50-50% between Berlin and Paris: the Krauss-Maffei was established in 1863, and was one of the main producers of tanks and bombs during World War II. Nexter is a French group, fully owned by the French agency for State participations. They both want heavier governmental investment in European defense.

This investment, according to Alberto Valleriani – the president of the environmentalist collective “Safeguard of the Sacco valley”- is predatory: “These are highly-automated productions. KNDS is telling us ‘we will invest, to create workplaces’. They lie. By doing so, they aim to divide our society: citizens against citizens, citizens against workers and so on.”

What Anagni needs, according to Valleriani and other protesters, are heavy investments in public health and industrial reconverting. Dialogue is needed, too. “Dialogue with the management of the factory doesn’t exist. We cannot enter there. And even the local administration cannot talk to them”, adds Valleriani. I experienced the same thing: I wrote an email to Bruno Pirozzi, the director of the factory. He didn’t reply.

“There is something dystopian even in the work organisation in KNDS. The engineer and the workers are split in two groups, to avoid any contact and avoid strike. The same applies for the other factories around KNDS: the schedules are made to avoid any meeting in the aftermath of day work”, many people tell me. “This is how KNDS prevents strikes”. 

Emanuele Ricchetti, member of the collective Madeinterraneo APS -a group of activists born for the inclusion of the immigrants in Anagni-, explains to me that they are trying to engage in a dialogue with the workers inside the factory towards the trade unions’ representatives. “It’s vital for us to dialogue with people who spend 8 to 10 hours a day in the factory. Willing or not, we need a confrontation”.

Fear of explosions

In front of the gate there’s Lorenzo, too. He’s an activist, and he explains to me what are the fears of the protesters: “the risk of accidents during the transportation of the nitrogelatine and the ammunition is really high. And we have a highway just close to the factory: what if there was an explosion?”

This scenario is not concrete just outside the factory: in 2007, an incident inside the KNDS of the town of Colleferro, few kilometers away from Anagni, killed an employee and injured 13 others. “There were other incidents in the following years, but just the one happening in 2017 was covered by a press release. Most of them were hidden by the management”, Valleriani tells me. Antonio Caporilli, another activist, adds that they heard about two others in 2014 and 2024 by the workers of the factory, but no official statements were released by the enterprise.

But that’s not the only problem. “In case of an incident, we have a backup plan: we should go to the hospital in Anagni. Shamefully, it has been closed since 2012”, Lorenzo tells me. The emergency plan was elaborated in 2012, and there has been no updates since then. The other hospitals in the area (Colleferro and Frosinone) are heavily underfinanced. And so, an effective emergency plan seems difficult to elaborate, for the moment. 

Health issues

But weapon production is not the only problem the population is facing. “In my personal experience, it is hard to find a family with no siblings that developed tumors. We know what’s going on and it affects the collectivity, directly or not”, Francesca Fiorletta tells me. She studies medicine in Rome. “The most frequent illness is breast cancer. Then, many develop similar issues with their testicles, liver – or ovaries, according to epidemiologists”. The project SENTIERI, from the health institute in Italy, documented an increasing mortality caused by tumors to stomach, liver and lungs. 

The contamination in Anagni affects the blood, too. The monitoring project Indaco found severe blood pathologies for people aged 0-19 years. Here, the water consumption is limited, because of the severe pollution. But still, many people have their own well, because of a certain “rural wisdom”, which puts self-sufficiency as a key value.

By looking at the fields behind the factory, one cannot think that this is a highly polluted area, but the toxic particulate matter -a mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets found in the air- is a serious issue, too. “Someone who lives in Anagni has 67% more possibilities to develop heart issues, compared to the national average”, Francesca tells me. Same for asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).

“Many people in the area suffer from thyroid issues, 21.4% of the general population, according to the epidemiological monitoring program INDACO in 2022. They figured out that they had some pathology only in old age,” Francesca tells me. In fact, Anagni is one of the most contaminated areas within the SIN (National Interest Site): having more accurate and localized data would be crucial for preventing cancer here.

“2.4% of the population developed auto-immune illnesses, according to INDACO. The incidence increases especially for lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and intestinal inflammation”, adds Francesca. “I see this everyday: as a student and a future doctor, I always try to be updated about what’s going on here. I need to be ready, one day my turn to assist the community will come”. 

A century of death factories

The Sacco Valley, the area where Anagni is located, is deeply contaminated because of a long chain of bad decisions. The area, especially the neighbouring town of Colleferro, witnessed an intense industrial development between from 1912 until the 1980s. “My father worked as a labourer in the factories in this area”, Valleriani tells me. “It was a great means of social redemption, at that time”.

Fiorletta’s family experienced the consequences of this firsthand: “We are not originally from here: my great-grandparents arrived from Tuscany in the 1940s, to work at the factory”. That’s why all her neighbours haven’t an “Anagnine” surname: they are mostly of Southern Italian ancestors. 

Her great-grandfather started immediately to work in the weapon plants, her mother in the chemical industry. Their story is deeply melancholic: when her grand-mother was two, her great-grandfather died because of an incident at the ex-Polveriera, a factory producing gunpowder in Anagni. It was owned by the Bombrini-Parodi-Delfino, the first industry of weapon production, established in 1912. “He was cleaning the basin for the production of the explosive. They didn’t follow the security protocol, and my grandmother received a pension that wasn’t enough to survive”. It was 1943. The great-grandmother, too, lost a finger during her work. 

But the area of Colleferro and Anagni was a center of massive and complex industrial development, starting from the 1950s. Italy itself heavily invested in subventions to this district. That’s why the chemical almost entirely replaced the military industry.

But, since the end of the 1980s, the industry started to run slower. However, pharmaceutical, military and chemical industries continued to dump their industrial wastes in the river Sacco and to bury them. It was mostly lindane, an insecticide. “I remember, up to 2000, seeing some white foam in the river. Nobody really cared”, Valleriani tells me. In 2005, some analysis of the milk produced in that area found a massive concentration of ß-HCH (Beta hexachlorocyclohexane), a cancerous molecule.

Anagni became a Site of National Interest (SIN), an area where an environmental emergency is declared by the national government itself. What this meant first, was limitations on water consumption -water is one of the main means of contamination, both by skin contact and drinking- as well as for meat and cheese consumption. 

“Now, there are many industrial appetites”, Valleriani tells me. “And they are backed by the local politics, which wants to reduce the area of the SIN”. To be fair, the area after Anagni is less contaminated than 20 years ago. The agricultural industry, another lobbying force in the area, asked for a redefinition of the SIN as well. “We are not opposed to this, in principle. But this should be done carefully”, Valleriani says. Anyway, Anagni will not be affected by this redefinition: the level of contamination is still one of the highest in the area. 

“Recently, another foam phenomenon was recorded in Sgurgola, around 10 kilometers away from the town, along the Sacco River. That’s because people dumped waste unpunished, especially from the industrial area in Anagni”, Valleriani tells me. “Nobody is accountable. You cannot check what’s the origin of the pollution, once it’s in the river”.

Installing a weapon factory in the area can potentially cause new contaminations in the soil. “To be fair, we’ve never recorded such contamination. But we can’t verify anything directly- factory access is restricted. And, if inspection permits arrive weeks later, it’s easy for everything to appear in order for an inspection”, Valleriani tells me. 

The nitroglycerin and nitrogelatin themselves, if not properly disposed of, can heavily contaminate the aquifers. In a situation where the water consumption is already limited, one can ask how all of this can get worse.

Palestine matters

Three weeks later, I come back to Anagni. This time, the committee organised a sit-in for Gaza in the center of town. I am in the Ousmane garden, a green area of more than three hectares, with an incredibly beautiful view of Anagni historical center and a valley at the bottom of it. It’s named after a volunteer who died because of a workplace accident.

I meet many different people, some of them were in front of the KNDS factory during my previous visit. There are readings of poetry from Palestinian authors. But the link between Gaza and Anagni is not just symbolic.

“We have good reasons to believe that KNDS exports weapons to Israel. We are considering this hypothesis, even if we haven’t yet found definitive proof,” Andrea Caporilli, an activist from the No War committee, tells me. “Officially, these are defense weapons. But it’s not hard at all to convert them to offensives. We think the ammunition is used by the oto-melara guns, which are part of the equipment of the Israeli navy”. 

There is also the Galix system, which KNDS exports also in Sudan, according to Amnesty International. The Sudanese war is one of the most violent conflicts in Africa, and to have information about what’s going on there is almost impossible.

“We know for sure that Leonardo [the Italian state-owned weapon enterprise], one of the main KNDS clients, exports weapons to Israel”, Ricchetti tells me. “So, to claim that we are exporting weapons to Israel it’s not impossible. This worries us: the wars are less and less between two armies. The main victims are civilians, attacked by states. We don’t want to be accomplices of war crimes happening in Gaza.”

The post Italy’s ‘Death Valley’: Resisting Europe’s Arms Drive, Toxic Legacies, and Gaza Complicity appeared first on Untold.