A tour through Europe's past—and what lessons we might learn from its museums to fight authoritarianism today.
Interrupting the skyline in Tallinn, Estonia is a tall gray building, a relic of the country’s Soviet occupation. It looms over the medieval city, declaring its name in giant letters: HOTELL VIRU. Behind these letters is a secret 23rd floor, where the KGB (the Soviet Union’s security agency) would listen to the hotel’s visitors, as unsuspecting tourists sipping drinks in the restaurant just a floor below would point to the windows above them and ask, “Hey, what’s up there?”
Tourists at the hotel were spied on right up until April 1991, when the KGB left the building and shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed. While the KGB cleared away many important details, enough artifacts were left behind, including a room full of monitoring devices, that a museum was opened in 2011. It’s a constant reminder of what once happened here—a reminder of how personal freedoms can so easily be lost, and a reminder of what’s at the end of the road to authoritarianism. A road that several European countries might be on once again.
The Hotel Viru & KGB Museum is the first stop on my tour as I gather up the scattered pieces of Europe’s recent history of authoritarianism and ask whether we are paying enough attention to our present.
(Photo courtesy of Katie Dancey-Downs.)
As you walk into what our tour guide calls the “listening room,” it’s the musty smell that hits you first. “Oh no, it even smells like the Soviet Union,” tourists from neighboring Finland are reported to have said, according to our guide, Margit. In one glass cabinet, there is a selection of microphones, recording devices, and transmitters. In the 1970s, when the hotel opened, around 60 guest rooms were designated as special rooms, with an empty room next door so that one of these KGB microphones could be slotted through a small hole. By the next decade, advances in technology meant more rooms could be monitored, with vases and lamps becoming favorite spots for hidden microphones. Sitting on a glass shelf in front of us, there’s even an old handheld camera, once used as a way to collect compromising photographs when poked through bedroom walls.
The guests were not completely oblivious to any of this, Margit says; KGB monitoring was something of an open secret.
“Tourists in general were very cautious in the rooms,” she explains. Visitors would leave the water running, turn up the television volume, or cover vents with towels for privacy.
The microphones weren’t limited to bedrooms, either. Margit directs us to a circular, speckled-green set of cufflinks, fitted out with a hidden microphone. In another cabinet, there’s an ashtray and a gold-rimmed plate monogrammed with a bold black V, both with hidden microphones, too. Perfect for slipping onto the table in front of people of interest.
While this hotel was a symbol of the free Western world to the people who lived in Tallinn, Soviet citizens knew not to get too close to its front doors, unless they wanted to be dragged to the basement for an interrogation. During its prime, Hotel Viru was not unique—any hotel that welcomed tourists in the Soviet Union or Eastern Bloc had a KGB presence.
It’s easy to forget that Margit lived under this occupation, that she knew exactly what it meant to keep away from Hotel Viru. I won’t go so far as to call Margit yet another artifact, but the memories and experiences held by the woman standing before us, in her Viru-branded gilet, are an important part of the picture. She remembers how Estonians used to hold their hands in front of their faces when they talked to each other in the park to fend away lip readers. She remembers how much people wanted to work at Hotel Viru, because they got access to illicit foreign goods and received gifts from the tourists. She also remembers how the hotel preferred hiring married people, assuming they wouldn’t try and couple up with a foreigner—the only accepted reason for leaving the Soviet Union. (This was an appealing option for many, although it came with complications: Divorce was allowed, but taking children to a new foreign life was not—any child born in the Soviet Union was in effect owned by the state.) This atmosphere, Margit tells us, made people easier to control.
“You are free to leave,” Margit says at the end of our tour. “Nobody takes you to the basement, nowadays.”
(Photo courtesy of Katie Dancey-Downs.)
An atmosphere of control
Unfortunately, this “special atmosphere of control” is not consigned to museum display cabinets. In Europe today, illiberal ideologies are finding strong ground, with support for populist parties soaring in many countries—my own, the UK, included.
This atmosphere Margit told us about, and the spying on people of interest, is also still going on in Russia today. Soviet (now Russian) state security has had various different names, including the Cheka, then the NKVD, then the KGB. Nowadays, the former KGB is known as the FSB.
I cannot safely travel to Russia to tell you what this atmosphere is like. I’ve criticized Putin and interviewed enough Russian dissidents that I don’t think I would be particularly welcome. But in the same way that seeing the artifacts in Hotel Viru has brought to life the history of intense surveillance and the atmosphere of terror, there is similar evidence in our current times: from school teachers forced to teach propaganda and patriotic lessons to a state-backed messaging app with extensive surveillance capabilities.
The artifacts in Hotel Viru’s listening room show us how surveillance technology developed over the decades, and that it did not stop when the Soviet Union fell in 1991. Instead, we now have even more advanced technologies to contend with.
This isn’t limited to Russia. In the UK, live facial recognition cameras are being rolled out by police across the country. According to Big Brother Watch, a human rights group that campaigns against the practice, there are 10 regional police forces regularly using the technology, but many others use it for large events. Currently, there are no specific rules governing its use.
Here's how it works: Surveillance cameras snap individuals’ faces and make biometric prints, then compare them to a police watchlist for similar matches, with the software flagging people in real time. A tech-smart way to catch criminals, yes, but here the threat to freedom begins. The technology has been deployed in numerous city centers, with hundreds of thousands of faces scanned on the streets as well as at events like Notting Hill Carnival. There have been cases of people being misidentified, and accusations from Amnesty International that the practice “amplifies racist policing,” as Black people are most often misidentified.
Big Brother Watch notes that it’s usually authoritarian regimes that embrace live facial recognition—Russia and China, for example. The UK does not currently have an authoritarian regime. But pair this with growing support for far-right politics and the UK’s rollback on protest rights—including a new provision to limit “cumulative disruption” of protests—and we might have a problem on the horizon.
Silencing critics
Across the border from Estonia, in Latvia’s capital city of Riga, is the KGB building known as the Corner House. Of all the places I see on my museums tour, the Corner House is the most chilling. The one that stinks the most of death. As I walk around the dark and dingy complex of cells, where the paint is peeling off in long strips, the thing that makes my skin crawl is the knowledge that in this very place people had their liberties stripped in the most inhumane ways. Some of them even lost their lives, simply for opposing the regime.
A young guide shows us around the KGB cells which were used during the first and second Soviet occupations (with a Nazi occupation in the middle). He tells us that people could be arrested for reading a banned book, for joking about the Soviets, or for believing that Latvia could be free.
At some point, when we’re standing in the old interrogation room, the guide smacks a rubber stick on the desk and we all jump, a glimmer of what someone under KGB interrogation would face. In one cell, he tells us that 30 people would be inside at once, the window covered so they couldn’t tell what time of day it was, then he flicks on the bright lights so that we’re disoriented like the prisoners would have been. He points to the heating system that would be cranked up high, and the sole bucket used as a toilet and emptied once a day.
(Photo courtesy of Katie Dancey-Downs.)
It's with all this in mind that we are taken to the courtyard. This, he tells us, would have been a reminder to the prisoners of how the free world feels (and a way to make them willing to sign anything, including confessions). Above us there are bars and netting. To stop suicides from the interrogation room, we’re told.
We’re left there for a few minutes, in a space where prisoners would have been allowed to breathe fresh air once a week, walking in circles with their heads bowed, their feet trudging along the same concrete that we stand on now. It is a reminder that not all artifacts live in glass cabinets.
There is worse to come. In what was once an execution room, there are more than 200 bullet holes in the walls, marked with red and yellow stickers. They go back to 1940 and 1941, when prisoners were told to face the very same wall now before us, then shot in the back of the head. Researchers are still trying to find out whether executions continued here during the second Soviet occupation.
“We Latvians know the price of freedom,” the guide tells us. He also reminds us that this type of thing is still happening in Russia today.
Opposition leader Alexei Navalny is one recent, high-profile person to have lost his life while incarcerated by Russia in a penal colony north of the Arctic Circle, where he was killed with a dart frog toxin. But he is far from alone, as many other Kremlin critics or persecuted communities have been imprisoned or killed.
(Photo courtesy of Katie Dancey-Downs.)
This modern unease extends beyond Russia to Baltic states like Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. One person in Estonia told me that her daughter talks about how they would escape if their home was attacked. In neighboring Belarus—where state security is still called the KGB, and Russian influence is strong—more than 4,600 people have ended up as political prisoners since 2020. Many of those people are pro-democracy protesters and campaigners who stood up against dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s rule, including his rigged election win in 2020 and then 2025.
A short walk away from Riga’s Corner House, artifacts in the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia shine more light on the country’s dark history. If you’d forgotten about the KGB building already, your memory would be refreshed by this museum’s display of bullet casings and the keys for the prison cells, now housed in a glass box.
I land at a small bottle and blister pack of pills which turn out to be chlorprothixene and other antipsychotics used to “treat” dissidents imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals. This practice is not history, but still happening in Europe as I stand looking at these artifacts. I am reminded of Russia’s punitive psychiatry, where medicated treatment is forced onto political activists who have been sent to psychiatric units in response to their activism, and where they are brutalized.
And then we come to what might be one of the most terrifying tools of Soviet oppression: the concentration and forced-labor camps known as the Gulag. A quilted jacket with the number F358 sewn on the back is hanging up on display, this particular one having belonged to a woman called Leontīne Kriviņa, who in the 1950s was arrested for participation in a youth resistance group and sent to the Norilsk Gulag camp, 400km above the Arctic Circle, where temperatures could drop to -50C.
The personality cult
I’m now standing before a KGB-sponsored weekly newspaper, called Dzimtenes Balss, which translates as Voice of the Homeland. It was written specifically for Latvians in Western exile and—if we were in any doubt about its purpose—published by the “Committee for the Return to the Homeland” between 1958 and 1989. The Soviets wanted to repatriate Latvian émigrés, and propaganda like this was a vital tool in making that happen.
The Soviet Union had a well-oiled propaganda machine. Posters, films, lectures, theatre, newspapers, and radio were ways to shape the collective consciousness, and control society. Among these was the personality cult—which brings us to our next artifact: a small statue from the 1960s of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the USSR, set inside a black display cabinet. The personality cult around him developed after his death, the description says, with many streets named after him and every significant town home to a monument. The “Lenin Cult” replaced the “Stalin Cult,” an information board explains, around three years after Stalin’s death, when the new leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s policies as a “departure from Lenin’s ideals.”
(Photo courtesy of Katie Dancey-Downs.)
There’s another artifact in this museum that speaks to this history of authoritarianism—a copy of Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s memoir and manifesto. It’s chilling to see it in real life, something so feared and despised across the continent, and indeed the world. Something that represents the personality of the man who led a genocide and brought terror to Europe.
In today’s Europe, we have a personality cult problem once again. But the personalities in question don’t even need to bother writing a book: They have social media at their disposal.
The scapegoats
There’s one more thing that I want to show you in the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia. A fabric Star of David, faded with time, which would have been used by the Nazis to identify Jews. It’s one thing knowing about these yellow stars and how they were used, but it’s another to really see one, imagining who it might have been pinned on. Next to it, there are a couple of strings of numbers on what look like badges. One is brighter, and says 8533. They are identification numbers worn by Jews held in the Kaiserwald Concentration Camp or the Lenta factory in Riga. Tens of thousands of Jewish people were murdered in Latvia during the Holocaust.
While relatively short compared to their Soviet occupations, Estonia and Latvia were both subjected to Nazi occupations during World War II. Many people even welcomed the Nazis, hoping they would save them from the Soviets. What people soon learned is that no authoritarian regime is “better” than another. All are bad.
I went to Kraków, a medieval city in Poland’s south, which felt the full weight of a Nazi occupation from 1939 to 1945. Up to 20,000 Jews were forced into a purpose-made ghetto, before Heinrich Himmler ordered their deaths in 1943 and they were either shot, sent to labor camps, or sent to concentration camps where they remained as prisoners or were exterminated.
In Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory, the permanent exhibition Kraków Under Nazi Occupation tells this story. In one of the first displays, there is a circular wooden construction painted in yellows and blues, like something that might belong in an old-fashioned penny arcade, with pairs of binoculars set into each panel. It is a carousel of photographs, the images rendered in 3D, each one frighteningly immersive as it takes my whole field of vision. I have never seen Hitler’s face this close, as he shakes hands with another Nazi, or holds hands with a smiling girl—in the latter, they might even be dancing. Another shows a woman smiling and saluting in a Sieg Heil. Flags are draped from buildings and swastikas plastered on armbands. Not just seeing these photographs from over 80 years ago, but being inside the photographs, makes it all frighteningly real—which of course it was. The people smiling is what’s really terrifying.
As we face our own dangerous political shifts today, it scares me to think about the photographs that our generation’s great grandchildren will look at. Will they also sit in a museum like this, immersing themselves in the artifacts we’ve left behind and ask, “How did they allow this to happen?” Will they struggle to understand how so many people could welcome the far right rallies and shake hands with the populist leaders of today, the way I now struggle with the same? Or will ours be a generation that truly learns from its history, so that we do not allow the most atrocious things that have happened in the past to happen again?
(Photo courtesy of Katie Dancey-Downs.)
At the end of the Schindler Museum exhibit is a glass case containing two spirals of barbed wire. They are from KL Płaszów, a camp in Kraków built on Jewish cemeteries, which housed up to 25,000 prisoners at a time. It began as a forced labor camp and later became a concentration camp, a place of terror for Jews, Poles, Roma and political prisoners. Although it wasn’t an extermination camp, prisoners were indeed also executed here.
Many concentration camps have been preserved across Europe as a reminder of what happened during the Holocaust, when the Nazis murdered six million Jewish people, as well as other persecuted groups. Decades ago, I visited the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, north of Berlin, on a school history trip. I still remember, vividly, the “Arbeit Macht Frei” lettering on the gates, that awful, twisted phrase that translates as “Work Makes You Free.”
On the other side of Kraków, there is a blue and white striped uniform hanging up in the People of Kraków in Times of Terror exhibition, part of Muzeum Krakowa. A woman named Anna Pieczarka-Mikulskaw wore it while imprisoned in the German concentration camp KL Ravensbrück between 1942 and 1945. Her grandson gave it to the museum.
“Some of them came back home in the uniform,” the museum’s curator Grzegorz Jeżowski tells me.
The Holocaust is perhaps our starkest example of where scapegoating can lead. That barbed wire and that prisoner uniform in Kraków are reminders of what happened in Europe’s darkest hours. And yet today, far-right politicians are still villainizing minority groups, in particular Jews, Muslims, refugees, and LGBTQ+ people. It is not comparable with what the Nazis did, of course it isn’t. But we must never forget where this road can lead.
Today, in countries including Russia, Germany, Italy, and Georgia, there are growing political movements pushing for “traditional family values” and against LGBTQ+ rights. In Bulgaria, too, it is illegal to discuss LGBTQ+ topics in schools. There is a question mark over Hungary, which made global headlines for banning Pride marches under recently deposed strongman, Viktor Orbán. Recently in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won the state election, just falling short of gaining a majority, and leaving the rest of Europe shaken.
(Photo courtesy of Katie Dancey-Downs.)
Why we must visit the museum
Let me caveat what I’m about to say: I am not carrying the weight of lived or generational trauma, as others whose families have been persecuted by authoritarian regimes. But I believe it's vital we go to these museums and face the evidence head on, that we look at Mein Kampf, at the shoes of people murdered by the Soviet secret service units found in burial sites, at the microphones slipped into hotel rooms. Not just to remember what has happened in the past, but to make sure that we develop the necessary critical thinking required to understand and prevent what is already emerging in our present.
The museums I visited are just a handful of those dotted around Europe, with countless artifacts to remind us we are not immune to the possibility of ending up under authoritarianism. In Europe today, there are flickers of these tendencies—and not just in Russia and Belarus.
In Serbia and Turkey, journalists critical of the government live under serious threat, and protesters have faced violent clampdowns in Georgia since the Georgian Dream party claimed victory in the 2024 election—a result which Western pollsters said did not match exit polls. Both Turkey and Georgia’s leadership has been described as authoritarian.
And then there are countries where populist or illiberal politicians are waiting in the wings, steadily growing in popularity. Like in the UK, where there is an ever-growing personality cult around the anti-immigration Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, a man who has been accused by former schoolmates of antisemitic and racist bullying (which he denies) while more recently getting caught supporting a neo-Nazi event and using extremist slogans in personalized Cameo videos. As of May 2026, Reform UK was the most popular political party in the country, before a series of financial scandals consumed discussion around the party, dropping them to second place by August.
Similarly in France, Marine Le Pen’s far right National Rally is the country’s most popular party according to the most recent voting poll. And perhaps most shockingly, as of June 2026, the most popular political party in Germany is the far right nationalist AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), which is shaped by xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and hostility to LGBTQ+ people.
Tyrants-gone-by echo in our current world, and illiberal politics serve as fertile ground for authoritarianism.
With all this in mind, the artefacts of terror and extremist politics in Europe’s museums are frightening, quite rightly. But in these same buildings, there are also always artefacts of hope.
In the Vabamu Museum of Occupations and Freedom in Tallinn, there is not only evidence of the oppressions Estonians faced, but also of their resistance. Hanging up on the wall, a brown leather briefcase that belonged to Enn, an Estonian dissident who was arrested by the KGB numerous times, tells the story of a petition called the Baltic Appeal, calling for the independence of the Baltic states. The briefcase was big enough to carry a secret typewriter, which could be used to make and copy prohibited materials—and there’s one of those here too, a large clunky machine with a teal-colored carriage. They were considered so dangerous by the Soviet Union, that each typewriter had to be registered, but dissidents found ways to trick the authorities. This particular typewriter belonged to Irene, who, according to the museum’s digital guide, exchanged her tent to get it and then used it to make copies of the banned The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an autobiographical work about life in the Soviet labor camps.
(Photo courtesy of Katie Dancey-Downs.)
Sitting proudly above the typewriter and the briefcase is a piece of samizdat, which dissidents were producing in the decades after Stalin died. These were self-published copies of prohibited texts—novels, journals, cookbooks, anything people wanted to read and couldn’t—which were passed around hand-to-hand, secretively.
There is a letter on the wall, too, signed by 40 Estonian figures from the cultural and scientific communities, against Russification. They collected these signatures in secret and sent the open letter to newspapers—even though ultimately, it resulted in many of them being punished, interrogated, or forced to publicly apologize.
Lastly, in the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, there’s one incredible artefact that I sit in front of for a long time. It’s a video of people—ordinary people—holding their linked hands up high along the side of the road. It is a singing revolution. In August 1989, 1.5 million people across the three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—created a 410-mile chain from Tallinn to Riga to Vilnius, held hands, and sang for their independence. A few months later, the Berlin Wall fell, and by 1991, all three countries were independent and free of Soviet occupation.
So much of authoritarian control is about isolating people, making them afraid of what they say and to whom they speak. These movements of resistance, then, these items that bond people, these relics, are all precious reminders of how people have resisted before. But we must go to the museum to truly see them. We must go to the museum to find hope in what can be overwhelming times. And we must go to the museum to arm ourselves with the lessons of history in the fight against a repeat of our worst moments.
[post_title] => Warnings from the Museum
[post_excerpt] => A tour through Europe's past—and what lessons we might learn from its museums to fight authoritarianism today.
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A Palestinian nurse recounts an average shift at Gaza's largest hospital in November 2023.
I used to imagine myself as a nurse dressed in white, moving between patients' beds, one link in the chain of their healing. I always believed that nursing was a humanitarian message before it was a job. I believed—and still believe—that nurses are angels of mercy who fight battles and wars every single day, in every shift they work. But then came October 2023.
At the beginning of the war, I decided to return to the emergency department of Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in the center of Gaza City where I’d previously done my internship. Its specialized units received patients from across the entire Gaza Strip, and its emergency department, also the largest in Gaza, was divided into three zones: green for minor, yellow for moderate, and red for critical cases.
To take the job, I had to leave my father and four of my siblings at our family home in Zeitoun, a neighborhood in eastern Gaza City. Two days later, they too were forced to leave, and another two days after that, our house was bombed. In the weeks that followed, I lost many friends and colleagues. Each day, I felt like I was losing a part of my own life.
Maybe it was the encroaching death, or separation, or longing—but "Gentle Faress," as my mother always called me, soon became hard. At the emergency department, I carried torn limbs with my bare hands, the hospital’s supply of gloves rapidly dwindling as medical supplies weren’t allowed to reach the hospital. I put my fingers inside deep wounds to stop their bleeding. And I developed the nerve to inform a family that their son or daughter had died by telling them, "Take them to the morgue so there is room for someone else.”
~
On the third of November at 7 o'clock in the morning, I got ready to start another typical 24-hour shift. I had just woken from a two-hour nap—sleep that felt more like a half-waking—on one of the metal chairs in the staff changing room, with two of my colleagues by my side. I went out searching for any spot with a phone signal so I could call my mother and tell her I was still alive, and to make sure everyone in my family was still alive, too. I would have to lie to her as usual, telling her that I was eating well, that I was still strong, and that we were safe and under international protection because we were medical staff. But none of it was true.
Outside, a now typical scene met me: what appeared to be thousands of displaced people were spread across the ground in the stairwells and corridors of the hospital, sleeping on the bare floor without the slightest bit of privacy or comfort. Children were crying, maybe from hunger or cold, or simply in their search for any feeling of safety. I looked into people's faces, which tell tales, and saw deep exhaustion and tears held back. Maybe they’d lost their house, their family. Maybe they’d lost everything, and only they themselves had survived.
Finally, I spotted a few people standing by the hospital gate, holding up their phones. After a few steps, I heard a loud whistling and then a violent explosion nearby. Israeli warplanes were bombing a water truck and the people queuing to fill their empty gallon bottles near the hospital’s entrance.
For a split second, in the commotion, I truly believed I had died, that I would never see my family again; that if my phone rang, no one would be able to answer it.
When sound returned to my ears, I could hear the screaming and crying of children and women around me. Wake up. Hurry. Get up, my dear. Don't die. Like slaps across my face, these words brought my awareness back, and I ran back into the hospital as fast as I could.
~
In the emergency department, my role was to insert intravenous cannulas so a doctor could assess the patients and try to compensate for blood loss with fluids. But because the intensive care unit was already filled with severe injuries and had no space left, we began receiving ICU patients in the ER, as well. Understaffed and given the overwhelming need, this meant choosing those who we believed had the greatest chance of survival. I felt the pain of having to decide who lives and who dies as I moved from one injured person to another, my mind unable to absorb what my hands were doing. The sounds of screaming and crying, and the smell of blood and burned bodies, filled the hospital.
While I was running with an oxygen bottle in my hand, suddenly, a woman rushed toward me, seizing my hand tightly and kissing it. "Please help my son—he's breathing, please, he's alive, I'm sure of it, I have no one else, and if I lose him I will have lost everything in my life,” she pleaded. He was lying on the ground, blood pooling around him like a lake. I knew he was already gone, but I was caught between two fires: the fire of the mother and her grief, and the fire of the many other injured people who still needed care. My conscience insisted I do something for the woman as she looked at me with eyes full of hope and anguish. But I did not know how to tell her that her son could not be saved, so I whispered to the doctor that we needed to perform CPR. It seemed almost impossible given how little time we had, yet the doctor agreed. Afterwards, we told the mother that her son had not survived. Then we moved on to finish our work with the other patients, leaving her behind.
"He was going to be married soon, and happiness was about to visit us,” she wailed. “I was going to sing for him at his wedding. The most precious thing I had has died.” To this day, whenever I hear another story of loss in the news, I still picture that woman’s face, and her hand reaching for her son’s.
I wanted to call my own mother to tell her that I was alive. I kept seeing her image and her shadow, as if she were walking beside me, to reassure me. But after meeting that woman, after seeing her tears, I began to fear that one day, my own mother might be in her place.
~
Family members carried dozens of bodies out of the intensive care unit to the morgue, and those who’d suffered injuries were transferred to the inpatient wards for follow-up. Our department looked like an actual battlefield, with blood everywhere, and IV lines, syringes, and used equipment scattered about. Around 12 p.m., once we’d finished assisting the morning’s cases, I walked outside once again to try to call my mother. My hands trembled as I held my phone and heard her tender voice answering hello. But despite all my longing for her, I hung up. I tried another time, and when I heard her voice, I burst into tears and hung up again. I couldn’t understand why.
Maybe it was all simply too much for me to bear. The Israeli military had destroyed the infrastructure around the hospital. They had destroyed the water lines and the solar panels we used to generate electricity, which shut down the operating rooms, the ventilators, and the sterilization equipment. How could I watch thousands of people die, without any fault of their own, while we just ran from one injured person to the next without any medical resources or equipment? The military had blocked the medicine, painkillers, and sedatives sent by international organizations from reaching the hospital. There was no food. I kept a box of dates in my locker, and I ate one a day.
The hours passed and the situation grew relatively calm. We could only hear the sound of reconnaissance aircraft flying low, like the buzzing of mosquitoes in your ear, but much louder, and the gunfire from the warships at sea. They sounded increasingly close—a bad omen. Most of the bombing and the massacres took place in the middle of the night. This made it harder for ambulance and rescue crews to pull people out from under the rubble, and harder for medical staff to help the injured.
~
My colleagues and I sat in the emergency department at 1 a.m., talking about what we would wish for if we made it out alive. A radio station broadcast from the West Bank, and we tuned in hoping to hear some good news about a ceasefire, or anything at all. But all the news mentioned were the threats to storm Al-Shifa Hospital and the Israeli military plan to occupy the Strip.
We heard the sounds of bursts and fire belts striking the area near the coast that separates the north and south of Gaza City. After several minutes, some ambulances arrived after having been blocked by the advancing Israeli tanks. I assisted the dozens of injured people coming in, most of whom had burns or lacerated wounds across their entire bodies. I asked one of them where he’d come from. When he mentioned the neighborhood where my own family was, I lost my mind.
I ran among the injured and the martyrs, among the disfigured and the unidentified, searching for anyone from my family. I tried calling them but couldn’t get through, and I tried to go with the ambulances to see for myself, but the Israeli tanks had advanced so far that they’d split the Strip into separate parts. I went to the morgue to search among the bodies, thinking through the worst scenario I could imagine. I had no strength left in me, as if I had lost the last strand of hope in this world.
Heavy hours passed, but none of them arrived.
With the sunrise, I walked out to the street once again to try to call one of my brothers. After several attempts, Yasser answered, and with it, life returned to my body. His voice sounded both shaky and exhausted, as though he were forcing each word out. "We got out by a miracle,” he told me. “It truly was a miracle, but we are still alive and we are all fine."
Then the signal dropped and our call ended.
~
Eight o'clock in the morning, the fourth of November. I made my way back to that same hard, cold metal chair where I had woken up the day before, a lifetime earlier. I closed my eyes, but sleep would not come. The day played back to me in pieces: the water truck, the young man who was already gone before I ever helped him, his mother's hands wrapped around mine, Yasser's voice breaking at the other end of the phone. I asked myself what our sin was, why all these children and women had to die. But instead of an answer, I only had that chair, my exhausted body, and the hope that if I kept my eyes closed long enough, I might, for once, dream of something else.
[post_title] => 24 Hours in the Emergency Room at Al-Shifa Hospital
[post_excerpt] => A Palestinian nurse recounts an average shift at Gaza's largest hospital in November 2023.
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Women steeped in democracy work around the world share their thoughts on what we owe our shared future, and how we can all better contribute to our communities.
So much of what we once took for granted—democracy, belonging, institutions, even our sense of a shared future—feels unsettled. Being a good community member feels equally fraught, yet in the face of uncertainty, it has become all the more essential in the collective fight for a better tomorrow.
We asked women working across different fields, countries, and cultural backgrounds a simple set of questions: What does community mean to you? What can a person do today to become a better neighbor, organizer, and partner in a shared future? And what advice would you offer to anyone looking to strengthen their relationship to their community?
Their answers point toward a common practice and perspective: A shared future is not something we wait for. It is something we make together.
Community is contributing, no matter what it looks like
Tiffany Kagure Mugo is a Kenyan author and podcaster who focuses on issues around sex and sexuality within the African context. Based in Johannesburg, South Africa, she is actively involved in building a vast community of and for queer people across the African continent. Describing this community as the one she spends the most time in, she says it also intersects with the sex positive community she is a part of, which she’s worked to cultivate continent-wide for many years.
“The older I’ve gotten, the more my idea of community has shifted,” Mugo says. “When I was trying to figure out my sexuality, the idea of community was very much based on my social justice connections, who could help me figure out my sexuality… And then as I got older, it was the network of friends that I have built.”
At present, Mugo primarily sees community beyond the larger groups she aligns with politically, socially, and in terms of identity, and instead, as the people who are a part of her core support system. “The idea of community can be very nebulous,” she says. “For the longest time, because of being in the social justice world and having all these buzz words around community, it became a very rigid idea.” During that period of her life, Mugo considered community to be a fixed idea with definitive parameters that demanded a collective politics presenting itself in very specific ways. She has since shed that precise definition of community for one that makes room for more people, even if they are not always the people who are going to sit together at the same dinner party.
Beatriz Silva de Almeida Barros in São Paulo, Brazil applies a similar sentiment in her definition of community. On a granular level, hers is composed of people across six cities in the three countries she’s lived in—Brazil, the United States, and Ireland—plus the digital connections she’s made, some through her work as a gender equality advocate. Broadly speaking, however, Barros says it’s “important to allow yourself the idealism of caring about everyone in the world.” As Barros explains it, taking an interest and learning to be attentive to the ways she can reach others is precisely what has expanded her ability to reach more people across social and political divides.
“If I tell my Gen X coworker with no college education that I think abortions should always be free and legal, she’s going to think I’m another one of those commies and dismiss me out of hand,” she says. “If I tell her I wish her doctor hadn’t pressured her into having another child before she had a hysterectomy, without which she’d still have debilitating pain, we’ve taken a step in the right direction.”
Barros considers communities as groups that we’re a part of, de facto, even if we may not necessarily choose all the people in them, such as in a workplace. In such environments, she says, attempting systemic change to wholly improve people’s lives may not always be possible, but there are still always ways to make a difference.
“What we can do,” Barros says, “is make the experience of making a living more livable by being kinder to one another.”
Start where you are, with what you have
For Maria Perez, the Ecuadorian co-Executive Director of Democracy Rising, becoming a better community member begins with finding a place to contribute.
“Join a local organization that aligns with your values and with the vision of the world and your community you are interested in co-creating,” she says. “Get clear about what you have to offer.”
That contribution does not have to be extraordinary. It might be $20 a month. It might be volunteering an hour a week. It might be facilitation, graphic design, event planning, or simply a willingness to show up.
“I guarantee that any organization you align with is struggling to make ends meet,” Perez says. “Become an active supporter. It will take all of us.”
This idea—that citizenship is expressed through contribution—is deeply rooted in the Basque Country, where Ione Ardaiz, Projects Lead at Arantzazulab, describes a longstanding tradition of community development and collaborative governance known as herrigintza: building community, society, and public institutions together.
One of the concepts that shapes this work is auzolan, collective work carried out for the common good. It is based on a simple reciprocity: Sometimes you contribute your time and effort to help others; other times, you benefit from the support of your community. More broadly, Ardaiz says, auzolan expresses the idea that people come together “to create, sustain, and care for what belongs to everyone.”
Another Basque concept, erantzukidetasuna, combines ideas of responsibility, reciprocity, and shared obligation. It provides a stark contrast to the transactional worldview prevalent in Western governing philosophies, particularly so-called “free market capitalism.” In one word, erantzukidetasuna describes the mutual relationships in a successful society, including what we owe one another. Through this lens, citizenship is not only about having rights, but about taking responsibility for the conditions we share. Collective and individual wellbeing is not simply something provided by public institutions; both depend on people actively contributing to sustaining and strengthening them over time.
This is a useful corrective to the idea that civic life is something that happens somewhere else, in institutions or among professional organizers.
Based in east Kent, UK, Rebecca Gibson emphasizes this kind of local community engagement should go beyond one’s municipality, to include both offline and online spaces where people have shared values. A Londoner for most of her life who now lives in Canterbury, her local community involvement includes directly addressing the most pressing issues within her area, from climate change to roads. She also says the early days of COVID lockdown inadvertently made her much more attuned to her neighbors both near and far, especially some of the especially vulnerable and lonely older adults in her community, something now considered an epidemic across the globe.
“Through the parish council and the church, there was a real effort to connect with elderly neighbors and make sure they weren’t isolated,” Gibson says. “I was actually paired with an 86-year-old woman at the time, who was in poor health and I would do her shopping for her and regularly call on her through the window.” Their relationship superseded the time frame of the initiative, and they eventually became friends, something Gibson says might not have happened without the initial program, despite them living on the same street.
Separately, the genocide in Gaza has prompted Gibson to seek community beyond her usual networks, who didn’t share her outrage. She sought local groups of like-minded people, joining marches and setting up a continuous weekend stall in the city center to engage strangers. Previously on the board of Canterbury for Palestine, Gibson has become heavily involved in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement over the last few years, as part of the Palestinian-led global movement’s effort to put economic and political pressure on Israel.
“For me, it’s been a powerful reminder that community can come from the most unexpected places and that finding people who you share values with can turn a feeling of helplessness into something much more positive and active,” she says.
Practice belonging through relationship
That work begins with how we relate to the people around us.
Perez suggests a remarkably simple practice: Start a friendly conversation with someone whose worldview you suspect is different from your own—because of age, class, gender, ethnicity, or any other difference. “Acknowledging that you both belong in your community is a reminder that a shared future includes all of us,” she says. “These small, seemingly meaningless touches are really important.”
For Ouassima Laabich, a Moroccan futures practitioner and initiator, and a Project Lead of Muslim Futures at Superrr, that kind of relationship across differences requires something deeper.
“Being a better community member begins with honesty and authenticity: showing up as your full self, with the beautiful, the difficult, and the unfinished parts all present,” she says. She describes the self as an unfinished process, and says we have to grant other people that same permission to continue evolving. That means staying in uncomfortable conversations: the disagreement in a group of young friends, the moment when someone names a tension nobody wants to touch, initiating a conversation with the neighbor to whom you owe an honest word.
Community, in this sense, is not harmony. It is the ongoing work of maintaining a relationship.
To Laabich, community needs caring, both for ourselves and for others. Self-care, then, is not an escape from community responsibility, she argues—it is what allows us to return to it.
“Rest when you are depleted,” she says, “so that after some rest, you can still lead the counseling session, answer the message that keeps the network alive, knock on the door of the neighbor who has gone quiet.” And just as importantly, work within your real capacities: "Offer the two hours you have rather than the ten you wish you had,” she adds. “Name the task you can carry and the one you cannot.”
There is generosity in knowing our limits. A sustainable community is built not by people pretending to be limitless, but by people being honest about what they can give—and then giving it.
Move from participation to shared power
The women also point toward something larger than individual acts of community care: finding ways to share real responsibility for community decisions.
If building a shared future begins with how we show up for one another, sustaining that future requires us to develop ways of making decisions together. Movements need more than shared values, individual acts of solidarity, and heroes; they need cooperative structures that turn many individuals’ knowledge, relationships, and imagination into collective agency and shared power.
Movements must cultivate forms of cooperation and collective decision-making that can draw people together, while also renewing the institutions we already have, even when those institutions seem illegitimate, or have grown distant, depleted, or derelict. The work of democracy is not simply to build something new, but to reclaim and repair what belongs to all of us.
Many of the women are experimenting with different ways that communities can achieve this, and Perez is particularly proud of a recent effort to find “antidotes to fascism that are effective and applicable now, by regular people in their communities.” She convened elected officials, government bureaucrats, and community activists from across the country who are experimenting with shared decision-making models in their jurisdictions.
“They are learning from each other and troubleshooting together,” she says. The goal is to cultivate experiments in collaborative governance, “one seed at a time.”
This is also at the heart of Arantzazulab's work in the Basque Country: finding new ways to meaningfully involve citizens in public policymaking and decision-making, while also supporting innovation within public institutions. The aim is not simply to give people more opportunities to speak, but to rethink the relationship among public institutions, organized civil society, and individual citizens—and to strengthen the democratic ecosystem that connects them.
For Dr. Jayne Engle, a Canadian-American practitioner working at the intersection of democracy, cities, land relationships, and futures, this kind of civic infrastructure is increasingly essential. “Every community carries stories of the beautiful futures its people already know are possible,” she says.
Currently, she is especially enthusiastic about building Polity, a democracy cooperative developing digital civic infrastructure for more participatory, deliberative, and democratic forms of collective action. Engle sees this work, alongside the efforts of many others, as fundamental to building the civic agency required for the societal innovation and transformation demanded by this moment of geopolitical and geoeconomic disruption.
In other words, becoming a better community member is not only about becoming kinder or more engaged. It is also about building the capacity to make decisions together.
Learn to see what is possible
This form of collective action also requires imagination.
Engle encourages people to pay close attention to their own thought patterns and ways of seeing. As Anaïs Nin famously put it, “We don't see the world as it is, but as we are.” For Engle, futures thinking and systems thinking have to be accompanied by two other elements that are equally important: feeling and imagination. Their practice allows us to see possibilities, and to cultivate a collective imagination that makes resilience possible.
“Start where you are; do what you can,” she says. “Find the others. And lead with love and courage.”
Perez's work with communities experimenting in collaborative governance is one expression of this principle. Engle's partnerships with Indigenous community leaders through 7GenerationCities and their efforts to develop new practices of land relationships and stewardship is another. These practices change the time horizon of civic work: Instead of thinking only in election cycles or fiscal years, Engle asks us to think in generations.
“Learn to see—and sow—the seeds of the possible,” she says. “Every community carries stories of the beautiful futures its people already know are possible.” That means accepting that important ideas may initially feel too radical, even embarrassing. “Discomfort is often a sign you're onto something meaningful and important,” she says.
For Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, a Ghanaian feminist and writer whose transnational work is at the center of sexual and reproductive rights and social justice, radical possibilities turn into radical realities when one considers what is absent from the community they have, and what they would like to have, then actually begins to build it.
“If there’s a space that you wish exists but doesn’t exist yet, create that space yourself,” she says. “Find people who are like-minded and invite them to co-create the space with you.”
She’s speaking from experience: Sekyiamah holds an annual festival centered around sex and sexuality, and for the first time ever, she’s excited that it will be held in a francophone country, Benin, allowing it to draw many French speakers from West Africa and elsewhere. Centered around pleasure, Sekyiamah is especially proud that she can approach sex and sexuality through this dimension, as an important part of the conversation. Bringing together her community of African feminists and queer people across Africa and its diaspora—including Mugo, who has previously attended—Sekyiamah takes great pride in the various people represented in organizing the festival and attending it, physically and virtually.
“I’m really proud of that, because it’s a community effort and also an effort that benefits the community, with the community being feminists, being queer people, being sex workers, being trans people, being gender non-conforming people,” Sekyiamah says.
Build for people you may never meet
Perhaps the most profound shift many of the women describe requires moving from thinking about community as the people who are here now, to thinking about community across time.
Engle describes the practice of considering “our future ancestors”—people who do not yet exist, but whose lives will be shaped by the decisions we make today. She asks herself a question that gives a different meaning to civic responsibility: “What did you do when you knew?”
This asks us to think beyond our immediate interests, our own political moment, and even our own generation. It asks us to become stewards rather than simply consumers of the places and institutions we inherit. And it connects back to the Basque concept of auzolan—how sometimes we contribute to something from which someone else will benefit in the future, just as we benefit from the work undertaken by those who came before us.
A shared future is built in this reciprocal space—between generations, between neighbors, between citizens and institutions, between what we can imagine and what we are willing to do.
The work is ordinary—and extraordinary
None of these women suggest that there is a single grand gesture that will repair our communities. Instead, they describe a collection of practices.
Join something. Give what you can. Talk to your neighbor. Stay in the difficult conversation. Know your limits. Rest so you can return. Share responsibility. Learn from people who see the world differently. Build institutions that allow people to make decisions together. Imagine futures that do not yet exist. Think across generations.
Community is something we continually make through our relationships, our contributions, our courage, our imagination, and our willingness to take responsibility for what belongs to all of us. Our shared future is not waiting to be discovered somewhere ahead. It is being built, one conversation, one act of care, one experiment, and one seed at a time.
[post_title] => How To Be a Better Neighbor
[post_excerpt] => Women steeped in democracy work around the world share their thoughts on what we owe our shared future, and how we can all better contribute to our communities.
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A strangely hopeful book that looks at the longer arc of history to find lessons for abolition today.
A few years ago, I spent a couple of nights at the Panama Hotel in Seattle’s International District. The 1910 five-story brick building was designed for migrant workers by the city’s first Japanese-American architect, Sabro Ozasa, and smelled as mildewy as it was old. The wooden floors creaked loudly and the water traveling down the pipes roared whenever someone above me flushed the toilet. When booking the hotel, I had no idea about its quirks nor its story.
On February 19, 1942, after then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were forcefully removed from their homes and taken to internment camps. As a hub for Seattle’s Japanese community, the Panama Hotel offered to store many of these families’ heirlooms, their furniture, and trunks full of other valuable objects, until they’d be able to come home. But even after the last of these internment camps was shut down in 1946—after myriad families lost their homes, their livelihoods, and were forcefully relocated yet again—many personal possessions went unclaimed. Today, there are still around 8,500 objects in the hotel’s basement—a beautiful and devastating testament to its place in history, and to the immeasurable harm these camps left behind. If you go to the tea house on the first floor, you can see many of them through a glass panel: dusty leather trunks, silk kimonos, books, purses, and the yellowed front page of a newspaper announcing forced evacuation orders during World War II.
I think about those unclaimed family objects every time I read yet another headline describing the terrors of Trump’s turbocharged deportation campaign. In 2025 alone, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported 442,637 people; according to the latest data, there are between 60,000 and 70,000 migrants stuck in ICE detention in the U.S. More than 70% of them have no criminal convictions.
Author John Washington (a fellow journalist and friend) has been investigating what he calls the “immigration enforcement regime” for years. His 2023 book, The Case for Open Borders, called for the abolition of border control as a way to minimize suffering and bring more equitable global economic growth. His latest, How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention, is an unapologetic look at the echoes of Japanese internment. As its title suggests, it is also a timely how-to guide for blocking the creation of new immigrant detention centers and the repurposing of old ones, and for changing the perception of migrants as “a population subject to detention under the guise of military necessity.”
How to Close a Camp shows how the more things change, the more they stay the same. How, just like Chinese migrants were detained as soon as they crossed the U.S.-Canada border in the 1880s, today’s brown and Black migrants are being kidnapped by masked federal agents and kept behind bars in horrid conditions for months. Part of that history, too, is the prison boom of the 1980s tied to the “War on Drugs,” and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security two decades ago as a response to the “War on Terror.”
“A camp warps and degrades reality both for those in fear of ending up in one and for those living alongside them,” Washington writes. “Our decisions as a society, meanwhile, are uprooting more and more people from their homes, pushing people to flee, and failing to meet them with the protection, basic rights, freedom, or dignity they seek.”
In spite of all this, How to Close a Camp is a strangely hopeful book. It is much more interested in the longer arc of history and what lessons it brings for abolition today. By examining successful direct action and pressure campaigns from the past, Washington identifies six main ways to get communities involved in exposing—and shutting down—the brutal for-profit immigrant detention system. “Closing a detention center is rarely a single strike,” he writes. “It’s a siege: conditions exposed through sustained communications with those inside, licenses challenged, permits denied, inspections weaponized, contracts terminated.” The sixth step? Let everyone know about your findings and what they mean. “You need to harness the research into a narrative, then start pressing on those levers of power.”
Albeit slowly, this shift is already happening: “Alligator Alcatraz,” a detention facility built in the Florida Everglades, shut down last month after multiple lawsuits and public outcry over its inhumane conditions. With How to Close a Camp as our guide, we gain a better understanding of how we can begin to close more of them.
[post_title] => Book of the Month: "How to Close a Camp" by John Washington
[post_excerpt] => "How to Close a Camp" is a strangely hopeful book that looks at the longer arc of history to find lessons for abolition today.
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Györgyi Gálik on trust, agency, and the invisible work of peacebuilding.
What are the conditions that make democracy possible?
This is the question that animates the work of Györgyi Gálik, the Hungarian co-founder of Governing Together at Dark Matter Labs, a non-profit research and design lab that builds alternative models for future economies. Unlike many democracy practitioners, Gálik is less interested in designing the next civic platform or participation process than she is in understanding the invisible conditions that ensure their success: trust, agency, kindness, dignity, psychological safety, and fostering relationships that allow people to govern together.
For Gálik, peacebuilding is not something that begins after violence, but rather the work of cultivating the social, relational, and institutional conditions that make violence less likely in the first place. In that sense, peacebuilding and democracy are not separate projects to her: They are expressions of the same underlying work.
"Peace begins much earlier,” she tells me “It begins in the everyday conditions that help people feel seen, valued, connected, and capable of shaping the world around them. Peacebuilding is the slow, everyday work of creating the conditions where people can act, choose, disagree, repair, and shape the systems that govern their lives.”
“Peacebuilding is less about the absence of violence and more about the presence of agency," she continues. "That is also how I understand democracy."
Learning Democracy Through Loss
For Gálik, this understanding emerged from both political observation and personal experience.
Raised in Hungary and having lived across Europe and North America, she became fascinated by the ways political systems shape everyday life. But her deepest lessons came from watching how people lose meaning when they lose agency—something she witnessed in her own home.
Throughout her life, Gálik’s father struggled with alcoholism, and died tragically at a time when addiction was treated primarily as a moral failing or personal weakness, rather than a consequence of trauma, disconnection, and unmet needs. What he lacked, she now believes, was not willpower alone, but community, dignity, empathy, meaning, and purpose.
Over time, she began to understand what happened to her father not simply as a family story, but also a political one: The same conditions that leave individuals vulnerable also leave democracies vulnerable.
Citizens who are filled with resentment and hurt, and feel powerless, unseen, and unheard, become easier to manipulate. People stripped of purpose and dignity become susceptible to cynicism and authoritarian appeals. Far more alarming, this can happen without most even realizing it: It has always frightened Gálik how much people can normalize almost anything if the conditions are made gradually enough.
"The personal and the political were never really separate to begin with," she says.
When Democracy Exists Without Genuine Choice
Few people understand this dynamic more viscerally than Hungarians.
Gálik points to recent investigations documenting how authoritarian governments can maintain the appearance of democracy while systematically narrowing citizens' choices in reality. Elections continue. Participation technically remains available. Yet fear, dependency, poverty, and intimidation hollow out any meaningful sense of agency.
This is something Hungarians have experienced firsthand. The former government stayed in power for 16 years, not simply by putting money in people’s pockets, but by deliberately maintaining widespread vulnerability with a disturbing level of precision. Threatening parents that their children could be taken away. Telling elderly people they could lose their place in care homes. Threatening families that their heating, gas, or electricity could be switched off, or that they’d lose their jobs. Letting criminals off in return for their votes.
What makes this system so chilling is how functionally, it narrows people’s choices without ever pushing them outside a system that depends on their votes and participation in order to maintain the illusion of a functioning democracy.
"A society can have consultation, elections, surveys, town halls, and participation processes, and still not have genuine democratic choice," Gálik explains.
For her, democracy is not simply the presence of participation, but meaningful participation.
That distinction feels increasingly relevant far beyond Hungary. Across many democracies, citizens are invited to participate while struggling with economic insecurity, housing crises, burnout, and declining trust in institutions. Formal participation remains, but if people cannot afford to lose their job, speak up, move home, access care, or have the capacity to imagine a different future, then democracy becomes procedural rather than real.
Democracy's Invisible Infrastructure
One of the most striking ideas in Gálik's work is her belief that, like any seed, democratic ideals need the rich microbiome that sustains healthy, regenerative soil to grow.
In politics, we tend to focus on what is visible: elections, policies, public meetings, constitutions, and institutions. But just as a plant depends on an unseen ecosystem of microorganisms to survive, healthy democracies depend on countless invisible interactions and flows of exchange. Integrity. Curiosity. Reciprocity. The ability to repair harm. The willingness to work across differences.
Without these, both on an individual and societal level, democratic institutions may continue to function on paper while becoming increasingly brittle in practice.
As a result of New Public Management, society’s dominant doctrine since the 1980s, and our broader desire to control complexity, most governments have invested heavily in measurable outputs and performance targets. Yet many technocratic reforms designed to improve efficiency and enable growth have unintentionally weakened the relationships that allow societies to function. Gálik argues that we have become experts at producing outputs, visions, and strategies while neglecting the human infrastructure that turns those outputs into meaningful outcomes for people and communities. A city can produce an award-winning climate strategy and meet every reporting requirement, yet still struggle to deliver meaningful change when departments are siloed, staff lack the capacity to collaborate across mandates, public trust is low, and political leaders are unable to sustain collective action over time.
"We are meeting the targets," one of Gálik’s colleagues observes, "but missing the point."
The Gendered Labor of Holding Society Together
The consequences of this invisible infrastructure are not distributed equally. Much of the work required to maintain relationships, build trust, manage conflict, and hold communities together is often performed by women, yet they remain largely unseen, undervalued, and uncompensated.
Like many women working in politics, public institutions, and social change, Gálik is familiar with the invisible labor required simply to be heard.
Having lived in seven different countries, she has encountered remarkably similar patterns. Many women learn very early that they need to be significantly overprepared to be taken equally seriously. They watch as strategic contributions go unnoticed. They learn to manage their tone, language, appearance, and demeanor to navigate institutions that were rarely designed with them in mind. They learn to present as smart enough, but never too smart.
The endless examples of code-switching she’s collected from women around the world are both humorous and sobering: wearing glasses to appear more serious, wearing a ring to signal they have a husband and are therefore to be taken seriously, bringing brothers as stand-ins to unlock credibility during negotiations.
But Gálik also sees an unexpected strength in these experiences.
Women, she argues, often become experts at reading power because they have spent their lives navigating it. They know how to build trust, maintain connection during conflict, and hold complexity without collapsing into domination.
These are not secondary skills. They are precisely what modern democracies so desperately need.
Gálik has never accepted a passive role in public life. Nor has she believed that the capacity to initiate change should be reserved for those who occupy positions of formal authority. Her advice to women facing authoritarianism is practical and urgent: find each other, protect each other, document what is happening, and refuse isolation. Throughout history, women have created new forms of communication when official channels become dangerous—from underground publishing networks to other mediums of resistance (including quilts, sewing circles, and silent public gatherings). That creativity and resourcefulness remain one of democracy's most enduring resources.
Trust as Democratic Infrastructure
Throughout our conversation, Gálik repeatedly returns to one word: trust.
Not trust as a feeling, nor as a given. But trust as infrastructure, and daily practice.
Roads do not emerge spontaneously. Neither do water systems, bridges, or electrical grids. They must be built, maintained, repaired, and protected. Trust requires the same kind of investment.
When trust collapses, participation becomes performative. Citizens may still show up, but they no longer believe their contributions matter. Democracy continues as a procedure while losing its legitimacy as a shared project.
The question should not be whether citizens trust institutions. The question is whether institutions behave in trustworthy ways. Do they listen? Repair harm? Share power? Tell the truth? Follow through?
These are governance questions, Gálik argues. But they are also peacebuilding questions.
The Work Ahead
Just weeks before our conversation, Hungarian voters ended their sixteen years of increasingly authoritarian rule. Yet Gálik cautions against viewing electoral victories as endpoints. Removing an authoritarian leader is only the beginning. The deeper challenge is rebuilding trust, institutions, civic confidence, and the everyday habits of democratic life among a population long treated as invisible and disposable.
The other challenge is dealing with the rightful resentment these governments leave behind. How might we see possibility in the widespread anger that results from an oppressive regime? Anger is a healthy and necessary response to injustice. It can be one of the most powerful motivating forces for change. The problem is what happens to anger when it has nowhere to go, when it is met with indifference, with the expectation to just move on, with contempt, or with further exclusion. There, it hardens into something more destructive.
As Gálik puts it, “The answer is not to suppress anger or to fear it. The question is whether we can create places where it can be transformed into agency, participation, and collective action. Democracies do not heal by asking people to suppress or forget what happened to them. They heal when people experience that their voices matter again.”
As our conversation ends, Gálik returns to the same idea that has guided her work from the beginning. She hopes that in ten years, Governing Together will have helped to build a serious field of practice around the relational foundations of democracy—one that nurtures both individual and societal wellbeing.
Democracy is not solely defended in court or in government halls. Peacebuilding doesn’t only happen after conflict. Both depend on whether people still believe they have agency in shaping a better future together—and whether they feel their lives carry meaning and purpose within it. Democracy, then, must be something we practice every day in our workplaces, neighborhoods, families, institutions, and communities. These everyday acts are the nutrients of democratic life. They sustain the social microbiome—the living ecosystem of relationships from which trust, cooperation, collective agency, and the belief that change is possible can grow.
It is a deceptively simple idea. And perhaps one of the most radical democratic arguments of our time.
[post_title] => The Soil Beneath Democracy
[post_excerpt] => Györgyi Gálik on trust, agency, and the invisible work of peacebuilding.
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In their own words, how people in Minneapolis, New Orleans, and Los Angeles are still showing up for their neighbors in the fight against ICE.
Minneapolis, MN — Molly M.
In early December, kids stop coming to school. My daughter’s third grade class shrinks from 22 to 15, then eight. Over the next two weeks, a handful of parents and teachers raise funds for Christmas gifts and toiletries; organize rides; deliver big hunks of meat, tortillas, eggs, and beans. Families begin planning to send their kids back to school after the holidays. After my final food and supply delivery, I pat myself on the back. Wow, look at us. We did it!
Then, three days after winter break, Renee Good is shot in the face a mile from our house. ICE agents indiscriminately teargas a nearby high school. The city of Minneapolis cancels class for the week. The district announces distance learning for children terrified to leave home. I arrive at school to help organize tablets, Chromebooks, hotspots, and food. Hundreds of brown paper bags fill the room adjacent to the cafeteria; 175 students at my child’s school have opted into distance learning, and every single one needs something in this room. Our principal hovers over a spreadsheet. This is the craziest shit ever, she mumbles under her breath. I see a teacher crying, then another.
I deliver supplies to four families. At the first stop, an apartment building above a Somali shopping center, a masked ICE agent marches past me. I’m a blonde, white, middle-aged woman carrying three grocery bags; I’m his sister, his cousin. I’m someone he knows from high school. I take the elevator to the seventh floor and hand everything to a terrified mother who hasn’t left her apartment, or her children, in weeks.
"The news cycle has moved on. We have not."
The version of me that existed way back in 2025 could not fathom what we’ve pulled off in the months since. A small team of parents and educators raising over a quarter of a million dollars for rent, utilities, legal fees, groceries, hygiene products. We’ve organized food and supply deliveries for 75 families. We’ve patrolled the streets around school, scanning for ICE vehicles while simultaneously smiling at children—letting them know Everything will be fine! As if we know.
Operation Metro Surge ended in February, but did it? The week Tom Homan announced the departure of 700 ICE agents from Minneapolis, three parents at my kids’ school disappeared. ICE has merely changed tactics—they’re quieter, less overtly violent, but they’re still here. The news cycle has moved on. We have not.
Our mutual aid group is exhausted, as is every other one just like ours. We’re just regular people, primarily moms, with regular jobs and responsibilities—cooking and cleaning for our own families, caring for aging parents, driving our kids to swimming lessons. Teachers should be focused on instruction, not learning the habeas petition process or figuring out a 1:1 tutor to help homebound kids desperately behind. They should not be scrambling to find emergency mental health services for children.
For the families we’re supporting—our kids’ friends and classmates, their parents, their siblings—things aren’t even close to normal. They’ve depleted their savings. Parents have lost jobs, and even if a position is being held for them, many businesses teeter on the brink of closure, unable to offer the hours required to support a family.
Yes, Minnesotans deserve accolades for showing up 50,000 strong to protest on the coldest day of the year. And frankly, I think we deserve that Nobel Peace Prize, too. But the fight is not over. Springsteen has left, and what remains is the basic, boring, unsexy work of feeding people and keeping them in their homes. And because no one else is coming to save us, we will continue to fight ICE ourselves, one $20 donation, one box of diapers, and one carpool at a time.
Last December was a hurricane of emotion. Agony. Terror. Heartbreak. You can't unhear girls sobbing as their dad is taken away by masked agents.
But New Orleans weathers every storm of government abandonment. People are used to helping their neighbors survive, and that includes helping immigrants remain in our city.
Our system is called Ojos (Eyes). It works in limitless chats and social media posts on Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp, wherever. Neighbors share information about ICE and police activity: the exact location, a time stamp, a description. We communicate verifiable, protective facts, not fear. Community “dispatchers” comb through group messages, call eye witnesses, and signal boost confirmed alerts in Unión Migrante forums. Allies head to the scene to film, sometimes exposing ICE live, often just arriving to post “DESPEJADO” once ICE leaves, so folks can transit there again.
Ojos is operated by everyone at once, in real time. Thousands of people participate. Some are confined to their homes for their safety. Some are citizens who parked up in churches, bars, and Mardi Gras krewe warehouses every day and night but Thanksgiving during the height of the Border Patrol occupation.
In a state where the Attorney General threatens prosecution of anyone who “interferes” with ICE arrests, we remind our participants that we're not impeding ICE’s operatives—the Constitution is; we just witness. We’ve learned to peacefully, legally, safely and effectively film and expose ICE and police, without getting Obstruction of Justice charges.
Limiting ICE’s ability to make arrests is paramount—we can't pay rent for everyone in the city for as long as these attacks may continue. People have to go to work. Rather than falling short with a finite band-aid of charity on these deep wounds, peaceful confrontation slows harm at its root.
"You can't unhear girls sobbing as their dad is taken away by masked agents."
We can't stop every arrest. But we can do a lot. Beyond alerts, Ojos educates followers on our rights to demand a warrant, to remain inside, to maintain silence, to film. Peaceful filming in the streets becomes a daily protest broadcast live as soccer moms, bartenders, and tech workers film ICE and Kenner cops, and then share their own families’ immigration stories on Facebook Live—Sicilians who fled gang violence not unlike in Honduras’; Jews who were kidnapped off the streets in broad daylight. It changes the public narrative.
Footage has aided civil lawsuits and deportation defense. Ojos led a 14-hour stand off between neighbors and ICE agents and cops at a trailer park in red voter Hammond, a suburb north of New Orleans. There were solidarity pizzas, politicians, journalists, thousands of viral views, and substantially fewer arrests than might have happened without so many ojos watching. Hammond’s City Hall exploded with vitriol against the agreement of local police collaborating with ICE in the aftermath.
Putting our bodies publicly and peacefully on the line isn't just about keeping our neighbors here. It's about keeping our democracy. I know this personally: Federal agents have come to my home to intimidate me. An eerie echo of the state violence I hear in the asylum interviews I interpret for. It’s the same violence my child’s father endured when he was beaten and wrongfully arrested while filming ICE, profiled as an undocumented Hispanic construction worker, though he's a citizen.
But We The People create our government and our reality. We the People of New Orleans choose love and peaceful, public, unified resistance, rather than cowering in fear and doom-scrolling in isolation. This choice is the future of our democracy. We hope others choose it, too.
When immigration raids intensified across Los Angeles last summer, almost every day seemed to bring another report of a neighbor’s disappearance. On the Westside, where I live, a beloved paletero was detained while selling ice cream on the street corner. Immigration agents kidnapped workers from a local car wash and day laborers outside a Home Depot. Neighbors reported seeing ICE vehicles staging at familiar shopping centers and church parking lots, turning ordinary places into sites of fear and uncertainty.
Suddenly, families across the city were faced with impossible choices, and many stopped working because they feared they would be next. Others returned to work because they felt they had no choice: The alternative meant falling behind on rent and risking their ability to support their families.
Like many, my neighbors and I wanted to do something concrete to help. Around that time, we saw that Ktown For All, a mutual aid organization in Koreatown, had begun buying out street vendors, and had published a guide explaining how other communities could do the same. That was the moment it clicked. Mutual aid is strongest at the hyperlocal level, where trust already exists and people can stay connected long after the immediate crisis has passed. We didn't need to invent something new to support and protect our neighbors. We could learn from organizers who had already done the work, and adapt it to our own neighborhoods.
As ICE raids have continued into another summer, street vendors remain among the workers most exposed to immigration enforcement. Their livelihoods depend on being visible in public spaces, often in the same locations every day. Many are women balancing the work of running a small business while caring for children and supporting their families. When those spaces become unsafe, they lose the ability to earn a living at all.
"Mutual aid is strongest at the hyperlocal level, where trust already exists and people can stay connected long after the immediate crisis has passed."
Our idea was simple. If the community could temporarily replace a vendor's lost income, that vendor would have one less reason to choose between personal safety and paying the bills. We started by visiting vendors we already knew. As the project grew, we partnered with local rapid response networks whose trusted community relationships helped us reach many more vendors than we ever could have on our own.
We expected to help a handful of people here in Mar Vista. Instead, our work has expanded to the entire Westside.
When we first started Westside Vendor Buyout, we realized almost immediately that the challenge wasn’t convincing people to care. It was giving people a tangible way to turn their concern into action. Hundreds of neighbors donated, and volunteers stepped up to contribute however they could. Some helped with translation or behind-the-scenes support, while others connected us with families we never would have met otherwise.
As we spent more time with vendors, we began to understand that the raids were doing far more than sowing fear. They were destabilizing entire households and livelihoods. Vendors described living day to day as plummeting sales turned to mounting debt and missed rent payments. One mother told us her son had considered leaving college because weeks of lost income made it impossible to keep up with household expenses. Another vendor received an eviction notice after staying home because she was too afraid to return to the corner where she had built her business. As customers disappeared, neighborhood businesses struggled.
We had originally imagined the Vendor Buyout as an emergency fund, but every conversation revealed another way the community could help. We created a Hire a Vendor program so neighbors could continue supporting local vendors whenever they needed food for an event. When families faced eviction, we organized emergency fundraisers to help keep them housed. We also partnered with community organizations to host tenant rights clinics and organized a Thanksgiving gathering where we broke bread with vendors and their families, shared groceries and holiday gifts, and spent time together outside the pressures of work and immigration enforcement. The gathering met immediate needs, but it also gave people a chance to get to know one another and build relationships that couldn't be forged through a cash transfer alone.
"We weren’t starting from scratch, but instead joining a much larger tradition of community care."
One of the most important lessons has been recognizing that our efforts did not emerge in isolation. Long before the current wave of raids, immigrant communities across LA were already building rapid response networks to combat years of immigration enforcement, creating trusted systems for sharing information and supporting families in moments of crisis. At the same time, mutual aid networks have expanded across the city, especially in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2025 fires, creating new ways for neighbors to care for one another. We weren't starting from scratch, but instead joining a much larger tradition of community care, and have continued learning from those who have been doing this work for years.
Today, whenever possible, we also use Buyout funds to purchase food from participating vendors for mutual aid efforts already happening across the city. A contribution meant to support immigrant vendors can also help feed unhoused neighbors at a local distro or help sustain another community organization. It’s the main lesson I think we'll all carry forward, even long after ICE has left. The strongest mutual aid isn't a collection of disconnected projects. This work is about building a network of relationships where each act of solidarity makes the next one possible.
[post_title] => Helpers On the Ground
[post_excerpt] => In their own words, how people in Minneapolis, New Orleans, and Los Angeles are still showing up for their neighbors in the fight against ICE.
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Across the United States, activists and organizers are 3D printing one of the most surprisingly effective weapons against ICE.
So far, they've distributed over 1.5 million of them.
Before I even get a chance to ask my first question, Heidi DiJulio, Operations Manager at Protoplant, Inc., is off and running. A Vancouver, WA-based producer of filament for 3D printers, the company has become a part of a growing grassroots movement in the United States, whose organizers need what they sell in order to make one of their most effective weapons: 3D-printed whistles.
Across the country, whistling has become an ever-present background noise in communities invaded by ICE, a low-cost, instant-alert system that anyone can participate in. Everyone from crusty gutter punks to activist grandparents have been blowing whistles to alert people to immigration raids; as well as gathering outside hotels and other spaces used by immigration enforcement to ensure they cannot rest, eat, or move without being accompanied by a cacophony. It prevents abductions, saves lives, and makes ICE agents absolutely miserable. And, as noise protests have continued to grow, 3D printing has proven to be one of the most effective and affordable ways to get more whistles into more hands, fast.
“Protoplant is very proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish,” DiJulio says. “We’re very proud to bring it into our workspace, and figure out how to be part of a better future.”
While the ICE occupation—and noise protests—aren’t as visible as they were on social media in February and March of 2026, the demand for whistles is going strong. Over the last six months, Protoplant alone has shipped out over 500 kilograms and counting of their filament at a specially discounted price, and an additional 100 kilograms in gifted spools, enough to make approximately 300,000 whistles.
This steady supply of filament is essential for the activists and organizers—many working invisibly and unheralded—who continue printing and distributing thousands of whistles a week.
It’s also just one piece of a much larger movement still fighting back against ICE and showing no signs of slowing down.
Sounding the Alarm
When ICE first occupied Chicago, mutual aid organizers Emily Hilleren and Lauren Vega were quick to spring into action. They started distributing whistles at mass scale, among other supplies and support, and put out a call asking people with 3D printers for help meeting demand.
“I saw a neighbor in Chicago posting about leaving whistles in little free libraries and I was like ‘ooh I can probably do that,’” Hilleren wrote on Bluesky. “[S]uddenly I had tens of thousands of whistles passing through my condo.”
Chicago-based journalist Mo Ryan was early to join these efforts, and shared a few of the whistle calls with her friends, romance authors Kit Rocha and Courtney Milan. Though not local, the two were eager to help: both have large social media platforms, extensive networks, a love for 3D printing, and experience organizing under fascism. They began sharing information, boosting tips, and gathering resources and support, helping to raise awareness for what was quickly becoming a nationwide effort. As more and more people joined in, others were encouraged to contribute in whatever ways they could.
Before long, the group—alongside a rapidly growing collective of printers, activists, and organizers—became known as the Whistle Crew. Today, they’re one among many distribution groups across the United States rising up for community defense against ICE.
"Everything is very grassroots, driven by ways to put information in front of the people who need it."
They’re also still growing: As ICE has invaded more and more cities across the country, Hilleren and Vega have applied their experience in Chicago to supporting efforts in Minneapolis and beyond. So have Milan and Rocha, alongside the rest of the Whistle Crew, in an ongoing mass-distribution effort made possible through collaboration, skill-sharing, and organizing that is responsive to the needs of individual communities—rather than a top-down approach, one rooted in principles of mutuality and care.
The origins of this incredible mutual aid effort reflect a lengthy history of feminist organizing, drawing upon decades of lived experiences that value collectives over individual work. It also taps into the glorious side of human ingenuity that utilizes tech for good—a welcome disruption to our current tech dystopia.
Mary Sturgeon, who runs Solder and Bubblegum—a Seattle-based makerspace where visitors can use equipment (including 3D printers), learn technical skills, and connect with fellow nerds—was quick to get involved with the group after she saw Rocha posting about it. “Something I studied very heavily before I opened my space is the riot grrl movement and women in making,” she tells The Conversationalist. “What fascinated me was how underground it was, how record companies, everyone official said, ‘We’re not interested,’ so women just said, ‘We’ll figure this out ourselves.’”
A similar ethos, she believes, is core to how the Whistle Crew operates. “Everything is very grassroots, driven by ways to put information in front of the people who need it,” she says. “That’s it, that’s all we need to do.”
In the case of the Whistle Crew, as their work has expanded, so has their need for structure: to track who needs whistles, who can print them, and how to get whistles where they need to go. Both Milan and Rocha stress that while they are very public faces for the group, they are far from the only organizers in a leaderful movement—adding that some core contributors to the Whistle Crew remain invisible for safety reasons. Today, their network includes a distributed and diverse collective contributing logistical experience, tech expertise, and other critical moving pieces. They also resist hierarchical structures, rooting their work in the “we,” as Milan puts it, which is essential for effective, sustainable, and anti-patriarchal community organizing.
So far, the Whistle Crew has produced and shipped over 1.5 million whistles.
To continue this work, the group practices both conscious security practices and redundancy, calculated to avoid burnout and to avoid creating bottlenecks. Coordinating over Signal, they get supplies where they need to go as quickly as possible. If you’re a person who needs whistles, you email whistlerequests@proton.me. The person wrangling the inbox adds it to a list of requests for individual printers to claim, print, and ship directly to the requester. The group has been so overwhelmed with support that they’re not currently accepting new volunteer printers, but they have published a Wiki with information on printing and distribution so anyone can pick up this work in their own community. People who can’t print or be involved in logistics can also donate funds or purchase filament directly via Protoplant or Amazon wishlists, to ensure their printers have a steady supply.
“The goal,” says Zoe Quinn, one of the printers involved in the effort, “is obsolescence. I would love to not be doing this.”
Anti-Patriarchal Organizing for Fascist Times
There’s an interesting undercurrent to this incredibly rapid mobilization: It’s rising to meet a need, but has also at times been surprisingly whimsical. There are sparkly whistles. Transparent ones in a range of hues. Whistles in metallic rainbow tones. Fun shapes like fish and cats, and designs intended to be beautiful and sometimes silly as well as functional. A whistle is a whistle is a whistle, but there are more unconventional ways to get one, too. You can go to https://linktr.ee/3Dwhistles if you want, but toottootmotherfucker.com, whistlegoblins.fun, and whistlecoven.com will all get you to the same place.
One reason for that playful approach amongst the Whistle Crew? Many of the people doing the work are linked to Romancelandia, the community of romance readers and writers that moves mountains, and rarely shies away from hard work and fighting on the right side of history.
"Political resistance is women’s work and always has been."
As a historically gendered genre read predominantly by women, romance readers and writers are frequently derided and discounted, even though romance is consistently one of the best-selling fiction genres. (According to industry group BookScan, 51 million units sold between May 2024 and June 2025.) Unlike many other genres, romance also isn’t dominated by traditional publishing, and many authors choose to self-publish or engage in a mix of both. Romance writers often have incredible business acumen as a result, acting not just as authors, but editors, publicists, web developers, designers, and more, with incredibly diverse backgrounds and skillsets. (Milan, for example, is an attorney who clerked at the Supreme Court—and far from the only lawyer-romance writer.)
Milan and Rocha are also no strangers to political organizing: Their Romancing the Vote project, which started with 2020’s Romancing the Runoff in collaboration with fellow romance author Alyssa Cole, has raised more than a million dollars to support nonpartisan voting rights organizations, and the 2026 edition just launched, with auctions running through July 5. That experience—with promotion, logistics, and coordinating—has been critical for the whistle distribution effort.
Political resistance is women’s work and always has been. Even as people dismiss romance as unimportant and inherently less valuable because it is feminized, romance writers are engaging in an ancient form of unappreciated work traditionally performed by people who are not cis men: getting things done, cooperatively. “We have seven admins, zero are masculine,” Sturgeon says. Not everyone involved in the Whistle Crew is a romance writer or reader, of course; but feminist mutual aid and support principles are core to their work.
Fundamentally, it is also important not to mistake the Whistle Crew’s whimsy for unseriousness. The reason people are printing whistles is not fun. The way some are building sustainable networks for printing and distribution, though, is joyful, kind, and spacious—all necessary in the inclusivity and sustainability of this essential work. It's an approach that makes room for both people who are new to activism as well as old hands, for people who want to print no-nonsense, matte black whistles right alongside Quinn’s glow-in-the-dark ones.
"People of minoritized genders are used to working collectively for survival."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, some people are not happy about this “rainbow sparkle agenda,” as Rocha puts it, noting that a very small but sometimes loud group of people—mostly cis men—seem to be very upset about women making 3D printing cute. (Though everyone is quick to state that the positive responses far outweigh the negatives.) The response reflects a larger history of pushing women out of tech spaces, hearkening back to the treatment of women’s creative work as that of hobbyists and crafters, in contrast to men’s.
It's also a theme that long predates 3D printing, or for that matter, whistles.
The devaluation of women’s work replicates itself everywhere, including in online conversations as well as offline makerspaces, which are often where people curious about 3D printing are first introduced to it. These sites provide access to equipment, training, and space for a wide variety of projects, but are often heavily male-dominated. This is despite the fact that the original makerspaces were sites of women’s “craft” and housework, such as sewing circles and other resource-sharing activities, enabling women to teach each other skills, perform tasks together, and access equipment and other resources too expensive to afford individually—all of which is echoed in how the Whistle Crew operates today.
Women are consistently early adopters and creators across tech, from Ada Lovelace to Katherine Johnson to Reshma Saujani. They also currently lead several high-profile 3D printing companies, including Cinderwing. Still, men enjoy being loud and wrong, convinced that they are the original innovators and that work only becomes serious when they’re involved.
The whistle goblins are having none of it. Among other things, Sturgeon notes, mansplainers who complain it’s wasteful to use sparkly or rainbow filaments for 3D printing seem to have a skill issue.
“It’s not inefficient,” she tells me, “when you know what you’re doing.”
These derisive comments about colorful, playful whistles have often been accompanied with equal surprise that women can be such effective organizers. In January, one Twitter user complained, “The ‘No-Go-Zone’ in Minneapolis is getting fully stocked like a pop-up leftist supply depot, free hand warmers, winter gear, coffee, food, milk, you name it. This is PROFESSIONAL-grade logistics. Someone is BANKROLLING this autonomous zone.”
For organizers, though, it was just another day ending in "Y." People who are not cis men are often accustomed to being the logisticians both at home and at work, expected to make sure everything runs smoothly, with labor that remains largely invisible. The ones who cook the meals and wash the dishes, who shop for school supplies, who manage all the appointments, make the office coffee, and become the de facto note takers at meetings.
If you want distributed logistics to run smoothly, you need people who can work cooperatively and efficiently together—and people of minoritized genders are used to working collectively for survival.
They’re also the ones physically showing up for their communities to push back against ICE.
“The bravest and fiercest defenders of their neighbors,” shares one supply runner, who asked to remain anonymous, “have been women and especially teenage girls in Chicago.”
Making Organizing Sustainable with Play
For Quinn, who has been outspoken about their experience with depression and anxiety, finding a fun thread for their brain to focus on, like experimenting with a new filament or whistle design, has helped them build community. It has also helped them cultivate sustainability for themselves, something that has not only been critical for avoiding burnout so they can continue doing this work, but also, for their mental health.
Sometimes, Quinn says, a person just wants to “have a better day. I like having better days.”
“We’re printing whistles to fight back against people with guns and immunity,” an activity that can feel incredibly existential, depressing, and enraging, says Quinn. “If that’s all you have, it’s going to be really hard to sustain that. Play matters. It allows people to engage in ways they wouldn’t otherwise. It allows us to get through the shitshow.”
This is not just about finding joy for those involved in the herculean whistle distribution effort, but also making whistle use more accessible for people who are new to mutual aid and direct action. Anyone can carry and blow a whistle. But whistles are only effective if you wear them, and if you’re a person who loves fun and whimsy, you may be more likely to consistently carry a purple sparkly whistle than a plain one. That approachability is very much by design, allowing people to be more comfortable getting involved. For some, this might start and end with whistles, but it can also turn into more engagement with community organizing.
"An expansive approach to activism makes room for everyone and builds long-term sustainability."
This doesn’t mean the Whistle Crew doesn’t have room for those who prefer the plain and understated. As a marginalized person who has been treated like political fodder, Quinn stresses that they “don’t fault anybody who’s in a space where they can’t engage with [whimsy],” recognizing the essential value of diversity in organizing tactics. An expansive approach to activism makes room for everyone and builds long-term sustainability. Both whimsical and deeply serious people are essential to the ultimate cause of fighting fascism and protecting our neighbors. So is letting go of the ego behind wanting to be right, to fix what isn’t broken, to tell people who have been engaged in this work for a very long time that they’re doing it incorrectly. Feminist organizing, like the Whistle Crew has practiced, highlights how important this is, and provides a model for doing it.
A whistle a day—whether printed in army drab or trans pride stripes—keeps the jackboots away.
“I’d rather be printing swords,” Quinn says at the end of our conversation, returning to what got them interested in 3D printing in the first place. “Swords are cool, swords are fun. But we have to do what we’re doing because our country is setting up concentration camps, they’re kidnapping our neighbors, they’re scaling up at an alarming rate.”
“Hear me out,” I reply. “Whistle sword.”
“Hold on,” they say, as their eyes light up. “I gotta write this down.”
[post_title] => Welcome to the Whistle Rebellion
[post_excerpt] => Across the United States, activists and organizers are 3D printing one of the most surprisingly effective weapons against ICE.
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[post_modified] => 2026-07-03 01:59:28
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Looking back at the courage of activists in decades past can help keep you from falling into hopelessness today.
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to quit “doomscrolling” at night.
It was going okay, until the Minnesota ICE raids accelerated in late January, and staying glued to my phone felt like all I could do to help from an ocean away. A few days later, there was news of yet another anti-trans bathroom bill passing, this time in Kansas, after over 600 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills were introduced across the United States last year. That same week, the Epstein files were released.
Previously ongoing for several years, my doomscrolling had instilled in me a sense of hopelessness that didn’t allow for any light to shine in. After I relapsed, I began to make nihilistic jokes about how dire everything felt, heavy bags under my eyes amidst my renewed nighttime habit. Instead of transphobic laws, anti-immigration sentiment, and sky-high rent existing as separate issues to be tackled with careful activism, all of the “bad” in the world morphed into one large, unintelligible blob, entitled “the horrors.”
Concerned about the possible damage I was doing to my brain, I sought advice from Melody Li, therapist and founder of Inclusive Therapists and Mental Health Liberation. They confirmed my fears were legitimate: According to Li, a “sense of despair” is one of the primary mental health impacts of doomscrolling.
“Social media feeds and the algorithm are designed to be addictive and to keep us scrolling to generate profit,” Li says. “[This] may manifest as feelings of depression, anxiety and hopelessness. When combined with loneliness—as these apps are designed to keep us isolated from community and real-world interactions—the despair may even heighten.”
I knew my anxiety and sense of hopelessness were increasing due to what was going on in the world around me. Unsure of how to stop it, however, I decided to turn to my work and community for guidance.
I am a queer journalist working on a long-term assignment about historic LGBTQIA+ activism, which includes researching movements led by queer British women. On one of my most fun work days, I read about a group of British women known as the Lesbian Avengers, who staged demonstrations against an infamous Thatcher-era law which banned discussion of LGBTQIA+ topics in schools. In 1988, as the law was debated in Parliament, the Avengers threw lengths of washing line over the House of Lords balcony, and abseiled into the chamber. They were immediately thrown out of the building, though some of the group were arrested and put in a “cell by Big Ben,” released several hours later. Despite their efforts, the law passed anyway, and was in place for 15 years until its repeal in 2003, but learning of the Avengers’ bravery and creativity in standing against it was galvanizing.
It also sparked a realization that I wasn’t achieving much by doomscrolling except augmenting my anxiety: If just one story could stir a hope I hadn’t experienced in years, what might learning about others do?
I began with two of the best-known examples of LGBTQIA+ resistance: the 1960s Stonewall Riots and Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in New York and California, respectively. Both were led by trans women and drag queens resisting police harassment and violence, inspiring Pride protests as we know them today. Wanting to better understand the wider movement, I decided to dig further into past and ongoing LGBTQIA+ demonstrations across the globe, and was astonished by the rich history that rarely ever makes it to the mainstream.
I learned, for example, about the prolonged fight for India’s Hijra (transgender and intersex, otherwise known as “third gender”) community to achieve voting rights in 1994. The campaign group, All India Hijra Kalyan Sabha, had already secured their right to vote after a decade of organizing, but in the 90s, “third gender” was still not an option on electoral rolls, forcing voters to choose between “male” and “female”. After years of further activism, the Supreme Court of India finally recognized “third gender” on official documents in 2014.
In Argentina, legal safeguards for LGBTQIA+ people were propelled by a group of twenty activists who stormed the Buenos Aires Constituent Assembly on August 27, 1996. The group carried large photos of Carlos Jáuregui, a gay activist who died of AIDS-related causes the week prior. Jáuregui was widely known for his HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns, for creating the LGBTQIA+ group Gays por los Derechos Civiles in 1991, and for attempting to sue the Archbishop of Buenos Aires for discrimination. He also organized the first ever Pride March in the city in 1992, which was made up of around 300 people, many of whom wore masks to avoid being recognized. (Buenos Aires Pride now attracts around a million people.)
During the August 27 demonstration, activists tracked down members of the commission, refusing to leave until they signed a statement of support for outlawing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Days later, on August 30, the anti-discrimination clause was approved into the Constitution of the city of Buenos Aires, which became the first city in Spanish-speaking Latin America to legally protect LGBTQIA+ people from discrimination. Today, Argentina’s LGBTQIA+ rights are rated higher than the UK and the US due to their strong protections against hate crimes.
In Uganda, the LGBTQIA+ community continues to stand up against mounting discrimination with joy and courage, throwing “guerrilla-style” Pride celebrations despite some of the strictest anti-LGBTQIA+ laws in the world. At great personal risk, activists and allies alike have fought through several channels, including legally challenging the country’s anti-LGBTQIA+ laws. A group of Ugandan mothers of LGBTQIA+ people even took on the President in an open letter criticizing homophobic legislation, writing that it has been “horrific” to see their children “verbally threatened, physically targeted and abused for who they are and for whom they love.”
Especially touching to me while investigating these brave, public feats of political activism was the knowledge that they were so often preceded by decades of quieter community-based activism—like the lesbians in San Diego who stepped up to donate blood during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the “buddy systems” which paired people living with HIV with an ally who “provided care, support and friendship when many people turned their backs,” the communities who fundraised for their vulnerable neighbors, and the friends who acted as each other’s chosen families. Many of these past activists’ strategies mirrored anti-ICE action in Minnesota, like noise protests, sit-ins, and mutual aid, demonstrating that in-person organization and community continue to be effective and powerful.
To curb some of these negative consequences, Li suggests allocating time limits on certain apps, turning off notifications, and setting boundaries with friends who might send you “doom” content. They also emphasize engaging with our communities—offline.
“Being in community helps us build collective power and systems of care that center our voices and needs,” they explain. “Doomscrolling will spiral us into isolation and a sense of helplessness… We must resist these tactics by taking part in community, where we can share resources, organize, strategize, and make change together.”
Li’s advice on harnessing our collective power has been especially meaningful to me, though I do still find myself doomscrolling on nights I can’t sleep. But more than before, I’m able to ease the urge to give into hopelessness by gaining strength from the past. I remember the women who abseiled into Parliament, the people who risked their lives dancing in the streets for Pride, the community protesting for trans rights today, and those who have bravely faced, and continue to face, the “doom” head-on. They remind me that the opposite of doomscrolling is action, and I have begun to act—to volunteer with my local LGBTQIA+ community, to amplify marginalized voices, to join local protest groups. Because of their example, I am able to turn away from the cold blue light of the screen, and instead find the light in the community around me.
[post_title] => How To Quit Doomscrolling When the World Is on Fire
[post_excerpt] => Looking back at the courage of activists in decades past can help keep you from falling into hopelessness today.
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Since the start of the war, Russian soldiers have targeted vulnerable Ukrainian women for sexual abuse.
These are just a few of their stories.
Olena Zaitseva was in the early stages of pregnancy when she was unlawfully detained by Russian forces in February 2019.
“They took me into a prison-like facility, where they handcuffed me and attached me to a pipe,” she recalls. But soon after, they moved her to another room, “where the violence—and all the horrors imaginable—took place.”
Living close to what was then the front lines of eastern Ukraine, where the ongoing war with Russia first broke out in 2014, Olena and her 18-year old son Vladyslav had been accused by Russian forces of plotting to destroy railway infrastructure. Without legal defense or recourse, the mother, then 48, would spend the next four years as a civilian captive, while her son would be sentenced to 22 years in prison.
Olena was first held captive in Makiyivka, a former prison colony, and later in Izolyatsia, a former pre-trial detention center. Both had been converted into torture chambers by the Russian army, and were widely known for the atrocities committed by Russian servicemen against Ukrainian prisoners—atrocities that continue to this day.
When she first arrived at Makiyivka, Olena tells me she was imprisoned in a one-person cell, where around six men in balaclavas beat her and raped her with rubber batons for several days. (The soldiers put a bag on her head, so she could not count the total number of perpetrators.) The rapes triggered grave gynecological difficulties, causing Olena to bleed heavily. For nearly two years, these symptoms persisted. “I was alone in a cell with only a mattress, a bottle of water, and one bucket,” she says. “I’d sit on the bucket so that the blood could flow because I had no pads, no cloth, nothing.”
Olena with a photo of her son, Vladyslav. (Photo: Sara Cincurova)
Subjected to other forms of torture, Olena did not receive medical aid in her four years in Russian captivity, except for a single hospital visit in occupied Donetsk to consult with a gynecologist. “I cannot translate that feeling into words,” she recalls. “It was like in American movies: my hands in chains, my legs in irons, I was forced to bend forward and look down, and they dragged me like a dog. I was so ashamed.”
“People were walking in the street, and I had a bag on my head, like the worst of the criminals,” she says.
The doctors did not give her a diagnosis that day. It would have been impossible, Olena says, because the same Russian servicemen and prison guards who had abused her were watching and listening. But she already knew she had lost her pregnancy as a result of the violence she’d experienced during her imprisonment. (The father of her child would die on the front lines before they could be reunited.)
After four years in captivity, Olena was freed in a prisoner exchange in 2022. I meet her outside of Kyiv, where she now lives alone in a small room in a shared apartment. She has recently applied to receive disability status as a result of permanent injuries sustained during her imprisonment, while her son Vladyslav remains in Russian captivity, now for the eighth consecutive year. Olena continues to advocate for his release every day, and says she only relives the abuse she experienced and gives interviews to the press in order to help draw attention to his case. But she admits there is little hope.
“For my son to be exchanged, a miracle would have to happen,” she tells me. “Looking at what is happening, those who had been imprisoned before 2022 have been forgotten.”
Searching Houses for Vulnerable Victims
Olena’s story is just one of nearly 30 testimonies I have collected over the past two years of conflict-related sexual violence perpetrated against Ukrainian women, and is consistent with the testimonies of other women I have interviewed who were held at Makiyivka and Izolyatsia.
All of the women’s accounts were independently verified by Ukrainian NGOs collecting evidence of Russia’s war crimes, and together, paint a grim picture of systematic abuse—one that is not just a crime of opportunity, but suggests an intentional scouting effort by Russian soldiers to find potential victims who are especially vulnerable.
Although the Geneva Conventions, as well as international humanitarian law, stipulate that all civilians in conflict who are wounded or sick “shall be respected and protected in all circumstances,” UN reporting suggests that Russian forces have not respected these protections, routinely abusing even the most defenseless of Ukrainian civilians. Children, disabled persons, and the elderly are also protected civilians under international law; as are pregnant women like Olena, as well as mothers and other caregivers. But since the war broke out in 2014, rape and other war crimes have been routinely documented against each of these protected groups, as confirmed by both a 2023 and 2024 UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine. Explicitly defining rape as a form of torture under international law, the investigators found that soldiers routinely "identified women in a vulnerable situation" and "committed acts of rape and sexual violence when they broke into the victims’ houses," sometimes "at gunpoint with extreme brutality and with acts of torture, such as beatings and strangling."
(Photo: Diana Deliurman)
While sexual violence has become a defining weapon in the Russian war in Ukraine, it has also been on the rise in conflicts around the world. A 2025 UN report documented thousands more cases of conflict-related sexual violence in 2024 compared with the year before—a 25 percent increase, widely considered a conservative estimate. A 2026 report of the UN Secretary-General on conflict-related sexual violence estimated that for each rape reported in connection with a global conflict, 10 to 20 cases went undocumented.
Rape and other forms of sexual violence have long been a violation of international humanitarian law, yet committed with impunity in conflicts around the world, Jessica Neuwirth, founder of the Frontline Women's Fund, tells The Conversationalist. Her organization works to combat this by offering support to women's organizations working in conflict zones, helping survivors of sexual violence. “The Geneva Conventions prohibit ‘outrages upon personal dignity’ and specifically mention ‘rape and any form of indecent assault,’" she says. “The statute of the International Criminal Court explicitly includes rape as both a war crime and a crime against humanity.”
The problem, Neuwirth says, has not been the legal prohibition of rape, but the failure to hold perpetrators accountable under the law.
There have, however, been some efforts to bring perpetrators to account. In 2025, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards, joined by several other experts, sent a dossier of sexual torture allegations to the Russian Federation, involving the cases of 10 Ukrainian civilians. “These were all highly sexualized assaults which included rapes, threats of rape, and other depraved conduct,” the dossier read. “It is becoming clearer that the Russian Federation’s deliberate and systematic policy of torture in Ukraine involves sexualized torture and other sexualized cruelty, including against the civilian population.” (While Russia did not formally address a reply to the UN, the Kremlin has publicly stated its belief that many reports by Ukrainian women of sexual violence were groundless.)
The Strongest of All
“No one is as strong as Ukrainian women,” Liudmyla, a retired teacher who will celebrate her 79th birthday this summer, tells me. In the summer of 2022, she was beaten and raped by a young Russian serviceman in her house in a small village of the Kherson region, then under Russian occupation. The soldier left her with four broken ribs, among other injuries.
I interviewed Liudmyla for the first time in February 2025. Despite temperatures in the negatives that day, we set out to meet in the ruins of a bombarded elementary school in her village, which Liudmyla wanted to show me. In the end, we had no choice but to record the interview in a car because of the unbearable cold.
Despite the risks of coming forward with her story, Liudmyla has refused to be silenced, and has inspired other survivors in the country to speak out—including elderly or deeply religious women who at times blamed themselves for their assault. For her bravery, she is now seen as a local leader.
Liudmyla. (Photo: Diana Deliurman)
A year and a half after our first interview, I meet Liudmyla again. Her mobility has worsened; she struggles to walk up and down the stairs. But her resolve remains unchanged, speaking with the same determination she had the first time we met.
The day she was raped, Liudmyla recalls, she was convinced she would die. When the soldier started violating her, she said “farewell to my children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren in my mind.” But she survived. “I speak in order to denounce the war crimes committed by Russia against Ukrainian women,” she tells me.
Liudmyla says the Russian soldier who raped her stormed into her house around 10 p.m. She was terrified: At the time, she lived alone. He shouted and interrogated her, asking questions such as “who lives in your house?” and “why are the lights turned on?” Then, he beat her up and tore her clothes apart. He raped her, she says, then immediately fell asleep beside her. Liudmyla said those hours were among the most harrowing. “I lay right next to him, petrified,” she said, “while he was asleep and snoring.”
At 4 a.m., the soldier woke up and told Liudmyla he would come back in two days. “He told me that if I told anyone, he would kill me,” she says. Liudmyla was too scared to go to the hospital—then occupied by Russian troops—and immediately decided to flee her village rather than wait for the soldier’s return. She was only able to move back to her house, which had been almost completely destroyed, after her village was liberated in late 2022.
Recalling the days of occupation, Liudmyla says she saw wounded and desperate civilians being tortured by Russian soldiers. Some were hanged; others were forced to drink motor oil, she recalls. Other survivors as well as Ukrainian soldiers from the area I have interviewed recall seeing and hearing school children being raped.
Today, Liudmyla’s village is located near the so-called “kill zone,” about 30 kilometers from the frontlines, where Russian servicemen use first-person view (FPV) drones to kill civilians with precision. The practice is called “human safari”—an act of brutality consisting of dropping bombs on people, cars, and even children at play, as if it is a video game. Making matters more dire for the village, there is almost no access to food or medications. “If it wasn’t for humanitarian organizations, I would die of hunger today,” Liudmyla tells me. She hopes the situation will not get worse.
Liudmyla’s testimony is not an isolated incident. Rape and forced abductions of elderly Ukrainian civilians by the Russian army have been widely documented in recent years. The elderly also represent a large majority of people who remain living close to the frontlines, unable or unwilling to move out of the houses where they have spent their entire lives.
Pain That Cannot Be Expressed in Words
While international humanitarian law protects all civilians living in conflict without discrimination, certain groups are singled out for additional protections. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, for example, contains specific protections for people with disabilities, who are at greater risk of violence, including of a sexual nature.
While reports across various countries have shown that violence against people with disabilities tends to receive relatively little media coverage, the UN has been “gravely concerned” about the fate of disabled Ukrainians since the outset of the war. “People with disabilities trapped in the Russian control zones in Ukraine are reportedly being used as ‘human shields’ by the Russian Federation armed forces,” the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) warned in September 2022. Other human rights organizations such as ZMINA have also published reports documenting the experiences of women with disabilities living in Ukraine.
Lidia Tarash, the acting head of the Department of Documenting War Crimes at the Ukrainian NGO Media Initiative for Human Rights, tells me that according to their organization’s data, at least 27 civilians with disabilities are currently held in Russian captivity. “We also have testimonies regarding at least five seriously ill civilians unlawfully detained by Russia,” she says. “These include people with spinal conditions, epilepsy, diabetes, asthma, cancer, amputations, and paralysis.” Some of these civilians are also being held “incommunicado,” in complete isolation from the outside world—their whereabouts and conditions completely unknown.
“These cases demonstrate that even particularly vulnerable groups of civilians receive no protection from Russia’s system of persecution,” she explains. “They point to the systematic nature of the unlawful detention of Ukrainian civilians and Russia’s blatant disregard for international humanitarian law."
Documenting disabled people’s stories in conflict also presents particular challenges. Many disabled people live close to the frontlines, where media access is limited and particularly dangerous. Disabled people are also a largely underrepresented group across traditional media, and anecdotally, this has made it especially difficult for journalists to find a home for their stories. On his last day in the role, Giles Duley, the United Nations Global Advocate for Persons with Disabilities in Conflict and Peacebuilding Situations, said, “When I photograph somebody in a war zone… they always say to me: share this story with the leaders. But the opportunities to do so were never fully realized.”
(Photo: Diana Deliurman)
In the spring of 2025, I spoke with the mother of a disabled woman, living with her family only about 13 kilometers from the frontlines of the Kherson region. Their village, which was occupied in 2022, has been routinely hit and targeted by FPV drones.
Her daughter Olha, she explains, sustained a severe head injury as a toddler that blocked the flow of oxygen to her brain, leaving her non-verbal and bed-bound. Although now a young woman of 33, she still looks like a child, no older than 9 or 10.
In late February 2022, as Russians stormed into their region, Olha’s parents were taken to the local police station for questioning. Her mother says they were forced to kneel for hours as they were beaten and interrogated by Russian soldiers. But all the while, she feared most for her daughter, who had been left at home alone.
Hours later, Olha’s mother was released. When she returned home, she found Olha lying on the bed, naked and motionless, with sweets placed on her pillow.
“Olha cannot undress herself alone,” her mother tells me. Devastated, she immediately knew: It must have been the Russian soldiers.
With Olha unable to speak, it was impossible to fully determine what had happened. But Olha’s body spoke for her. In the months that followed, she lost around 10 kilograms, and nearly all her teeth fell out. She became terrified of men, her mother says.
While the family will never know the details of the abuse, organizations such as Human Rights Watch have documented similar war crimes perpetrated against people with disabilities in Ukraine. In 2024, the country’s United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) stated that the prolonged and combined nature of insecurity, displacement, and economic deterioration had reduced “the coping capacities of women and girls and other at-risk groups in Ukraine ... further exposing them to risks of gender-based violence.” The organization also warned that older women and women with disabilities represent a significant majority of vulnerable civilians in frontline areas, and that both are more likely to be left alone, which often makes them especially vulnerable. As a result, the UNFPA concluded that different forms of gender-based violence have been significantly increasing.
A Fear of Sexual Violence
Children are legally protected in armed conflicts under international humanitarian law, with a series of rules granting them special protections. Ukraine’s General Prosecutor’s Office is currently investigating 23 cases of child victims of conflict-related sexual abuse, out of a total 396 reported cases of sexual violence by Russian troops. These numbers, however, are likely just the tip of the iceberg, and do not reflect the full reality of the sexual abuse that has been committed against children.
Alla Sobchuk, a 42-year old woman from Kherson, tells me she was unlawfully detained with her then 11-year old daughter, Viktoriia, when the city was occupied in 2022. She says they were driving through a checkpoint set up by the Russian military, who tried to force her to remove her window tint.
“I said no and they threatened to shoot me,” she says. “They handcuffed me, beat me, put zip ties on my wrists, and sprayed me with tear gas.” All of this, she adds, happened in front of her daughter.
Alla next to a sign that reads, "Ukraine will win." (Photo courtesy of Alla Sobchuk.)
The pair was then taken to a former police station, occupied by what seemed to be Russian police, she says. Viktoriia watched as Russian officers hit her mother and tore her dress apart.
“We are both very afraid of sexual violence,” Alla says, “and very afraid they would assault us.” (She adds that “luckily,” the Russian forces “only” used physical violence.)
Viktoriia was taken to a separate office, where the soldiers interrogated her. One of them threatened to send her to a boarding school and Alla to prison, before threatening Alla directly, as well. “He hit me in the face because I demanded my child be returned,” Alla says. They were both held at the police station in separate offices for nearly 24 hours. The next day, they were freed.
After they were released, Alla says, Viktoriia was very frightened—but relieved to see her mother again. “I supported her by telling her she was a hero, and even adults could not endure the [abuse] by occupation forces the way she did.”
Viktoriia next to a sign that reads "Kherson is Ukraine!!!" (Photo courtesy of Alla Sobchuk.)
This kind of exposure to violence—sexual and otherwise—is prevalent in captivity, especially in cases where children and teenagers are held for longer periods of time. But as more cases emerge involving Ukrainian children, particularly those detained in Russia, humanitarian organizations—and victims’ families—are warning of another deeply disturbing reality: evidence of severe physical and sexual violence inflicted on children themselves. Mariam Lambert, the co-founder of Emile Foundation, an organization that helps bring Ukrainian children abducted to Russia back to Ukraine, shared one recent case involving a family reunited after years of separation. “One of the children, a six-year-old girl, had previously been identified on a Russian adoption database,” Lambert says. “After her return home, evidence emerged indicating that she had been exposed to violent sexual abuse while in Russian-controlled custody.”
Lambert also confirms that similar incidents point to a broader pattern of abuse, disappearance, forced separation, and exploitation of vulnerable children caught inside a system operating without transparency or accountability. “The world still does not fully understand what some of these children have endured,” she concludes.
Hundreds of Methods of Torture
The sexual abuse committed as a weapon of war by the Russian forces remains just one method of brutal torture used against imprisoned civilians and other prisoners of war. Lyubov Smachylo, the Head of the Analytical Department at Media Initiative for Human Rights Ukraine, an NGO that has carried out comprehensive investigations and in-depth interviews with detained civilians, says she and her colleagues have been able to document patterns and connections between violations of civilians’ rights in different locations and at different times, which indicates that such violations “are not isolated incidents and may qualify as war crimes, as well as crimes against humanity.” Today, the organization is aware of at least 2,495 civilians held in unlawful captivity across 240 locations.
Based on in-depth interviews conducted as part of the organization’s research, in 87% cases of torture, Russian forces subjected victims to severe beatings, using their hands, feet, sticks, clubs, belts, hammers, or other improvised equipment. Of the 54 torture victims identified, 34 were also subjected to electric shocks. The evidence also suggests that Russian forces have used sexual and gender-based violence against both male and female detainees.
On May 22, 2026, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, reported that Russia has used 695 different forms of torture, including physical and psychological abuse, as well as sexual violence, in the war so far." Prisoners of war are strangled, beaten, subjected to electric shocks, set upon by dogs and sometimes forced to stand in one place for up to 18 hours; as soon as you start to squat, you are immediately physically beaten,” he said. He said that Russia has already tortured 406 Ukrainian captives to death.
This torture and abuse is perpetrated unlawfully and indiscriminately. The stories described above are a reminder that such horrors have not spared anyone—not even the elderly, not even the children. But reporting for months on sexual abuse across Ukraine, it has become clear to me that numerous survivors do not want their accounts to remain buried in shame. Nearly all of the women I spoke to longed to have their stories told and shared with the world—showing global readers that such unbearable, widespread abuse continues, and none of its perpetrators have been brought to justice for their crimes.
[post_title] => "All the Horrors Imaginable"
[post_excerpt] => Since the start of the war, Russian soldiers have targeted vulnerable Ukrainian women for sexual abuse. These are just a few of their stories.
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Why intersex activists are fighting for constitutional protections in Ghana.
To get ahead of the odds against them—an unsympathetic media, a punitive legislature influenced by the American Christian right, and a public uninformed about biological diversity—the intersex movement in Ghana has had to get crafty.
In January 2025, the Ghanaian government announced a new constitutional review process, instituted by President John Mahama shortly after he was sworn in. Its main aims were to “propose reforms to enhance transparency, limit executive power, strengthen checks and balances, and improve judicial and local government structures."
In it, however, the intersex movement saw an opportunity: All of Ghana’s constitution could be reviewed. This included Article 17, which states that all are equal before the law and no one is to be discriminated against on the basis of race, place of origin, political opinions, color, gender, occupation, religion, or creed. If the movement could propose a review of Article 17, they reasoned, perhaps they could amend it to explicitly include that no one could be discriminated against based on their sex characteristics, or if they are of indeterminate gender (intersex).
It seemed like a solid plan.
After several strategy meetings, legal review, and input from constitutional law experts, however, the leaders of the movement realized it would not be so straightforward. Article 17 represented an “entrenched position," meaning a long-held view that was unlikely to change. As such, not only would it be difficult to convince the public of the importance of including intersex people for protection under the constitution, socially; legally, it would also require a referendum to pass.
The intersex movement already had only a few allies among the political class, and based on their findings, they also knew a majority of the public did not understand the concept of indeterminate gender—that someone may be born male with female sex organs, for instance, and should not be discriminated against for something out of their control. Making matters worse, the media also regularly conflated sexuality with gender in bad faith: A slate of investigations by friendly NGOs had revealed some major media organizations had even received funding from anti-LGBTQIA+ rights groups.
They changed tack.
Instead, the movement decided to seek an intervention through Article 28, which provides for the protection of children’s rights. They proposed that the provision be updated to explicitly ensure the recognition and protection of intersex children, who, in Ghana, are currently subjected to “corrective” and “forced” surgeries and medical procedures, according to firsthand accounts reported to Intersex Ghana, the country’s first intersex-led human rights organization.
Specifically, the group hoped to protect intersex children from “medically unnecessary, nonconsensual and irreversible procedures, intended to alter their sex characteristics.” These speculative procedures—sanctioned by doctors and parents without due consideration for the well-being of the child—can have lifelong physical, psychological, and even economic consequences, impairing the child’s ability to make a living in the future, says Lawrence Shone Edem Adjei, director of Intersex Ghana, over a video call.
"At age 14, I have undergone more than six surgeries after non-consensual procedures were performed on me at birth. I feel like the doctors used me for studies,” intersex advocate Emmanuella Kwarteng shared in one testimonial.
Kwarteng’s experience is not an uncommon one, and Intersex Ghana has had to intervene in a number of medical cases gone awry. In one particular case, Adjei recounts that a child had gone through up to eight surgeries over a span of ten years. Initially, their testes were removed, and the child was identified as female. Years later, doctors realized their initial procedure had caused the child to begin bleeding internally during menstruation. An additional surgery then had to be performed to remove the child’s womb.
“It's like just trial and error," Adjei says.
To make the case for intersex children in front of the constitutional review committee, and to prevent this from happening again, the intersex movement put together a murderer’s row of accomplices. Alongside activists like Adjei, this included two doctors, three lawyers, a High Court judge, and families with intersex children who could share their lived experiences.
It was a particularly precarious time: The intersex rights movement was working with significantly fewer resources than it had ever had. Intersex Ghana and other NGOs had been depleted by the U.S.-led funding cuts to pro-LGBTQIA+ rights advocacy groups all over the world, and philanthropic support had dried up.
The movement was throwing everything it had left at this case. Before the constitutional review committee, it had a few propositions. First, that the Ghanaian government provides an additional gender “I” (or intersex) on its Birth and Death registry upon discovery at birth that a child is not identified with one gender. Second, that the Ghanaian government outlaws and criminalizes forced surgeries to deter doctors from performing them, regardless of the demands of the child’s parents. Controversially, by Adjei’s own admission, “We are not in favor of the parents serving consent.” Instead, the movement proposed that the intersex individual be allowed to develop naturally. When the child is of age, they can then make an informed decision on their own bodies.
The advocates made their case to the constitutional review panel, drawing precedent from a case in Kenya. In the 2014 case, Baby A v Attorney General, an intersex child was denied a birth certificate because their sex had been marked with a question mark, effectively barring them from participating in civic life. The court, hedging, declined to admit a human rights violation, but still ordered the state to issue the birth certificate and begin the slow work of collecting data, developing medical guidelines, and contemplating a legal framework for intersex people. As a result of the case, the Kenyan government is now mandated to collect data on intersex individuals, and consider legal reforms and protections for them more broadly.
This landmark court case eventually resulted in an Intersex Persons Bill in 2024 which, among other things, guaranteed the “prohibition of harmful medical practices” against intersex people—including children.
The advocates argued that Ghana should follow Kenya’s example and recognize intersex people as a distinct legal entity, allow for intersex markers in civil documentation, include intersex persons in national census and data gathering, and establish a national commission for intersex individuals. They further argued that the condition of being “intersex” is not in conflict with Ghanaian cultural values by demonstrating support from religious and traditional leaders.
After months of deliberation, which included hearing from anti-intersex and anti-LGBTQ+ groups opposed to the proposed changes, Ghana’s constitutional review committee reached a decision. They recommended to the government that the constitution be amended to “provide for the right of every child to bodily integrity, including freedom from irreversible, non-consensual medical or surgical interventions that are not strictly necessary to preserve life or prevent serious and immediate harm; that the best interests of the child shall override social, cosmetic, cultural or expediency-based justifications for invasive medical procedures; for protection for intersex children, recognising their distinctive vulnerability to medically unnecessary ‘normalising’ interventions carried out before informed consent is possible.”
The movement was thrilled.
Their excitement, however, was short-lived. Soon after the committee submitted its recommendations, anti-intersex rhetoric started appearing in the press. On a national news show, Ghanaian legislator Nana Agyei Baffour Awuah called the proposed protections the “most crucial” part of the constitutional review, claiming the changes would “transform our constitution”—but not for the better.
“We know that these things can be the entrance of LGBTQ,” Awuah said, repeating a common trope widespread in the media that conflates sexuality with gender. “You want to sneak this into the constitution!”
Awuah was not accusing anyone in particular with his statement, but turned to fellow guest Oliver Barker-Vormawor, an activist and lawyer involved in the constitutional deliberations. In response, Barker-Vormawor defended the committee’s recommendations.
“We're saying that these are medical decisions that must be made, not parents using cultural basis to demand for surgeries to be imposed on children,” Barker-Vormawor said, reiterating their intentions.
In reality, the intersex movement in Ghana has gone to great lengths to distance itself from the LGBTQ+ movement as a safety and security strategy. It is also one of the biggest criticisms the movement faces from its potential allies. When an anti-LGBTQ+ bill was first introduced in Ghana in July 2021, intersex advocates campaigned tirelessly for the removal of intersex persons from the law, which included recommendations for surgery and hormonal treatments to “correct” them. Later that year, Intersex Ghana sent a memo to the Ghanaian legislature’s Committee on Parliamentary Affairs, asking for the bill to be thrown out in its entirety. But overall, the movement continues to tread the line between distinction and solidarity with its LGBTQ+ allies as best it can.
Still, some argue the two movements are ultimately inseparable because of their intersections: There are people who are intersex and trans; or intersex and gay.
“The movement has become too medicalized,” intersex and trans activist Awo Dufie Fofie says.
Dufie, assigned male at birth, later discovered she was intersex in her 20s, and initially went great lengths to reverse the growth of breast tissue in her body. At some point, she was taking fifteen pills a day. Upon meeting a queer elder—who had also been born a hypereffeminate male, but had socially transitioned to female in the 1950s—Awo stopped blocking estrogen in her body and instead let her body develop as it would without pharmaceutical intervention.
The intersex movement often has to make its case through visual aids of intersex bodies, Dufie argues, and as such, she believes it has created “a system that becomes a bit puritan about who can rightfully call themselves intersex and who is intersex enough to represent the community.” When Awo decided to transition, she was even advised by a fellow advocate that if she made it public, it would make the intersex movement “look bad."
"It is my sincere hope that intersex advocacy…adopts a much more decolonial framework and approach which embodies and centers the entire experiences of intersex people, such as their everyday lives,” she says. “Not only what medical conditions we have and how much intersexphobia we experience.”
Adjei acknowledges the catch-22 the intersex movement finds itself in, and understands why it believes it has to advocate for itself by providing distinctions between sexuality and gender. But she also believes it must also be in solidarity with the queer movement because of their overlap and intersections—including continued discrimination. “Ghanaians will not differentiate between an intersex person walking by and an LGBT person,” Adjei says. An effeminate but masculine-presenting intersex person is just as likely to be attacked—as has happened in many cases across the country—as a gay man expressing himself in a way that might be considered feminine.
“I was not seen as human growing up… because I had two genitalia,” Comfort Bugre, an intersex person, shared in a testimonial presented to the review committee.
“Growing up, I was isolated from people due to my intersex condition. I was relocated because people found out and started calling me names,” Elorm Enne, another intersex advocate, shared in a separate testimonial.
Currently, the hard-won constitutional review recommendation is in the implementation stage, and the Presidency has set up a committee to see how proposals may be effected.
The intersex movement is counting on seeing three things: First, large scale research on intersex people across the country, both to shed light on the quantitative heft of these protections, and to better understand the prevalence and diversity of intersexuality. Second, mass sensitization and public education across the country’s 16 regions on the harms of corrective child surgeries, in partnership with key institutions such as the Human Rights Commission and the National Commission for Civic Education. And perhaps most importantly, the legitimacy of intersex as its own gender, and protection for all intersex people in the country.
The movement is tempering ambition with pragmatism. Advocates are also preparing for an outcome where the recommendation is struck down, or isn’t implemented, either in whole or in part. But if this comes to pass, the movement—with whatever funding it has left—plans to play its trump card. There are a number of government agencies and offices that should be involved in protecting intersex children: medical boards, the Attorney General’s office, the Ministry of Health, local government administrations.
It plans to sue all of them.
~
Additional Research by Nyameye Kiki Akumia.
[post_title] => "I Was Not Seen as Human Growing Up"
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Nerima Wako Ojiwa on technology, youth-led democracy, and organizing at the speed of crisis.
Peacebuilding does not always unfold slowly.
Sometimes, it happens in moments of crisis—when institutions fail, when violence is imminent, and when the only thing standing between disappearance and survival is collective action.
This is where Nerima Wako Ojiwa enters the story.
As the founder and executive director of Siasa Place, one of Kenya’s most influential youth-led political organizations, Nerima represents a proactive and vital expression of feminist peacebuilding: fast, adaptive, deeply networked, and rooted in solidarity, showing how democracy must often be defended in real time.
From Distance to Determination
Nerima’s political awakening began far from home. In 2012, while interning in Washington, D.C. with Search for Common Ground, she watched conflict escalate in East Africa and felt the weight of distance—geographic and political.
“I felt removed,” she says. “And that made me question not just what was happening there, but what was happening at home in Kenya.”
When she returned, she noticed a gap between activism and politics that led to systemic change. Youth organizations existed, but few were willing to engage in or with politics directly, whether governance, policy, or power. Online spaces for serious political debate were rare.
So, she decided to help create one.
Siasa Place—siasa meaning “politics” in Swahili—was designed as an explicitly political, youth-centered, digital-first space. Its purpose was simple and radical: to give young people room to deliberate about their future, to organize collectively, and to reclaim politics as somewhere they belong.
Feminist Leadership in a Hostile Arena
Leading this kind of space as a young woman in Kenya came with immediate costs. Nerima was in her early twenties at the time—petite, outspoken, and operating in a deeply male-dominated political environment. She encountered disbelief, harassment, and persistent assumptions that a man must be behind her work.
“There has to be a godfather,” people said. Or a rich uncle. Or a political patron.
But Nerima was doing everything herself.
For years, she ran Siasa Place without funding, navigating precarity while building credibility. She also learned—like many women before her—how to protect herself, adapting her behavior to avoid advances from men in ways that reshaped her leadership and hardened her resolve.
Perhaps the most telling moment, however, came later, when Nerima was debating running for office herself—and a male colleague told her she should not run for a women’s political seat because she’d transcended gender entirely. (Kenya has constitutional female quotas in parliament, mandating that no more than two-thirds of members in elective or appointive bodies can be of the same gender. However, the country has struggled to meet this quota, with women holding about 23% of parliamentary seats as of 2022.)
It was meant as praise. It revealed the cost of legitimacy.
Organizing as Peacebuilding
Unlike many leaders trained through formal mentorship, Nerima learned to organize through crisis.
The most recent example still reverberates. In May 2025, activists Boniface Mwangi of Kenya and Agather Atuhaire of Uganda were abducted in Tanzania after showing solidarity with an opposition leader. Nerima helped coordinate a rapid-response network across borders—using encrypted messaging, social media amplification, and collective pressure.
Four days later, both were released.
“They couldn’t kill us because people were making too much noise online,” Agather later told her.
This experience underscored Nerima’s belief that if you are not involved in politics, if there is no good governance, you're not going to be able to have a good—or safe—life. “And that's what we translate in all of our Siasa Place forums,” she says. “This is why you should be engaged, because everything is a political decision.”
Technology, Deliberation, and Power
At Siasa Place, technology is not treated as a single solution but as a menu of tools, deployed intentionally at different moments:
TikTok to raise awareness and funds.
Messaging platforms to coordinate action.
Deliberative technologies like Polis and Remesh to shape policy outcomes.
What Nerima values most about these tools is their refusal of hierarchy. Influence cannot be bought or performed, and participants must think for themselves.
For a generation shaped by influencers and algorithmic culture, this kind of engagement carries real weight—and it works. One striking example: Youth participation through Siasa Place pressured the Kenyan government into withdrawing a proposal that would have cut funding for youth programming entirely. The outcome showed that when young people organize and speak collectively, they can shift policy directly.
Nerima sees her work as bridging the gap between mobilization and meaningful political participation. "We are channeling our people to understand how policy works," she explains, "and why inclusive involvement matters for the betterment of the majority—rather than allowing purely selfish actors to dominate these spaces." She also points to progress on more fundamental challenges, like making information accessible so that people can engage without feeling locked out of the process.
Mutual Aid as Feminist Democracy
Perhaps the most powerful shift Nerima describes is cultural. Kenyan youth—many disillusioned by the state—have begun to act as one another’s safety net. They have raised millions to bail out protesters, cover medical bills, and support families in crisis.
This is not issue-based activism. It is solidarity as infrastructure.
And it is being led, overwhelmingly, by young women.
Refusing Erasure
Before we end our conversation, Nerima raises a final concern—one that echoes across feminist history.
“These movements are being led by women,” she says. “And women get erased.”
Technology, she believes, gives us a chance to interrupt that pattern—to document leadership, to create an archive of memory as it happens, to leave digital footprints that future generations can trace. For Nerima, this preservation is through Siasa Place. But each of us is capable of participating in it—because the act of recording is itself a form of peacebuilding, as is the full spectrum of feminist democratic work today: patient and urgent, institutional and insurgent, grounded in care and driven by courage.
The first step is simply to choose to take part.
[post_title] => We Will Be Our Own Safety Net
[post_excerpt] => Nerima Wako Ojiwa on technology, youth-led democracy, and organizing at the speed of crisis.
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Diana Dajer on community, technology, and the radical work of democratic care.
In a world increasingly shaped by political violence, authoritarian reflexes, and digital harm, peacebuilding can feel abstract—or impossibly distant. But for Diana Dajer, peace is neither theoretical nor inevitable. It is something that must be built carefully, collectively, and often quietly, through democratic practice.
Currently, Dajer is manager of citizen participation with Fundación Corona, a non-profit based in Colombia. We met in Barcelona after Build Peace, an international gathering of practitioners working at the intersection of technology, conflict transformation, and civic life. Among many compelling presentations, Dajer’s stood out—not because it promised technological salvation, but because it insisted on something more demanding: deliberation, care, and faith in people.
From Conflict to Participation
Dajer’s path into democracy work began not with innovation labs or civic tech, but with the social disruption caused by violence and loss. As a lawyer, Dajer worked on human rights cases for victims of Colombia’s armed conflict early in her career. Later, she joined the Ministry of the Interior during peace negotiations with the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrilla movement.
While there, she listened closely—to victims, civil society leaders, and government officials. What became clear was unsettling. Violence in Colombia was not only the result of armed actors, but of long-standing democratic exclusion. When local communities lacked meaningful ways to influence policy or solve local problems, violence became one of the few remaining channels for human agency—the capacity to shape their own lives.
“That’s when I understood,” Dajer says, “that participation is the real name of peace in Colombia.”
Rather than focus solely on peace after violence, she turned toward democracy itself: how it is built, who it includes, and how power is shared.
Technology for Care, Not Control
Years later, that commitment would take shape in Bogotá through a rare experiment: a multi-year effort to embed deliberative democratic processes inside city government. Working with the City Council and civil society partners, Dajer helped create a “laboratory of democracy” to test new ways of engaging citizens—especially in a political culture where protest had become the dominant form of participation.
“Protest is essential,” she says. “But when there is no dialogue with institutions, real solutions don’t happen.”
Bogotá’s leaders made a strategic choice to move incrementally. Rather than treating technology as a standalone tool for deliberation, they used it to solve specific process challenges in order to make participation more open, inclusive, and effective. Drawing on behavioral insights to encourage constructive engagement, the team launched a public communications campaign across social media. City Hall’s chatbot, Chatico, helped scale participatory budgeting and created a more transparent, inclusive channel for the civic lottery process. The city also relied on practical, digital tools, which included building websites to support hybrid citizen assemblies and bring in voices beyond those physically in the room. An educational course delivered through WhatsApp prepared participants in advance.
These early pilots evolved into a citywide deliberative process backed by Carlos Galán, a leader shaped by Colombia’s history of political violence. The aim was never speed or one-off spectacle, but trust—built gradually through structured listening and collective reasoning.
In Dajer’s work, technology is never the starting point. It is a tool, carefully chosen, subordinate to context. Used strategically, it can help narrow the distance between governing institutions and citizens, opening new possibilities while respecting its limits. But she emphasizes it should never be the destination.
This ethic traces back to her mentors in the global peacebuilding community, who taught her to ask first: What problem are we trying to solve? And just as importantly: Should technology be part of the solution at all?
Leading as a Woman—with Awareness and Solidarity
Leadership, for Dajer, has always been gendered. “It is more challenging than being a man,” she says without hesitation. Like many women in public life, she learned early to manage others’ perceptions—how she dressed, how she spoke, how authority was read onto her body.
But she is also careful to name her privilege: Gender does not operate alone. Race, class, indigeneity, and access compound exclusion in ways that shape who is heard and who is erased. Conscious of this, Dajer sees her role not just as a leader, but as a bridge—using her position to elevate other women who face even steeper barriers.
What has sustained her is community: women working together across civil society, refusing isolation. Feminist leadership, she believes, is collective by design.
Faith as a Source of Strength
What is less often visible in conversations about democracy and technology—but central to Dajer’s life—is faith.
When asked where she draws strength and clarity, she speaks not of ambition or certainty, but of prayer. One prayer, in particular, guides her: Make me an instrument of your peace.
“I don’t always know where I’ll be needed,” she says. “So I pray for openness. That I can serve—whether the work is big or small.”
Her faith is not about control or moral superiority. It is about humility, discernment, and love—qualities she sees as essential antidotes to polarization. In moments of exhaustion or fear, prayer is a way for her to realign with purpose, especially as she balances leadership with motherhood and family life.
Resisting Authoritarianism with Love and Hope
Dajer is clear-eyed about the global moment. Colombia, the United States, and many other democracies are experiencing renewed threats to the rule of law and separation of powers. For women living through these pressures, she begins with solidarity.
“I see you,” she says. “I see the burden.”
Her advice is strikingly feminist: Resist not only through opposition, but through care. Much of her current work focuses on narrative—how language shapes emotion, and how perceived chaos blends with fear-based messaging to fuel authoritarianism. Facts alone, she notes, rarely counter hate. What does are stories rooted in hope, love, and a shared future.
This extends to digital life. She urges mindfulness about what we consume and amplify online, recognizing how social media can trap us in cycles of rage. The alternative is not withdrawal, but grounding—deep human connection, empathy, and collective action offline as well as on.
Youth, the Future, and Feminist Democracy
Despite everything, Dajer is hopeful, especially about young people. Her organization, Fundación Corona, has shifted its strategy toward youth engagement, informed by research showing that future-oriented democratic narratives can reawaken belief in collective power.
When democracy is framed not as a failing legacy but as a tool to shape the future, young people also respond. Deliberative spaces—especially when designed with care—can help further transform this hope into action.
Building Peace Together
If there is one message Dajer offers to feminists working for democracy, it is this: Do not do this alone. Authoritarianism thrives on fragmentation. Peace, by contrast, is built through collaboration—across differences, across sectors, and across borders.
Agreeing on fundamentals is hard, and deliberation is slow. But isolation changes nothing.
For Dajer, the work continues—not as performance, or branding, but as service. As manager of civic participation at Fundación Corona, she remains guided by faith, sustained by solidarity, and grounded in care. Her work and ethos is a necessary reminder that democracy is not only a system. It is a practice. And women are already doing the work of keeping it alive.
[post_title] => The Long Arc of Peace Is Built by Women
[post_excerpt] => Diana Dajer on community, technology, and the radical work of democratic care.
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