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 a 2023 UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine. Explicitly defining rape as a form of torture under international law, the investigators found that "soldiers 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.
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[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"
[post_excerpt] => Why intersex activists are fighting for constitutional protections in Ghana.
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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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How the archival work of librarians and other activists helps preserve more than just history.
In 1979, as the Iranian hostage crisis played on American television screens 24/7, the television producer, librarian, activist, and intellectual Marion Stokes began recording the news broadcasts on tape. The live coverage—across all channels, at all hours—launched what we now recognize as the never-ending, ambient flow of media. Simultaneously, Stokes recognized a shift in the narrative America was telling about itself, and the role of media manipulation toward pro-American policies. So, for the next 30 years, she recorded any and all TV news broadcasts, commercials included. All of it was then archived, stacks of VHS tapes quickly accumulating in her Philadelphia apartment, as portrayed in the 2019 documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project.
This kind of project by an individual who operates outside of an institution was a radical endeavor: When Stokes began, broadcast channels didn’t archive their own material, often erasing tapes so they could reuse them due to cost. But Stokes’ project and its often innocuous content would also foreshadow the long-term value of guerrilla archives, both in preserving an accurate historical record and holding the media—and government—to account. Activist archives began as a practice in the 1960s, when organizers filled in the historical gaps where universities and institutions could not. These, however, were collective efforts; Stokes operated individually, until eventually, her son donated the recordings to the Internet Archive, where digitized selections are now available online. “By [Stokes] having that collection, it means the scholars, artists, and researchers have access to the information without paying for it,” says Shola Lynch, filmmaker and Professor of the Art and Visual Culture at Spelman College. “Because when our history is bound up in commercial hands, that's problematic.”
Stokes’ practice of recording any and all materials resembles the history of what is now called “memory work,” or individuals who preserve the photographs, documents, and ephemera of a community. A relatively recent tradition, this form of archiving has taken on new meaning in a digital era where data sets can be wiped and personal data sold, seemingly without consequence. Following the start of the second Trump presidency in January 2025, more than 2,000 datasets suddenly disappeared from Data.gov, the U.S.’s government's data portal. Since then, the Trump administration has overhauled even more data, including entire web pages and important coding tools for researchers and climate scientists.
Over the last five decades, open source tools and government data have been integral to preserving the historical record and maintaining public infrastructure in the United States. According to America’s Essential Data, New Orleanians received smoke alarms because fire departments used American Community Survey (ACS) data to identify neighborhoods most in need. School districts could (previously) make the case for increased teacher salaries using the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) to highlight underpaid teachers. Residents could avoid scams in their community based on federal Consumer Sentinel data. Now, these records are liable to disappear from the internet, possibly forever.
The government is ultimately responsible for preserving a record of its own actions. But when federal agencies are unable to preserve all their data, or willfully choose not to, it begs the question if this work is best done by civil society and those outside of the government. Guerrilla archives—whether digital or analog like Stokes’—are generally nonpartisan acts of preservation to serve the public good. There’s the Internet Archive, which has been archiving the web and other cultural artifacts since 1996, and Vanderbilt Television News Archive, which provides the most comprehensive chronicling of evening television news broadcasts in the world. There’s also the End of Term Archive—one of the largest of these projects in progress—which downloads all government information at the end of each presidential term. It’s a grassroots alternative to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which notoriously did not receive all of the presidential records from the first Trump administration in 2021 as mandated under the Presidential Records Act. (Trump promptly fired the head of NARA when he re-entered office in 2025.)
Despite having distributed its data more digitally over the last 20 years, the government has not issued any dedicated preservation or access strategy for its information. Additionally, the current laws and policies around government data preservation are outdated and inadequate. This hole in the system has compelled librarians to join the race to copy digital federal archives, beginning in 2016 with the Data Rescue movement, which drew over 1500 volunteers for dozens of hackathon-style events throughout the year. “Distrust re-orients care,” researcher Laura Rothfritz wrote in her analysis of these early efforts for Big Data & Society. When a public distrusts a system and a possible threat is identified, however, anxiety can be mobilized into producing future forms of infrastructure.
As the situation becomes more dire, these efforts have only expanded. Today, the Public Data Project runs within the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School, collecting and authenticating all federal datasets, more recently including the Smithsonian Institute’s public domain data. So far, they have downloaded the entirety of Data.gov, copied it, and digitally signed it with a provenance mark to authenticate its origins. The project launched in early 2025 as part of Harvard Law School’s repository system, which dates back centuries.
“I think a lot of us in the library and technology communities are sort of waking up to the fact that we need to have a strategy in place for the preservation and access of government data beyond what the government provides,” says Molly Hardy, the Project Lead for the Public Data Project. Their team also works closely with the Data Rescue Project, a grassroots nonprofit preserving massive data sets and consisting entirely of volunteers.
“Public data infrastructures have long been considered essential components of democratic governance, scientific accountability, and civic participation,” Rothfritz continues in her Big Data & Society piece. Much like our city’s infrastructure, however, we don’t recognize its value until it's broken. It is the invisible fiber that holds democracy together, from our roads and postal service to job numbers and environmental data. Increasingly, its preservation is also a task that has been left to individuals and communities. In October 2025, the nonprofit organization Internet Archive celebrated archiving its trillionth web page on its most popular service, the Wayback Machine, an initiative that allows users to find web page screenshots from specific dates. It has become an essential tool and digital service for independent organizations and guerrilla archivists alike. (The largest archive on the internet, dedicated to “universal access to all knowledge,” has not been without its setbacks however: In 2024, it suffered a data breach affecting millions of users and a copyright infringement case over its digital lending library.)
The Invisible Histories Project, a nonprofit organization based in North Carolina, has been preserving the digital history and cultural memory of LGBTQ+ life in the South using tools like the Wayback Machine. “We could no longer trust institutions to protect marginalized histories,” says Maigen Sullivan, the Co-Executive Director of Invisible Histories. She recalls a community effort at the start of last year to preserve government and university pages with references to diversity offices, along with flyers and photos. According to Sullivan, by August and September 2025, when universities returned to term, about a quarter of those pages were already gone. “This is the only evidence, other than what individuals might hold, that exists,” she says.
Invisible Histories has also built its own server because of mistrust in corporations like Google and Microsoft that store and hold onto their data, another issue facing digital archivists. The organization has endured two cyberattacks—one in 2023, and the other in 2025—since its founding in 2017. Because of this, they’ve considered cybersecurity training and increased security for potential threats against the archive. “If you feel like you're hopeless and helpless and have nothing to do, archiving is a tool of resistance and anyone can do it,” says Sullivan.
These examples of digital mutual aid have become essential for documenting history, and are one way to combat historical revisionism. Activist archives also continue to challenge which institutions have a say in the historical record, nationally and beyond. Zakiya Collier, a Brooklyn-based archivist, says individual archives preserve more than just data. “I think that memory work has a liberatory capacity to it,” she says. “I use that term because it calls on a legacy of people who dedicated their time and energy to preserving history in their homes, communities, churches, attics, and basements. They decided something was important to document and keep.”
Collier, who has worked as the digital archivist in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the New York Public Library, now works with the organization Archiving the Black Web, which trains archivists to document a more inclusive history of the internet. Its potential to create more live archives and documentations of the web aims to contribute to a more equitable historical view of how we catalogue our lives online.
As data and information is getting purposefully disappeared from the internet—an increasingly fertile ground for fascist ideology—archiving becomes increasingly necessary, or else, the public cannot bear witness to itself. In April 2025, the National Park Service erased references to Harriet Tubman on its webpages. The following month, Trump issued an executive order sanitizing federal cultural institutions by accusing the Smithsonian Institute of promoting “race-centered ideology” in its exhibit, “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture.” The USDA ended its annual survey of hunger in America two weeks before the government shutdown in October 2025, affecting the distribution of food stamps.
Data is information and has become a weapon in the digital age. But both individuals and communities are not powerless to fight back. With the rapid monopolistic takeover of mediaplatforms, it’s no surprise that users are beginning to archive their own data and leaning towards physical media. Sales of vinyl are up, print book sales are rising, and DVD collections are in.
“All archives create futures,” says a voiceover in Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, as news broadcasts and infomercials from Stokes’ archive flash in rapid pace onscreen. The organization of information by the lay person may help overcome barriers of the institutionalized index and history, as the threat of excessive online information and its disappearance still looms large for activist archives. But this work has become even more critical, not only for deciding how the past will be remembered, but how an imagined future might pull from its past to mobilize this kind of anticipatory care in the present.
[post_title] => On Guerrilla Archives in the Disinformation Age
[post_excerpt] => How the archival work of librarians and other activists helps preserve more than just history.
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In an era of rising authoritarianism and billionaire autocrats, defenders of human rights cannot afford to retreat.
There's a moment in every struggle when retreat seems like the only rational option. When dictators grow bolder and democracies grow weaker; when the funding dries up and the threats are mounting.
For even the staunchest of human rights defenders, this is often the moment when the temptation to step back, to compromise, to "wait for better times" becomes almost irresistible. But it’s also the moment when it’s most crucial that we hold the line.
The Illiberal Surge
The numbers tell a grim story. According to the 2025 Democracy Without Borders report, the proportion of the world’s population living in a liberal democracy is now the lowest it’s been in 50 years—less than 12% of people worldwide. In contrast, 72% of the population—equivalent to 5.8 billion people—live under autocratic rule. Even countries once considered democratic beacons are sliding backwards, their institutions hollowed out by leaders who exploit fear, weaponize division, and dismantle checks and balances with disturbing efficiency. Increasingly, even the United States—long regarded as a democratic anchor—is exhibiting patterns of autocratic drift, marked by the concentration of executive power, the erosion of institutional constraints, and the normalization of political coercion and violence.
Across every continent, we are witnessing an unprecedented assault on human rights, rule of law, and democratic norms. According to Freedom House, global freedom has declined for 19 consecutive years. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has transformed a nuclear superpower into a revisionist rogue state, waging wars of conquest under the banner of Russkii Mir (“the Russian World”)—an imperial doctrine that frames violence as civilizational reunification. In practice, this entails the imposition of totalitarian control over territory, society, and political life through authoritarian systems of governance abroad; and at home, the total, systematic elimination of political opposition. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has hollowed out judicial independence and imprisoned tens of thousands to entrench personal rule. In China, Xi Jinping has constructed the most advanced surveillance state in human history, fusing cutting-edge technology with unapologetic repression. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has perfected the model of so-called “illiberal democracy,” an oxymoron that now functions as a practical manual for aspiring autocrats.
Even in formerly Soviet Central Asia, where expectations were never high, the trajectory is alarming. Kyrgyzstan, once celebrated as the region's freest country, now jails journalists, suppresses protests, and coordinates with Russian security services to hunt down dissidents. Kazakhstan, despite its carefully cultivated image as a modernizing state and economic powerhouse, brutally crushes peaceful protests, including inviting Russian troops to massacre its own citizens—killing over 200 people in what the government euphemistically called "anti-terrorist operations" in January 2022. Uzbekistan continues to restrict civil liberties, while the EU prepares to reward it with enhanced trade deals; and Tajikistan and Turkmenistan remain totalitarian nightmares that don't even try to pretend otherwise.
The Billionaire Autocrat: Democracy's New Nemesis
Making this era particularly dangerous is not just the rise of traditional autocrats, but the emergence of a new breed: the billionaire strongman who wields wealth as a weapon and treats nations like personal subsidies.
These are not just politicians who happen to be rich, but oligarchs who view governance as an extension of their business empires, who treat public office as private property, and who recognize no distinction between state resources and personal assets. Unlike traditional dictators, who seize power through military coups or revolutionary movements, this modern autocrat often arrives through elections—then uses his power for self-enrichment and for dismantling democracy from within, ensuring he can remain in power indefinitely.
Look at Donald Trump’s return to the U.S. presidency, backed by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who has used his ownership of X (formerly Twitter) to amplify destructive and hateful narratives and undermine democratic discourse while on his path to becoming the world’s first trillionaire. Look at the tech billionaires who increasingly view themselves as above the law and accountable to no one, while wielding unprecedented influence over information flows and public opinion. Intoxicated by this unchecked power, some have gone further—intervening in the domestic politics of other countries, amplifying or aligning with extremist and openly fascist movements, and actively threatening democratic processes far beyond their own borders. This concentration of power is not accidental: It is built on decades of privileged access to public resources, publicly funded research, state subsidies, regulatory forbearance, and the extraction of value from user-generated data and public infrastructure.
This marriage of authoritarian governance and extreme wealth has created a feedback loop of power consolidation, where wealth buys political influence, and political influence protects and expands wealth—a cycle that continues until the very concept of public interest becomes quaint and obsolete.
These billionaire autocrats also work in tandem, threatening human rights both in their home countries and abroad: They fund each other's regimes, help evade sanctions, provide safe havens for each other's stolen assets, and create international networks of corruption that transcend borders.
The result is a global ecosystem of kleptocracy where the rules apply to ordinary people but never to the powerful. When a Kyrgyz president is overthrown for corruption, he flees to Belarus or Russia. When Russian oligarchs need to launder money, they find willing accomplices in London, Dubai, and New York. This is not limited to traditionally authoritarian states, either. Under Donald Trump, the United States also recently adopted a recognizably autocratic maneuver: Shortly after kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro, proceeds from the sale of Venezuelan oil—reportedly totaling $500 million—were routed into multiple offshore accounts, the largest held in Qatar.
The Funding Crisis
The cruel irony is that, as threats of global authoritarianism continue to multiply, the resources to defend against them are evaporating.
The organizations that document war crimes, defend political prisoners, expose corruption, and provide legal aid to vulnerable populations are being forced to cut staff, close offices, and scale back operations. Small grassroots groups—often the most effective, because they're closest to the communities they serve—are disappearing entirely.
Human rights organizations across the world are facing unprecedented funding cuts. Governments that once supported civil society are redirecting resources to "national priorities"—often code for building walls and buying weapons. Private foundations are "pivoting" to other issues. International donors are suffering from "democracy fatigue," as if defending basic rights were a trend rather than a fundamental imperative.
Why We Cannot Retreat
In the face of these challenges, some have argued for strategic retreat. "Wait for the political climate to improve," they say. "Focus on less controversial issues." "Don't antagonize powerful governments." "Be realistic about what's achievable."
This advice is seductive precisely because of its supposed practicality. But it's also wrong.
History teaches us that authoritarianism, once given space to breathe, metastasizes. Dictators interpret hesitation as weakness and compromise as surrender. When human rights defenders go quiet, they don't buy time—they lose ground.
The window for resistance doesn't widen with patience; it narrows with delay.
Every time we soften our demands for accountability, every time we accept "reforms" that are purely cosmetic, every time we prioritize short-term economic interests over long-term democratic values, we hand authoritarians another victory. Consider the trajectory of Russia. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Western governments believed they could moderate Putin through engagement and economic ties. But each concession, each instance of looking the other way, each prioritization of "stability" over justice only emboldened Putin further. By the time the West decided to take a firm stance, Russia had already become the authoritarian menace it is today—and Ukraine is still paying the price for it in blood.
It is imperative, then, that we do not repeat our predecessors’ mistakes: Where they ceded ground, we must now hold the line.
What Holding the Line Means
Holding the line doesn't mean mindless stubbornness, or a refusal to adapt. Instead, it means refusing to compromise on core principles, regardless of the circumstances—a collective effort that requires each of us.
It means human rights organizations should continue documenting abuses even when governments threaten their staff. It means journalists investigating corruption even when they risk imprisonment or death. It means activists organizing protests, even when they’re banned and participants are beaten.
Holding the line means attaching real, enforceable human rights conditions to every cooperation agreement, trade deal, and aid package. It means wealthy democracies cannot allow their financial systems to become laundromats for dictators' stolen wealth. It means tech companies cannot provide surveillance tools to authoritarian regimes. It means universities cannot accept money from kleptocrats seeking to buy respectability. It means investigating and sanctioning corruption, regardless of whose feelings it hurts.
It also means confronting the uncomfortable truth that extreme wealth concentration must be dismantled. A world where a handful of billionaires wield more power than elected governments is inherently incompatible with democracy and human rights. When individuals accumulate resources equivalent to national budgets, they become unaccountable centers of power that can manipulate democracies, fund authoritarian movements, and evade any meaningful oversight.
To truly hold the line, then, we also need wealth taxes that prevent the emergence of quasi-monarchical fortunes. We need to abandon the fiction that billionaires are somehow more enlightened, more competent, or more deserving of power than democratically elected officials. We need corporate governance reforms that prevent oligarchs from treating companies as personal fiefdoms. We need to close the legal loopholes that allow the ultra-wealthy to operate in regulatory twilight zones.
We need to hold not just one line, but all the smaller lines that make up the whole.
The Cost of Retreat
And if we don't?
In the 1930s, democracies chose appeasement over confrontation, economic interests over moral clarity. They told themselves that engaging with fascist regimes would moderate them, that war could be avoided through compromise—and millions died because of it.
Today's authoritarians are learning the same lesson their predecessors did: Democracies will tolerate almost anything if you frame it as "stability" or "economic necessity." And they've adjusted their behavior accordingly—becoming bolder, more brutal, and more brazen in their contempt for human rights and international law.
If we retreat now, the next generation won't just face an "illiberal surge"—they'll face an illiberal world order where authoritarianism is the norm, the powerful answer to no one, and human rights are quaint historical curiosities.
Hope Is a Discipline
Make no mistake: Holding the line is exhausting. The victories are small and the setbacks are devastating. There will be moments when continuing seems impossible, when the challenges we face feel insurmountable.
But hope is not about believing everything will work out. Hope is the discipline of continuing the fight even when the odds are terrible. Hope is understanding that the line we hold today creates and protects the space where tomorrow's resistance will grow. And sometimes, against all odds, that resistance succeeds.
We’ve seen it in our lifetimes: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the USSR, the end of apartheid, the Arab Spring’s brief flowering, the popular uprisings across Latin America and Central Asia, Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity. These weren't inevitable—they happened because people refused to accept authoritarianism as permanent.
They happened because people held the line until the moment came to advance.
A Call to Action
To human rights defenders everywhere: When funding disappears, innovate. When governments threaten you, document everything. When allies waiver, remind them what's at stake.
To democratic governments and international institutions: Stop the charade of believing trade will transform autocrats. Attach real conditions to every agreement. Support civil society unreservedly. Sanction corruption aggressively. And recognize that your credibility depends not on what you say but what you do when authoritarians call your bluff.
To citizens of global democracies: Recognize that your freedoms are not guaranteed. They exist because previous generations fought for them and current defenders maintain them. Support human rights organizations. Find your people. Build coalitions. Hold your governments accountable when they prioritize profits over principles. And understand that authoritarianism will eventually come for you if it is allowed to flourish unchecked.
To journalists: Keep investigating. Keep publishing. Your work is dangerous precisely because it's effective. Every investigation you complete, every truth you reveal, chips away at the foundations of authoritarian power.
And to those who have already retreated, who have compromised, who have gone quiet: It's never too late to return to the fight. The line is thinner than it should be, and we need everyone who still believes in human rights and rule of law to stand with us.
The Choice Before Us
We stand at an inflection point. The choices we make now—as individuals, organizations, and societies—will determine whether the 21st century becomes an era of hard-won freedom or deepening oppression.
The authoritarians are betting we'll fold. They're counting on our exhaustion, our divisions, our tendency to prioritize short-term comfort over long-term principles. They believe that funding cuts will silence us, that threats will intimidate us, that time is on their side.
They're wrong.
We will hold the line. Not because it's easy, but because it's necessary. Not because victory is guaranteed, but because surrender is unthinkable.
The line we hold is not just a metaphor. It's the space where lawyers defend political prisoners. Where journalists expose corruption and abuse. Where activists organize communities. Where ordinary people refuse to accept injustice as inevitable.
We see this in action with every political prisoner who receives legal representation because a human rights organization refused to close. Every corruption scandal exposed because a journalist refused to be silenced. Every protest that happens because activists refused to give up. These are not marginal victories—these are the threads that keep the fabric of resistance intact.
This line is under assault from authoritarians, oligarchs, and billionaire autocrats who recognize no limits to their ambition and no accountability for their actions. They have money, power, and momentum.
But we have something stronger: the conviction that human dignity matters, that our rights are not negotiable, and that no amount of wealth or power places anyone above justice.
So we hold the line. Today, tomorrow, and for as long as it takes.
Because if we don't, there won’t be one left to hold onto.
[post_title] => We Must Hold the Line
[post_excerpt] => In an era of rising authoritarianism and billionaire autocrats, defenders of human rights cannot afford to retreat.
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How door-knocking for Mayor Mamdani restored my faith in the power of organized people to defeat organized money.
The thought of knocking on a stranger’s door once filled me with dread. It sounded uncomfortable at best, and potentially humiliating, or dangerous, at worst. What if someone slammed the door in my face or said something memorably vicious? I’m a 43-year-old white woman, raised in an upper-middle-class home in Buffalo, New York. My parents, respectively descended from Eastern European Jews and Sicilian Catholics, discussed politics and occasionally attended protests, but knocking on strangers’ doors wasn’t a big part of my childhood.
Yet in the last eight years, as I’ve gotten older and more politically active, I've begun to grasp the value of pushing through that discomfort. In April, before the summer’s Democratic primary, I started knocking on doors for then-New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, and continued through Election Day in November. Altogether, I knocked on approximately 2,000 doors, usually with a partner, which was more fun and comfortable, if less efficient, than going alone.
Door-knocking shifts for Mamdani regularly drew dozens of New Yorkers, even in terrible weather, and on Monday and Tuesday nights, when fewer people are motivated to go out after work. I mostly knocked on doors in Brooklyn, where I live, but my fellow canvassers came from all over the city. Some were ideologically motivated, while others had concrete, pragmatic reasons for showing up, like the woman I met who joined a canvass because “the bus I took to get here took 40 minutes to make two stops.” (Making buses fast and free was one of Mamdani’s signature campaign promises.) Or the 40-something Afro-Latino couple who said they came out for the sake of their children’s future, because “right now, things aren’t looking so good.” Other first-time canvassers I encountered included a soft-spoken young woman named Fatima, a heavily tattooed, outgoing 20-something Asian-American guy, a shy middle schooler with her immigrant dad, and a young white man who praised the campaign's “immaculate vibes.”
One reason Mamdani means so much to so many New Yorkers is that he assembled a 100,000-person volunteer army—the largest in municipal history, and one of the most diverse. His volunteer base included young and middle-aged progressives of all stripes, and a substantial subset of Jewish New Yorkers, South Asians, and Muslims. Getting to know my fellow canvassers for hours and months at a time as we worked to expand that coalition was an extraordinary project in a perilous time for democracy. It demonstrated the hope that tens of thousands of us still feel, and how hard we are willing to work to make life better for ourselves and our neighbors.
Given how many doors we knocked throughout the city's five boroughs, the New Yorkers we reached were even more varied than the volunteers. During one general election canvassing shift in Kensington, a young Black woman opened the door to me and my friend Tania, who is Jewish. Although she didn’t initially recognize Mamdani’s name, as we went into our spiel, she realized he was the candidate her boyfriend had urged her to vote for. “Normally I wouldn’t tell a woman to do what her boyfriend says, but in this case, he’s right!” Tania said. (Our new friend smiled.)
Another striking moment came when an older man in South Brooklyn’s Sunset Park unsmilingly asked if I were Mamdani’s daughter. He seemed to be trying to determine why I was volunteering for a man to whom I had no apparent ethnic or religious ties. Why else would I be doing this? Mamdani was not, in fact, my father, I explained, but I believed so strongly in his agenda that I was volunteering anyway. The man kept his face blank. I wondered when someone had last knocked on his door.
Another day in Sunset Park, an older Spanish-speaking woman thanked me and my partner, who also spoke Spanish, for volunteering. She invited us into her home, where she and a small circle of relatives were celebrating her 90-year-old father’s birthday with balloons and cake. I’ll never forget the warmth and intimacy she offered us as total strangers.
In the last eight months, I’ve met Mamdani fans from Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Australia, and Canada. None could vote or contribute to the campaign, but some shadowed canvassers and interviewed volunteers, most commonly because they belonged to left-wing political parties and hoped to reproduce his success at home. Although he often emphasized that he was running a local race to benefit New Yorkers, it was clear Mamdani was also inspiring admirers around the world.
In addition to many happy, surprising, and rewarding encounters, I had my share of the awkward, unsettling, and agitating. There was the woman who saw my “New York Jews for Zohran” shirt and pretended to retch; when I moved toward her, thinking she might need help, she screamed, “That was about you, because you want my children dead!” There was the super who ordered us out of his building because we were supporting a candidate who, he falsely believes, “wants to kill all the Jews.” Another woman called my friend Allie “Nazi scum” and said she should just “put on the burqa [Mamdani will require] right now.”
Moments like these were reminders of the ugly racism our politics so often exposes. They shook me: I am rarely around people who would speak this way to anyone, let alone a stranger. But they also strengthened my resolve to work for and with people who lead with love, respect, and decency, and model those traits for others.
As of last week, New Yorkers have made one such person our mayor.
Just before the polls closed on Election Night, Tania and I met a man with two little girls with him on the street in Park Slope. He hadn’t planned to vote and realized he couldn’t make it to his polling site in time with the kids. After he left, I joked that we should have offered to babysit: “We can start delivering on Mamdani’s promise of free child care right away!” We were giddy with pre-election anxiety, and desperate to turn out every last vote.
A short time later, once it was clear Mamdani had won, my friends and I experienced one of the happiest moments of our lives. We were weeping and hugging and singing and cheering at what we’d accomplished together. All the neighbors we’d met on the ground were reflected in the voting blocs he’d won: older, moderate Black voters; young voters, including but not limited to white socialists; and immigrants, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. I’d knocked on doors before, but Mamdani’s campaign showed me just how powerful it could be.
Later, I wondered if we’d ever find a way to recapture that feeling and use it to drive ourselves forward in less happy and hopeful times. Could we love each other enough to keep doing the work that only occasionally produces such moments, even in times when there’s no end, and no payoff, in sight?
I’m still not sure how we’ll navigate this fundamental challenge of organizing. But being part of a political project that attracted the passionate support of New Yorkers in all five boroughs, and sympathizers around the world, has restored my faith in the power of organized people to defeat organized money. And although a huge part of Mamdani's appeal is that he ran on improving New Yorkers' daily lives, he also showed that grassroots campaigning works—and that contemporary politics can be a joyful and loving project that brings people together, rather than an ugly spectacle that thrives on negative attention, exploits our fears, fills us with anxiety, turns neighbors against each other, and leaves us feeling empty, sad, bitter, and alone.
In canvassing for Mamdani and other DSA-backed candidates, I saw how much people are craving community, connection, and fun. We need to create more opportunities like this—to move joyfully toward something, rather than slogging through a sales pitch for a mediocre candidate who’s better than their opponent in hopes of slowing what feels like an endless parade of horrors. In the last year—still emerging from the long shadow of a global pandemic—I’ve embraced more near-strangers than I had in the previous five. Now, there’s a bracing sense of possibility in the air—the unfamiliar feeling that good things can still happen, and we can make them.
[post_title] => Knocking On Hope's Door
[post_excerpt] => How door-knocking for Mayor Mamdani restored my faith in the power of organized people to defeat organized money.
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I've gotten exhausted with the ways that convenience culture has shifted what we find acceptable when it comes to waste.
Soapbox is a series where people make the case for the sometimes surprising things they feel strongly about.
On the streets near my house, there are lines of tree stumps, left over from diseased elms that had to be cut down. Some people have made the most of these hollowed out stumps by planting flowers inside them, or scattering seashells around the base. Some have even used them to create elaborate shrines for their dead loved ones. Others, meanwhile, have taken a different approach, filling the hole in the center of the stumps with beer cans, cigarette ends, and banana skins, treating the stumps like organic trash cans.
Randa l. Kachef and Michael A. Chadwick, researchers at King’s College London, have coined a term for this phenomenon: polite littering. Other examples include a person placing their litter on a wall or in a hedge, or somewhere almost near a trash can, but not quite in one. I know about this phenomenon, and this term, because I have thought a lot about the psychology of people who litter in recent years, and what, if anything, can be done to change it, both on a local and global scale.
There is a certain type of person who sees a hole and perceives it to be a trash can, where others have seen the potential for a garden. But having spent the last couple of years campaigning with my local councillors to tackle litter in my immediate area, I know that the issue isn’t unique to either my three-block radius or even my (unfortunately pretty filthy) country. Human beings and the things they dump are having a devastating impact on the planet. Where infrastructure cannot keep up with increasing numbers of people and waste, trash cans overflow. The rate at which we produce plastic, and waste more generally, means that a great deal of it will escape our hands and end up in nature or creating garbage islands. Litter and plastic waste have been found in the deepest parts of the ocean and on the tallest mountains. Litter has even been found in places humans have never been.
While daunting, this doesn’t mean that the issue is out of our individual hands. On the contrary, it only makes our individual efforts all the more important. I live near the beach, and in the summer, we get a lot of tourists. Many of them are respectful and take their waste to the trash cans just a few meters away from the shore. A few, however, will litter in the most egregious way, leaving inflatable boats, bottles, and even the waste from an entire picnic rotting in the sun behind them. This summer, over 24 tons of trash was cleared from our beach over just two weekends.
Of course, not everyone who litters is so flagrant. But every day, people who consider themselves to be polite, upstanding citizens will leave napkins, banana skins, or orange peels on our pebble beach, and when confronted, will use nonsense words like “biodegradable” instead of the most fitting one, “lazy.” I’ve often had to make several trips back and forth with someone else’s sandwich wrappers, drink cans, and dirty napkins while sunbathers sit and watch. I’ve even fished band-aids, croissant wrappers, and takeout packaging out of the sea from a paddleboard.
I won’t bore you with tales of every dirty diaper I have found in a beach parking lot. But suffice to say, I have gotten pretty exhausted with the ways that convenience culture and our incessant waste seem to have shifted what we find acceptable. There is a cognitive dissonance inherent to littering, a short-sightedness wherein a person cannot think more than a few minutes into the future. Littering, and convenience culture overall, affects all of us in the longterm, and yet many people still choose the instant gratification of no longer having a Big Mac wrapper in their car over waiting to throw it away once they reach their destination.
There are places I have visited and loved that seem to sadly be crumbling under the weight of their own litter and waste: Paris, Los Angeles, New York, London, Athens. It isn’t only major cities, either. On Crete, an island in Greece, the first thing I saw when I arrived at the airport was trash. Everywhere. That continued: at the side of the road, in the ocean, on the beaches. Some places were untouched, but only because they were in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t believe it. Crete was, in many ways, the most beautiful place I had ever seen, and I wanted everyone else to have the reverence and respect for it that I did, so that others could enjoy it, too. But when I looked down from a sunset mountain view to the streets of the small village I was staying in, all I saw was trash.
The consequences of throwaway culture are also rarely felt by the people who most egregiously participate in it. Beyond litter in our streets, the countries who produce the most devastating volumes of waste are often not the ones who feel its true impact. In much of the western world, our waste is shipped to other countries, creating an overwhelming crisis in places like Indonesia, Vietnam, Ghana, and Kenya—destroying the environments of countries that simply do not have the infrastructure to handle our onslaught.
I have been trying to understand why litter is so out of control and why so many people do it, and my only answer is convenience and laziness, combined with the fact that we just have so much more waste and single-use plastic than ever before. Yet an abundance of litter is as much a cultural problem as it is an environmental one: There are also major cities that manage to keep their trash under control. In Tokyo, there are very few public bins, due to the 1995 sarin gas attack. Instead, people simply carry their litter around until they find one, or even bag up their waste throughout the day and take it home. This diligence, this refusal to give up and just put down a Pocari Sweat bottle because they’d been holding it for a few minutes, was a welcome reprieve. This isn’t to say I didn’t see any litter in all of Tokyo. But overall, I believe most of us have much to learn from the city and its people.
Other countries have also made similar strides in their relationships to litter. Sweden sends just 1% of its waste to landfill, using half of its garbage to create energy. When I visited Las Canarias, in Tenerife and Lanzarote, I saw city workers out every single day cleaning trash from the side of the road. Hoping to deter foreigners from contributing more, signs begged tourists not to litter and to respect the islands’ unique volcanic environment. Tenerife even has fines of up to 3,000 euros for littering.
I would hope that seeing people take such great pride in their home would deter even the most ardent litterbug. But maybe that’s part of the problem: I’ve never found that same pride when I come home. The answers are there, but countries like the US and UK are just not prioritizing solving the problem—or sometimes, even asking the right questions.
Litter has been found in 90% of the UK. We are a small island, but we still can’t manage to keep it clean. Our roadsides, waterways, and countrysides are filthy, particularly compared to neighbouring countries, and there is no motivation to change it at either a government or local level. It also seems like nobody really cares to. When I look at other countries and wonder why they’re cleaner, I know that no small part of it comes down to better infrastructure, organization, and funding for waste clearance and street cleaning. But a lot of it is pride, too—and with it, genuine care.
There isn’t a straightforward answer to fixing our monumental global litter problem, particularly when we only keep creating and wasting more. But to start, we need our governments to invest in better waste management, to prioritize circularity, and to devote infrastructure and resources to tackling waste, not only on our streets, but throughout every country. We need corporations who relentlessly produce single-use crap to be held to account and restrained.
Sadly, we can’t make someone care about something that just isn’t a priority for them, and the same is true of our governments. But beyond lobbying and campaigning and voting tactically, we can all make a small difference at home. If more of us took control of our own waste and took pride in our own small parts of the world and the ones that we visit, perhaps we might actually begin to make some difference in cleaning up our mess.
[post_title] => There's No Such Thing as Polite Littering
[post_excerpt] => I've gotten exhausted with the ways that convenience culture has shifted what we find acceptable when it comes to waste.
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Three trans service members speak out on the military ban, and the rise of transphobia in the United States.
I met Commander Emily Shilling in April 2024 during a Lesbian Visibility Week panel celebrating LGBTQ+ women in leadership. I immediately found her both warm and intriguingly different. When I asked if she had ever flown upside down, the absurdity of posing such a question to a Navy test pilot sparked laughter, and a friendship.
After Trump’s reelection and his vow to reinstate a ban on transgender military service, my filmmaking partner Rivkah Beth Medow and I knew we had to respond. The growing anti-trans narrative wasn’t just a culture war skirmish, it was a symptom of something deeper and more dangerous: a coordinated effort to undermine democratic norms by turning vulnerable groups into political targets. We reached out to Emily, who saw our project as a way to turn a dark moment into a new mission: protecting her troops. When she shared that she’d voted for Trump in 2016 before coming out as trans, we all recognized how potent—and powerful—her story arc could be.
We initially intended to make a short film centered on Emily’s experience, but it became clear that there was a bigger story to be told. Emily has always understood the power of storytelling, and through her leadership role and deep respect in the trans military community, she connected us with several compelling voices across all branches of service.
Alongside Emily, we cast Navy Petty Officer Paulo Batista and Army National Guard Chief Warrant Officer Jo Ellis for a feature documentary, Fighting Forward. The film follows these three trailblazing transgender service members as they continue to navigate career threats, legal battles, and rising political hostility. And yet, despite this constant onslaught, one of our most interesting discoveries as the project has progressed is that each of our heroes remains completely committed to serving their country. Each, too, has taken a completely unique path in moving forward.
This kind of service—steadfast, principled, and often invisible—is precisely what democracy requires to survive. But the attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, especially within government institutions like the military, are not isolated. They are part of a broader attempt to consolidate power by eroding the rights of those who don’t conform to a narrow, exclusionary vision of America. Efforts to push trans people out of public life, out of service, and out of legal recognition are not just discriminatory—they are anti-democratic. They chip away at the very idea of equal citizenship.
Equally chilling is the growing political rhetoric around using the U.S. military to "fight crime" in so-called "Democrat-run cities." Deploying the military against our own citizens, especially in diverse urban areas that overwhelmingly vote for progressive policies, is a direct threat to democratic governance. It weaponizes fear to justify the erosion of civil liberties and the silencing of dissent. This is precisely why it matters who serves in the military, who leads it, and whether or not they believe in the rights of all Americans: When the military is redirected to silence dissent at home, it stops defending democracy, and starts dismantling it.
Rivkah and I believe wholeheartedly in everyone’s right to belong. While we chafe at the military’s hierarchical system, feel appalled by their budget allocations, and are devastated by the environmental and human cost of war, if we have a military, then we want it to be representative of the country that military is fighting for. Not because of “woke ideology,” but because inclusion reflects democracy; and without it, we risk losing the very principles this country claims to defend.
The best way we know to shift culture is through telling nuanced stories amplified through impact campaigns that spark transformative conversations, policy change, and solidarity. While making this film, we’ve been surprised to find a strain of patriotism rising in us. It’s of an abolitionist and civil rights provenance, aligned with hope of what our democracy can possibly be. With the world around us on fire, both literally and figuratively, Fighting Forward has offered us a concrete way to challenge stereotypes, clarify misconceptions, and seed the culture we want for the United States.
~
Disclaimer:These interviews have been edited and condensed for length and clarity. The opinions expressed reflect the personal views of those interviewed, and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Military or Department of Defense.
Navy Commander Emily "Hawking" Shilling
Photo courtesy of Emily Shilling.
Why did you first enlist?
The Navy’s motto at the time was “A Global Force for Good,” and I believed it, wholeheartedly. I believed in service, in being part of something bigger than myself. I couldn’t imagine sitting on the sidelines when I had the ability and the drive to make a difference. So I chose adventure, to stand and fight for all those who couldn’t. Maybe it was naive, or self-aggrandizing for the scrawny nerd I was, but I believed the worst sin of all is to do nothing in the face of evil.
What does it signal more broadly that trans people are now banned from joining the military?
It’s a betrayal of the very ideals the military claims to uphold. We say we’re a merit-based force, one where what matters is your capability, your integrity, your commitment. When we start disqualifying people simply because of who they are, we’ve abandoned that principle. If identity, not performance, is grounds for exclusion, where does that line stop? It's not just unjust. It's dangerous. The military must be made up of the people it swears to protect; otherwise, those that are different tend to become the unprotected.
What do you want people to know about the ban, how it’s impacting you, and what it means for the U.S.?
I want America to understand this isn’t abstract, it’s affecting real people, with real lives, families, and responsibilities. I’ve worn the uniform for over two decades. I’ve deployed in combat. I’ve led teams and flown missions that mattered. And now, people like me—qualified, capable Americans, patriots—are being told we’re not welcome, not because of performance, but because we were brave enough to say who we are. That should alarm every citizen. This ban doesn’t just hurt trans people, it undermines the strength of our military and the values we claim to defend. A country that believes in liberty and justice for all shouldn’t be in the business of telling patriots they’re not allowed to serve if they don’t match the reigning political party’s “perfect mold”.
Emily (foreground) with her wife, Amanda. Photo courtesy of Emily Shilling.
What, if anything, is giving you hope right now?
I find hope in those who refuse to accept silence as safety. People are organizing, speaking out, pushing back against the narrative that some of us are less worthy of dignity or service. Your voice matters.
I find hope in my fellow service members and veterans, who are standing together in solidarity. Many of them have seen what leadership really means, and they know it has nothing to do with gender or politics and everything to do with integrity, skill, and trust.
I find hope in how many people outside of uniform are waking up to what’s happening. They’re realizing this isn’t just about trans people, it’s about whether we will be a nation that honors its promises, and continues to fight for the dream of a more perfect union.
And personally, I find hope in simply still being here, able to speak the truth out loud, to show up for others, and to remind people that we’ve been through dark times before and when we have organized, when we have stayed loud and connected and human, we have never lost. And, if we have the moral courage to fight, we will win this time, and every time.
What can readers do to support trans service members?
1. Raise your voice. Contact your elected officials. Let them know you oppose discrimination in the military and support open service. They do pay attention to public sentiment, and silence helps no one.
2. Challenge misinformation. Whether at your dinner table or your workplace, don’t let transphobia or fear-mongering go unchecked. Educate yourself, then share accurate, humanizing stories, especially about those who serve.
3. Support organizations doing the work. Groups like SPARTA, Modern Military Association of America (MMAA), and Minority Veterans of America (MVA) are fighting daily for the rights, recognition, and safety of LGBTQ+ service members and veterans. Donations, signal-boosting, and volunteering all help.
4. Connect and care. If you know a trans service member, reach out. Let them know you see them, support them, and appreciate their service. It’s not always about grand gestures; sometimes, the quiet affirmation that we’re not alone gets us through.
Army National Guard Chief Warrant Officer Jo Ellis
Photo courtesy of Jo Ellis.
Why did you first enlist?
I wanted to serve my country. Service is in my blood. I’m a patriot and I come from a family of military service.
What does it signal more broadly that trans people are now banned from joining the military?
It means our country will lose out on patriots like me who volunteered to sacrifice for the country. It means instead of a military based on meritocracy, it’s now a military based on political ideology. Instead of selecting the best person for the job, we are excluding an entire category of people for no justified reason. It’s pure animus. Service members were told they could serve openly and now we are being punished for coming out under a previous administration.
What do you want people to know about the ban, how it’s impacting you, and what it means for the U.S.?
Thousands of deployable service members are being purged from the military without regard to readiness, cost, or experience. Service members are being sent home from deployments, command positions vacated without replacements, and no plan to recoup qualified personnel. We can’t shortcut a decade-plus of military experience.
Photo courtesy of Jo Ellis.
What, if anything, is giving you hope right now?
I believe in the great experiment that is the United States. We can be better. It’s not big percentages that make the difference in this country. It’s in the margins. 1%. 1% better each day. It’s the aggregation of marginal gains that lead to exponential results. Maybe that’s quixotic, maybe I’m the greater fool. I’ll wear those as a badge of honor. This country was founded by greater fools.
Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Paulo Batista
Photo courtesy of Paulo Batista.
Why did you first enlist?
I enlisted because it was a dream since high school to serve in the military, inspired my by older brother who served for 20 years in the Air Force. Due to the "Don't Ask, Dont Tell" policy and me becoming my father's caretaker after high school, I could not join right away and had to wait until later in life.
What does it signal more broadly that trans people are now banned from joining the military?
It means military readiness will be affected. Many transgender military service members play a vital role in all branches. We are enlisted to officers, and removing us from our jobs will leave gaps in many areas, including deployments. The military will lose great leaders with experience in their areas of expertise that cannot be replaced easily.
What do you want people to know about the ban, how it’s impacting you, and what it means for the U.S.?
That being transgender in the military does not affect military readiness. We meet the requirements and standards implemented to service our country. However, more importantly, transgender service members have been serving for decades in the military, making our military more effective.
Unfortunately, per the new policy, thousands of effective service members, including non-transgender members, will be affected. It's a domino effect when the gap is created. Pulling a transgender service member from their job means that other service members will have to cover down for that unmanned position, ultimately causing more stress on the other service members by making them work longer or go on longer deployments, thus taking service members away from their families and causing more strain on other service members and their families, declining military readiness instead of increasing it.
Furthermore, the ban causes harm to all the transgender service members due to the DD214 [Certificate of Release or Discharge from Active Duty] rating that the policy implements, giving a rating that ultimately labels transgender service members a national security threat, thus affecting our futures and ability to continue our careers, even though we all served our country with honor, courage, and true bravery.
Photo courtesy of Paulo Batista.
What, if anything, is giving you hope right now?
The one thing that gives me the greatest hope is my community and trans siblings. Seeing others standing tall and seeing the ones who tell me they get hope from seeing me stand loud and proud against the current environment instead of going quiet.
What can readers do to support trans service members and veterans?
If allies and friends are looking to help, the best ways start with reaching out to their representatives and congressional offices. Helping influence their decisions is vital, as that is the way to make the changes we need. Otherwise, I would say be a voice for transgender service members when we cannot speak. We are a limited number of voices, and need a vast audience to spread the correct information and hopefully educate the ones who are willing to listen.
[post_title] => "I Find Hope in Simply Still Being Here"
[post_excerpt] => Three trans service members speak out on the military ban, and the rise of transphobia in the United States.
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Once we lose a free press, we lose everything it protects.
Last summer, I stood in front of a typewriter that led to the death of two journalists. I was visiting the German Occupation Museum on the small Channel Island of Guernsey, a British crown dependency, and was awe-struck by a display on a group of dissident reporters from the 1940s.
At the time, all news entering the occupied Channel Islands was filtered by the Nazis, and reports from the BBC and elsewhere were forbidden. But a small group of journalists disobeyed Nazi orders, secretly listening to wireless broadcasts, and typing out uncensored news for distribution. One of them used the typewriter I was looking at in the museum.
In response, the Nazis held a tribunal for five of the men involved. While I hear stories about shrinking media freedom and threats to journalists daily—I’m the deputy editor at a freedom of expression magazine, Index on Censorship—as a Brit, it gave me chills to know this level of censorship had once played out on British soil. Without a civil defense, the men were given prison sentences in Germany totalling over eight years. Charles Machon, sentenced to two years and four months, and Joseph Gillingham, sentenced to 10 months, never made it home. Both died in a German prison.
Today, global press freedom is more restricted than it has been in recent memory. In many places across the world, information is controlled by authoritarian regimes. Criticism of these governments, real or perceived, can land people in jail, or worse, and journalists often risk their lives to report on it. The 2013 Press Freedom Index and its accompanying interactive world map assembled by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), shows a handful of countries shaded green (good) and yellow (satisfactory). Pull the slider across to 2025, and the map dissolves into an alarming dark red (very serious) and shades of mid to dark orange, with a few countries in northern Europe clinging onto that green space for dear life. There’s not a lot of yellow either, indicating that concern over press freedom is not alarmist: Things have, in fact, gotten worse.
In Eastern Europe, the Russian- and English-language news outlet Meduza, founded in 2014, was headquartered in Latvia by its Russian-born founder, Galina Timchenko, for the safety of its staff. Russia is hostile toward independent media, and Meduza and others like it are labeled as “foreign agents” or “undesirable organizations,” resulting in increased surveillance. People who work in or with an “undesirable outlet” can face prosecution, fines, and even prison time. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, its media landscape has been further eroded, with most news sites owned by the state and their allies. According to RSF, there are currently 50 jailed journalists or media workers in the country.
In 2023, I spoke to student journalists from the online Russian outlet Doxa, who fled to Germany and other European countries after four members of their team were sentenced to two years of correctional labor in 2022 for a YouTube video where they defended freedom of assembly for young people. Months later, the publication’s editor and co-founder Armen Aramyan was added to the country’s “terrorist and extremist” list. In one high-profile case, for speaking out against the war in Ukraine, British-Russian journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza was denied access to lawyers while languishing in jail between April 2022 and August 2024. Condemned to a 25-year sentence for his dissent, he was freed in the biggest prisoner swap between Russia and the US since the Cold War. But even exiled Russian journalists like Kara-Murza are not safe, and face possible assassination attempts by the state. Elena Kostyuchenko is one of three female Russian journalists in exile who, in a similar period of time, suffered symptoms associated with poisoning.
Even countries, regions, and cities that have a history of press freedom have backslid in recent years. Once home to a thriving media landscape, Hong Kong has fallen hard since the crackdown on its anti-government protests in 2019-2020. In 2020, the headquarters of one of its last publications to criticize the authorities—independent media outlet Apple Daily—were raided by police. Shortly after the introduction of the National Security Law was imposed by Beijing that same year, Apple Daily’s publisher Jimmy Lai, a pro-democracy activist, was arrested and placed in solitary confinement. The company has since closed, and Lai remains imprisoned.
According to RSF, China is the third worst country in the world for media freedom, after Eritrea and North Korea. The government has long seen the media as a tool for propaganda, sending out daily notices detailing censored topics. Journalists are kept under a watchful eye, including foreign journalists, who are followed by drones. While this censorship masks much of what is happening in China, prominent cases give some insight into the more honest reality. Over 100 journalists are currently detained in the country, a huge number of whom are Uyghurs who have reported on atrocities committed against the ethnic minority group in Xinjiang. Zhang Zan, who reported on the outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan, was jailed for four years, and once released, almost immediately rearrested. Reporter and #MeToo activist, Sophia Huang Xueqin, was held in solitary confinement for months and faced a closed-door hearing, before receiving a sentence of five years for “subversion against the state” in 2024 for her reporting on sexual assault.
Meanwhile, in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where journalists are widely persecuted, it is near impossible to be a female reporter at all. Since regaining control in 2021, there’s been increasing restrictions on both women and journalists—including a national ban on women’s voices being heard in public. Afghanistan’s female journalists now largely work in exile, notably including Zahra Joya, the founder of Rukhshana Media, who currently lives in the UK. In neighboring Iran, journalists face arbitrary arrests and prison sentences, as was the case for Iranian-American journalist Reza Valizadeh, jailed for 10 years in January for “cooperating with the hostile U.S. government.”
Beyond legal pressure and intimidation, reporters in the region are also being killed at alarming rates. On June 14, Saudi Arabia executed prominent journalist Turki Al-Jasser for alleged treason, with no clear evidence, following his writing about corruption in the ruling family. Despite Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman playing for positive press, the reality is a country with a poor human rights record and a dire situation for press freedom under his rule.
It’s also no secret that Palestine has become the most dangerous place on the planet to be a journalist. Since Israel’s escalation following the October 2023 Hamas attacks, at least 250 journalists have been killed in Gaza, the majority of whom are Palestinian. Some journalists have been deliberately targeted by the Israeli army, according to the International Federation of Journalists, and others, critical of Hamas, have said they’ve been threatened by the militant group. According to the United Nations, it has officially become “the deadliest conflict ever for journalists.”
As well as the disastrous consequences for human lives, this intense pressure on journalists has created an information vacuum, in part due to Israel’s ban on international press entering Gaza. Al Jazeera has some of the only international journalists left on the ground, but they, too, are facing disruption and targeted killings. Elsewhere in the region, the Al Jazeera offices in the occupied West Bank were closed down by both the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli authorities, with broadcasts suspended. The Israeli government also stopped Al Jazeera from broadcasting in Israel, calling them a propaganda tool for Hamas, a move condemned by many human rights and press groups. In May, Israeli police also raided their offices in East Jerusalem.
These are just some of the more glaring extremes of shrinking media freedom around the world, but there are many more, including in countries where press freedom is enshrined in law, such as the U.S. The second Trump administration has made it clear that they want to control which media outlets have press pool access. In one alarming example, they banned Associated Press (AP) journalists from White House press events after they continued to use the term “Gulf of Mexico” instead of their adopted “Gulf of America.” A judge later ordered the administration to restore AP’s access.
In June, the administration's threats to journalists became physical. As protests against ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids in Los Angeles grew, several journalists were injured by “non-lethal” bullets (which, despite the name, can actually be lethal), including at least one Australian reporter caught on camera. Elsewhere in the city, a photographer was shot in the head with a rubber bullet, a British photojournalist had emergency surgery to remove a plastic bullet from his leg, and other journalists were tear-gassed. Back in April, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued its first ever travel advisory for journalists heading to the US because of increased security at the U.S. border. Since then, comedian Jimmy Kimmel was taken off air (and later reinstated) for remarks critical of the Trump administration. Yet in the wake of this huge story, Trump actually suggested that networks which give the president bad press should have their licenses taken away.
Closer to my home, the rich and powerful use abusive lawsuits known as Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, or SLAPPs, to silence journalists and others who speak out against them, in the UK and beyond. Some (but certainly not all) of these lawsuits come from oligarchs. Through defamation or privacy claims, critical views in the public interest are silenced with the backing of the British courts. Defending against one of these claims can be costly and drag on, which is exactly the point. It scares people, and stops reporters from doing their jobs for fear they could become the next SLAPP target.
In spite of the worsening global landscape, there are still organizations and journalists holding the line. The Anti-SLAPP Coalition is doing incredible work to put an end to SLAPPs. Maria Ressa, a Filipino journalist who co-founded Rapplerin 2021 has dedicated her investigative journalism to uncovering corruption within the Philippines government, and continues despite landing several charges against her, including charges of cyber libel and tax evasion. There is also the late Daphne Caruana Galizia, who unearthed numerous instances of Maltese state corruption, including her vital work on the Panama Papers scandal. In October 2017, she was murdered for it, and the campaign for justice continues.
There are countries, too, that give us a ray of hope, including Norway, which tops RSF’s 2025 World Freedom Press Index map. It’s a country that safeguards press freedom, has a vibrant independent media sector, and where editorial independence is valued. Namibia, while not falling within the green sweet spot, has historically been one of the best countries in Africa for press freedom, according to RSF. Journalists have faced verbal attacks and criticism from the government, and there are other areas where there is room for improvement. But in a world of press decline, it has risen six places (to 28th) in the most recent league table. (However, it’s important to note that it stood in 18th place as recently as 2022.) This comes down to a diverse media landscape, few barriers to coverage, and a judiciary that often defends the press.
That a free press is vital in order to uphold democracy always bears repeating; and with things as dire as they’ve become, we must defend it with everything we’ve got. In countries where that idea is under threat, or where democracy itself is in tatters, we desperately need journalists who are pushing back, who refuse to stop publishing, and who shine a light on corruption. They’re often the ones running incredible independent media, whether in their countries or in exile. And we need the public, international community, and human rights organizations to keep calling out the threats, and supporting these brave journalists, wherever they may be. Because once we’ve lost press freedom, it’s only a matter of time before we lose everything it protects.
[post_title] => The Shrinking Space for Media Freedom
[post_excerpt] => Once we lose a free press, we lose everything it protects.
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How one word has birthed a globe-spanning tradition of resistance.
A few months ago, I was at a protest in Washington, D.C. This was not unusual. Gaza burns. The president deports with impunity. Respect for the rule of law—notably and especially by the government—now seems like the nostalgic artifact of a more innocent era, an era merely months ago. Unsurprisingly, for those of us moved by these simultaneous horror shows, expressing our anger through protest has become almost unremarkable. I’ve lost count of the number of protests I’ve attended, the catchy homemade signs I’ve crafted and seen, and the clever chants I’ve memorized. But at that particular march, something unusual happened: a chant-leader exhorted us to cry a word in my mother tongue, Urdu.
“Azadi!” she called.
“Azadi!” the crowd responded in unison.
Suddenly, the word seemed everywhere: scrawled in chalk across sidewalks and columns; emblazoned across signs. In the heart of the nation, the seat of its power, everywhere, that old watchword of uprising—Azadi.
~
Azadi, or freedom, is a small word. A scant five letters in both English and its original Farsi (آزادی), these five letters have birthed a globe-spanning tradition of resistance, having been shouted by students in Srinagar and Tehran, whispered in prison cells in Ankara, and sung by women in Kashmir and Delhi. A cry familiar to all children of the Middle Eastern and South Asian diaspora, myself included, Azadi is hymn, music, and lifeline. It’s a demand for dignity from its callers and from all those who answer the call.
This demand is expansive in scope and depth, inclusive of the dignity of life, of identity, and of the ability to govern your own political destiny. Azadi evokes our collective memory that freedom is claimed, not given, while narrating a people’s unified struggle for systemic social change. For those who seek the protection of the most vulnerable while preserving the dignity of all, Azadi is always within reach.
Still, for all that Azadi is, we must be clear about what it is not. It is not a slogan to be selectively invoked. It is not a justification for state violence. Azadi cannot mean the protection of innocent life only when politically convenient. Moreover, it becomes meaningless when uttered by those who do not uphold a politics grounded in human dignity. Nowhere was this distinction starker than in a recent televised address, in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu briefly switched from English to Farsi while commenting on Israel’s bombing of Iran. “Women, life, freedom. Zan, zendagi, azadi,” he said—invoking the slogan of the Iranian women’s rights movement. In that moment, the language of liberation was co-opted to justify the machinery of war. It was surreal to hear a feminist chant—professed often by Iranian women defying authoritarian rule—repurposed by the very man overseeing the brutally indiscriminate bombing of thousands of women and girls in Gaza. The slogan, stripped of its radical roots and repurposed as rhetorical cover, stood in direct contradiction to the grassroots movements that had once breathed life into it.
Creeping autocracy in the United States has for too long been ignored and shrugged off as a dysfunction that happens only in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Global South—the lawless other. But this careless, arrogant posture can no longer be supported, nor can the dangers of autocracy be reduced to a foreign export; and so, Americans chant Azadi now, because America needs it now. The past 100+ days have exhibited what the marginalized in this country have always known: that the greatest repression within America’s borders remains homegrown. Despotism collapses the political distance between nations and times, and just as fascism is rising globally, it has risen here. The myth of American exceptionalism falsely preached that our democracy was immune to the spell of demagoguery. But we know that Americans are just as capable of voting themselves into tyranny as any other people. White supremacy, toxic masculinity, and violent inequalities in rights and liberties were always part of the country’s domestic architectures. Now, from the streets to digital silos, they are plain for all to witness.
From Hungary to India, Israel to the U.S., authoritarian regimes the world over are in conversation, looking admirably upon each other. They swap notes in class, sharing tactics of repression, like aggrandizing executive power and politicizing independent institutions. But just as authoritarian regimes learn from each other, so too must we build solidarity across movements. The rhymes of history—from the surveillance of Black radicals in the U.S. to the targeting of Kashmiri students in India—demand collective study. And along with any new lessons that may arise, we must continue to echo the lessons of some of our most beloved visionaries. From Angela Davis to Edward Said to Arundhati Roy, we are reminded that global resistance is strongest when deeply rooted in local struggle.
In fact, therein lies Azadi’s greatest power: It crosses borders, languages, and faiths, moving between nations without itself becoming nationalized. It is a global grammar of defiance.
~
Language lives. It breathes, grows, reproduces. Azadi has done so, too, absorbing every movement and tongue it touches: Farsi, Urdu, Kurdish, Pashto, Punjabi, English. The precise journey of the word is contested; after all, linguistic borrowing is never an isolated event. Still, it carries an expansive genealogy of struggle through its travels: against gendered violence, against settler colonialism, against religious nationalism.
While I heard cries for Azadi in D.C. for the first time this year, in Indian-occupied Kashmir—the most militarized zone on earth—Azadi has been invoked for decades, having been part of the Kashmiri liberation movement since its inception. Yet as Modi’s India forbids conversations about the region and brands it as sedition, as students and organizers are arrested for expressing their desire for freedom, as the indigenous Kashmiri struggle for self-determination persists—Azadi remains the movement’s heartbeat.
Long serving as the anthem of the Kashmiri separatist movement, now that Azadi can no longer be expressed in the open, it hides itself in art or in niche digital spaces not yet subject to state discipline. Digital speech, however, is increasingly policed. On platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Indian authorities now block, geofence, or suspend accounts that challenge its narrative. Content from advocacy groups like Stand With Kashmir is censored using the same tools of repression that platforms in the U.S. deploy against pro-Palestinian activists—algorithms, shadowbanning, keyword suppression. Surveillance and censorship, previously characterized as exclusive to so-called illiberal regimes, are now a feature of the liberal democracies just catching up.
As all this occurs, state actors escalate their repression of dissent in the United States. Trumpism has made it clear what can and cannot be said: speech critical of the Trump administration is met with swift retribution; and speech challenging domestic and foreign policy is quickly vilified, as seen by the vicious response to ICE protests in California earlier this summer. Meanwhile, students protesting for Palestine in the U.S. now face the same brutal state retaliation we’ve long associated with authoritarian regimes abroad—even though the U.S. has always had its own archive of violent suppression, from the surveillance and silencing of civil rights activists and abolitionists to the the crackdown on anti–Vietnam War protesters after them. Today, much to Trump’s delight, some of the most prestigious law firms have capitulated to executive pressure, agreeing to perform approximately $1 billion worth of pro-bono labor for Trump’s retributive pet projects. Activists and pro-Palestine advocates have been doxxed, fired, expelled, and/or blacklisted. All the while, institutional liberalism bends the knee: DEI offices that once promised safe harbor for marginalized voices now fall silent or side with power; liberal media outlets fire staff who speak out against atrocities in Gaza. The suppression of speech, criminalization of protest, surveillance of dissent—these are global patterns, and we are not exempt. Arguably, if American exceptionalism matters here at all, it will be in its ability to normalize this authoritarian bent worldwide.
And yet resistance continues. The same dignity Azadi rallies for abroad is now demanded here. On the steps of American universities. In its hallowed institutions. At the foot of the Capitol.
~
For all that Azadi gives, it demands something of us—namely that we do more than simply bear witness. When we chant Azadi, we are not just echoing other movements, past and present, but entering into dialogue with them, from Kashmir to Kabul to Tehran. This is not mimicry, but lineage, as Azadi reminds us in every generation that our rights are not guaranteed and must be renewed through struggle.
It is not enough, then, to be the appreciative, passive inheritor of a tradition of resistance; one must mobilize. This means texting rideshares, learning how to administer basic first aid for those whose names you don’t yet know, and tracking jail releases of those who you just met and marched alongside. This means disagreement without collapse, and accountability without exile. This means spending hours in rooms with bad lighting and too many opinions, trying to move toward consensus anyway.
If Azadi is to continue to mean something lasting, we’ll need to carry it beyond the chants—into policy fights, mutual aid networks, protective kinship, and more. Because Azadi is not metaphor, it is mandate, and requires all of us to answer its call.
~
Call and Response:
Hum kya chahte?Azadi! What do we want? Freedom!
Chheen ke lenge—Azadi! We will snatch it—Freedom!
Hai haq hamara—Azadi! It is our right—Freedom!
Zor se bolo—Azadi! Say it louder—Freedom!
Hai jaan se pyaari—Azadi! We love it more than life—Freedom!
Tum kuch bhi kar lo, hum leke rahenge—Azadi! Do what you want, we will still win it—Freedom!
[post_title] => America Needs Azadi
[post_excerpt] => How one word has birthed a globe-spanning tradition of resistance.
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Soapbox is a series where people make the case for the sometimes surprising things they feel strongly about.
At a press conference in Baghdad in December 2008, Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi stood up and threw both of his shoes at then-U.S. President George W. Bush in an act of protest against the Iraq War. “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog,” he yelled in Arabic, chucking the first shoe. “This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq,” he continued, throwing the other.
Disappointingly if impressively, Bush managed to duck both shoes. But the impact of al-Zaidi’s actions was both immediate and profound: It demonstrated that an American leader—a man responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people—was not untouchable. And by proxy, neither was the United States.
Muntadhar al-Zaidi wasn’t the first person to throw a shoe at a politician, and he wouldn’t be the last. (In fact, he wasn’t even the first to do it that year.) Still, the Bush incident inspired copycats over the following months, many explicitly citing al-Zaidi as their inspiration. Over a decade and a half later, it feels like the practice has gone out of style. I imagine this is partly because, with the rise of global authoritarianism, the potential punishment for throwing a shoe at a world leader has drastically gotten worse—something true even with softer ammo, such as when a protester was arrested for throwing tomatoes at then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016. Or last year, when another protestor was sentenced to prison for throwing coffee cups at Reform UK leader Nigel Farage. But, in my opinion, this is all the more reason for it to make a comeback: More war criminals need to have shoes thrown at them. And, more importantly, people should be allowed to throw shoes at war criminals without fear of death, jail, or other punishment.
In the grand scheme of violence, having a shoe thrown at you is painful but temporary—often to the ego for far longer than the body. Even in the Bush incident, the only people injured were then-Press Secretary Dana Perino after a boom mic gave her a black eye, and al-Zaidi himself, when he was subsequently tackled to the ground and kicked by Iraqi guards and U.S. Secret Service agents. When compared to the countless deaths caused by the person on the receiving end of the shoe, some might even consider it a relatively minor gesture. But I believe it’s the spirit of the act that matters most, both in meaning and message. Having a shoe thrown at you is highly offensive, and as Iranian-American professor Hamid Dabashi points out, not just in Arab culture; a truth easily understood by the billions of us around the world who know to take off our shoes whenever we enter a home. As an insult, it dates at least as far back as the Old Testament—“Upon Edom I will cast My shoe” (Psalm 60:8)—and as a form of defiance towards a person in power, it requires a great deal of bravery. More than anything else, though, shoeing is an outlet for insurmountable rage and grief—a desperate expression of despair.
As our protests in their many forms continue to go unheard, and the world’s countless injustices mount, it sometimes feels as if there is little recourse to stop the people most responsible for our collective devastation. After reading Chris Stephen’s The Future of War Crimes Justice(2024), I was disappointed but not surprised to learn, in great detail, that the reason most war criminals never face trial is largely bureaucratic. There is no feasible way to have a functioning “international” criminal court, because no country notorious for its crimes against humanity would ever willingly comply with its laws, or even agree that it’s subject to such a court’s jurisdiction. Notably, the United States is still not a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC), despite signing the Rome Statute in 2000, two years after the treaty was adopted. In a statement in 2002, then-United Nations Ambassador John Bolton confirmed that the U.S. had no intention of ratifying it, and therefore, the country “has no legal obligations arising from its signature.” (Equally notable, the three other countries that signed the Rome Statute but confirmed they would not comply are Israel, Russia, and Sudan.)
If the so-called systems of justice aren’t serving their purpose, at what point, then, is it acceptable for us to take matters—and shoes—into our own hands? I’m not saying we should all be throwing shoes at any run-of-the-mill asshole, or even any run-of-the-mill asshole politician. But I do think the world shouldn’t bend so easily to fascists and dictators and genocidal oligarchs; that literal war criminals shouldn’t get to feel so comfortable moving through the world, living morally bankrupt lives without consequence. If their victims aren’t ever going to see real justice, then at the very least, they should feel perpetually inconvenienced, and a little on edge—aware that, at any moment, a rogue shoe might thwack them in the head.
Personally, if I were a war criminal or billionaire or other generally detestable figure enacting suffering on millions, I’d rather have a shoe thrown at me than lose my head to a guillotine. (For legal reasons, this is a joke.) But beyond inconvenience, perhaps it might also accomplish something more substantial—if not a reckoning for the person being shoed, then for the millions of people who might witness it. Because sometimes, it takes seeing someone else accomplish something we hadn’t considered possible to understand what’s possible to accomplish ourselves.
Muntadhar al-Zaidi has claimed he does not believe himself to be a hero, but merely “a person with a stance.” His only apology in the incident’s aftermath was to his fellow journalists—with the caveat that, “Professionalism does not preclude nationalism.”
“This scene stands as proof that… a simple person was capable of saying ‘no’ to that arrogant person, with all his power, tyranny, arms, media, money, and authority,” al-Zaidi said in an interview with Reuters for the shoeing’s 15-year anniversary. To me, this is precisely why it has endured in our cultural consciousness for so long: Bush’s shoeing remains an important reminder that each of us, as individuals, is more powerful than we often give ourselves credit for; and when we act collectively, that power only multiplies.
Like all forms of “violent” protest, throwing a shoe at a prominent political figure is not without its risks. After he threw his shoes at Bush, al-Zaidi was sentenced to three years in prison, later docked down to a year. He ultimately served nine months, having been released early for good behavior, alleging he experienced violent torture at the hands of senior government officials throughout. But he has also never once expressed regret for anything other than the fact he “only had two shoes.”
If more of us were to partake in this time-honored tradition, however, this wouldn’t be a problem: After all, if one pair of shoes can cause such a fuss, just imagine what we might accomplish with a few million more.
[post_title] => Who Throws a Shoe, Honestly?
[post_excerpt] => In defense of a long-neglected form of protest.
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