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When Luffy’s Jolly Roger was hoisted from Nepal’s Singha Durbar palace, it instantly became a symbol of something larger. Over the past few months, a wind of protests has swept across the globe. From Nepal to Madagascar, Kenya to Peru, Indonesia, the Philippines and Morocco: the youth, unwilling to inherit a broken system, have taken to the streets to prove that their future is daring and won’t be silenced. < Back #GenZ 212 Ibtissem Remdane When Luffy’s Jolly Roger was hoisted from Nepal’s Singha Durbar palace, it instantly became a symbol of something larger. Over the past few months, a wind of protests has swept across the globe. From Nepal to Madagascar, Kenya to Peru, Indonesia, the Philippines and Morocco: the youth, unwilling to inherit a broken system, have taken to the streets to prove that their future is daring and won’t be silenced. Nepalese Gen Z protesters in front of Bharatpur Mahanagarpalika Office हिमाल सुवेदी, Wikimedia Commons Unlike previous waves of political mobilization, the Gen Z protests distinguish themselves through their decentralized organization, digital coordination, and symbolic creativity. Simultaneously emerging across several regions of the world, they reflect a generational response to deep structural crises like economic precarity, political disillusionment or the distrust in traditional institutions. What really makes them Gen Z though, is the fact that these movements are enabled and amplified through social media platforms such as TikTok or Instagram, where humor becomes a political language. By September 2025, these protests became a transnational phenomenon. Although each local movement addresses specific national issues such as political corruption in Kenya or the restriction of free speech in the Philippines, they all share a common logic: the rejection of hierarchical authority and the demand for accountability in governance. Something else they have in common, is the means of transmitting symbolic messages. Young women protesting the increase of period products in the #RejectFinanceBill2024 in Nairobi, Kenya author:, Egotieno, Wikimeda commons Gen z’s the first generation to grow up fully online and has had a worldview shaped by an infinite access to information. Unlike previous generations, I believe our political awakening did not occur only through party affiliations or ideological schools but through our feeds. Many before now have witnessed global tragedies through media – from the TV broadcast of the Resistance War Against America in Vietnam to seeing 9/11 live in their living room. What differs for Gen Z is not exposure itself, but the proximity, the pace of it, and the line between those watching and those living the events becomes thinner. The result of this hyper-connected daily-life isn’t simply “more exposure to suffering,” but a system where this very suffering is always available to be seen, directly, at all times: close enough to tap into, and just as close enough to scroll past. For some this information overload fosters apathy, and to some extent, really does numb us to violence. But for some others it sparks indignation, because what this really means is injustice is never distant; it’s chronically always in our pockets. Since these movements are leaderless, they are also difficult to suppress. There is no single figure to arrest, no headquarters to shut down. Their anonymity democratizes participation: anyone with a smartphone can join. Only it is not without consequences, as governments, along with the protesters, have adapted. Affiliation alone can become grounds for punishment, such as in the US where supporting the Palestinian cause publicly has led students to face disciplinary action, surveillance or even barriers like visa denials. Still, this particular humor Gen Z has adopted online disarms power, and it transforms fear into creativity: because beneath the irony does lie a sharp moral core. Again, the memes are not just jokes; they are tools of political literacy. The use of images drawn from pop culture such as animes like One Piece, where a young pirate challenges the authority of the corrupt Marine Forces, or movies like The Hunger Games truly demonstrate Gen Z’s ability to merge digital culture with political activism. This led to the creation of a shared dissident language, and a sense of community despite the geographical distance. Within this wave, Morocco’s Gen Z #FreeKoulchi movement stands out as one of the most relentless. The word koulchi means “everything” in Arabic, which all of it then means “Free Everything.” Born after the tragedy at Hassan II Hospital in Agadir, where eight women died in childbirth after failed C-sections, what began as outrage over poor healthcare quickly evolved into a broader social movement. By the end of September of this year, Moroccan cities saw the emergence of a decentralized protest network. In a statement published on its official accounts and Discord server, the movement calls on “all Moroccan youth, as well as all citizens,” to gather “in large numbers.” while emphasizing the nonviolent nature of the demonstrations: “The protests are peaceful and civilized. Order and responsibility must be maintained.” The movement had no formal leaders or party affiliations, yet its organization was remarkably efficient. Teenagers and university students used TikTok, Instagram, and Discord to coordinate marches, share safety tips, and amplify testimonies of hardship. The digital sphere became both a meeting place and megaphone. Protests in Rabat Mounir Neddi, Mounir Neddi, Wikimedia commons The initial grievances were clear, such as collapsing public services or youth unemployment exceeding 25%. Later on, it gradually broadened to challenge the fact that national wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few. Many criticized the government’s investment in grand infrastructure projects for the Africa World Cup, AFCON, while hospitals and schools struggled to function. Phrases like “No World Cup, health comes first" and "We want hospitals not football stadiums" could be heard in the streets. Later, as the movement progressed and protesters were being massively repressed, arrested and prosecuted by the Moroccan police, the phrase “Free Koulchi” appeared. It called for the release of the peaceful protesters who exercised their right by coming to the streets. It thus became not only a slogan but a diagnosis, everyone and everything needs to be freed because everything feels trapped. Emotionally, the movement was fueled by hogra : a dialectal Arabic term used to describe humiliation and injustice. It’s the feeling of being ignored, of existing within a context that perpetuates oppression. For many young Moroccans, hogra had become a national condition. As a response to the uprisings, the Moroccan government, accustomed to containing dissent through a mix of reform and restraint, initially downplayed the protests. But as #FreeKoulchi gained visibility and international attention, the official rhetoric shifted. On 10 October 2025, King Mohammed VI delivered a rare televised address urging his administration to act “with greater speed” on healthcare, education, and youth employment. Days later, Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch’s government announced a package of social reforms: investment in hospitals, teacher recruitment programs, and targeted job creation schemes. Finance Minister Nadia Fettah Alaoui promised to redirect budget funds from luxury projects toward essential services. Yet these promises were met with skepticism. Many activists viewed them as performative gestures from Akhannouch aimed at cooling tensions rather than systemic change. The AMDH (Moroccan Association for Human Rights) reports around 2,068 arrests, intimidation, and police violence continued to surface, prompting condemnation from organizations such as Amnesty International. So while the government’s reformist language was conciliatory, its security practices remained repressive, a dual strategy that seems to have long characterized Moroccan governance. Still, the movement achieved something significant: it disrupted the narrative of Moroccan youth apathy. It revealed that beneath apparent stability lies a generation increasingly unwilling to accept a political order that limits them to symbolic participation. GenZ 212 demonstrations in Rabat , Mounir Neddi, flickr #FreeKoulchi encapsulates many features of Gen Z activism worldwide: decentralization, digital organization, and moral clarity. It demands dignity, opportunity and concrete actions. What sets Morocco apart is how these universal frustrations intersect with local realities: a constitutional monarchy balancing modernization with control, a rapidly urbanizing youth population, and stark inequalities between coastal elites and rural communities. The AFCON preparations have also exacerbated these disparities, making many Moroccans feel the government’s priorities are misplaced . The protest thus reflects both a national crisis and a generational awakening. For Moroccan youth, #FreeKoulchi is not only and solely about policy failure; it’s about belonging. Although the movement initially focused on social and economic rights rather than challenging the political system itself, it was later associated with broader democratic aspirations. It asserts their right to shape the country’s future rather than merely inherit it. In that sense, Morocco’s movement joins a larger global pattern: the rise of “connected dissent”, where young people mobilize simultaneously as citizens of their nations and participants in a transnational digital public sphere. Yet, the power of digital protest contains its own contradictions. The same algorithms that connect youth also fragment their attention. Sustaining momentum beyond the viral moment remains a challenge, one that many Gen Z movements from #M66 in Togo to #MilkTeaAlliance in Asia, have confronted. Indeed in Morocco too, sustaining #FreeKoulchi beyond the online moment remains a challenge. Without formal organization or negotiation structures, translating demands into policy becomes difficult. But its legacy may not lie in immediate reform; it may lie in the cultural and psychological shift it triggered. Milk Tea Alliance: Group called Humanity Beyond Borders distributes free Tiananmen cookies author: Prachatai, flickr The #FreeKoulchi movement in Morocco is both a symptom and a signal. For thousands of young Moroccans, protest is no longer taboo. It is part of civic life. Today, our generation does not seek revolution in the old sense. It seeks renewal of trust, of accountability, even of hope. Its politics are not about overthrowing systems but about demanding that they finally work, that the citizens can be heard. In Morocco and beyond, these protests announce a truth that governments keep on ignoring– not without cost– the youth are not the future, we’re the present. #FreeKoulchi

It’s what Varoufakis calls a 'digital fiefdom': a post-capitalist economic order where smaller businesses pay dividends to massive corporations which control essential platforms — just like how poor serfs paid landowners in order to farm the land. < Back The Fight against Big Tech and the New Order Feidias Psaras November 30, 2024 As a law school student at Yale, Lina Khan was highly critical of how Amazon was doing business. In a break-out 92-page academic hit published in her university’s law journal, she explained how the company’s business model, which prioritized aggressive expansion within and across business lines even at the expense of profits, was poisonous to the free-market economy. Amazon’s Prime membership service, for example, allowed users to offer exclusive privileges such as same-day—for some, even same-hour—delivery and free shipping. Such features are immensely costly and lead to substantial deficits. But only multi-billion dollar companies like Amazon, with sets of faithful stakeholders and immense amounts of capital acquired from a wide variety of businesses, can fuel these ventures. These investments ultimately increase consumer spending and—much more importantly—loyalty. Lina’s efforts have extended to other tech behemoths that have pervaded their respective markets. After achieving her post as chair of the FTC, she quickly revived a lawsuit to break up Meta, and led attempts to prevent Microsoft’s $69 billion deal to acquire Activision in an attempt to consolidate ground in the gaming market. Khan called for a radical change in how the Federal Trade Commission, the state body in charge of maintaining anti-monopoly laws, dealt with companies such as Amazon. She contended that whether a company is engaging in anti-free-market practices should not be determined solely by its short-term impacts on consumer welfare and low prices, for example. It’s also the long-term impacts: how these low prices allow the company to gain a stranglehold over the market and paralyze competitors. It sets it up for a sort of dominance that would allow it, in the future, to raise prices as it wished. But there's something even more worrying about companies such as Amazon and their increasing establishment as the singular e-commerce retailer. While contemporary antitrust analysis would assume that rational firms aim to drive competitors out of business, Amazon’s ubiquitousness and role have made it necessary for competing smaller businesses. Thus, it has created an arena over which it gets to set the rules at the expense of dependent rivals. In a dispute with Hachette in 2014, for example, the company delisted the publisher’s books from its website during business negotiations. In ‘Project Gazelle,’ executives talked about approaching smaller book publishers as a ‘predator might approach a wounded gazelle.’ It’s what Varoufakis calls a digital fiefdom: a post-capitalist economic order where smaller businesses pay dividends to massive corporations which control essential platforms — just like how poor serfs paid landowners in order to farm the land. An emerging neoreactionary movement Varoufakis’ interpretation is an expressly Marxist one, and he believes in increased regulation to try and mitigate it. But there are others who welcome such change. Curtis Yarvin, one of the key thinkers of an emerging neoreactionary movement, believes that the best form of government would come about by a nationalization and subsequent privatization of everything. Nick Land, a frequently cited colleague, is known for coining the term accelerationism; that rather than fighting to regulate capitalist forces, we should just let them be and drive the system to its limits. In his essay, Meltdown, he writes: The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. These thinkers are founding members of what has been dubbed the ‘Dark Enlightenment,’ a movement that criticizes aspects of the liberal democratic model prominent in the ‘Western sphere.’ Its proponents support that democracy is fundamentally flawed; that giving power to the majority ultimately leads to mediocre governance by the most popular rather than the most competent. The democratic institutional complex does not promote genuine plurality of opinion but rather just enforces another form of cultural hegemony through the imposition of societal norms. Yarvin’s concept of the ‘Cathedral’ denotes how the liberal universities that predominate the US zealously promote a foundational belief in egalitarianism that stifles freedom of thought and innovation. Land, in the same essay mentioned above, finishes: Learning surrenders control to the future, threatening established power. It is vigorously suppressed by all political structures, which replace it with a docilizing and conformist education, reproducing privilege as wisdom. Schools are social devices whose specific function is to incapacitate learning, and universities are employed to legitimate schooling through perpetual reconstitution of global social memory. Although this movement’s intellectual achievements were generated in online blogs by informal scholars, it doesn’t only extend to niche circles of disillusioned internet hermits. Peter Thiel, a multi-billionaire tech—investor listed 212th on Forbes’s list of richest people, recommends Yarvin’s blog unqualified reservations while stating that he ‘no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible’. He is counted among the many ‘broligarchs’ that find the government’s monopoly on money-production irksome and seek to circumvent it. As well as heavy investment in seasteading projects aimed to create tax-free safe havens for the rich, he’s known to have co-opted government programmes intended to extend retirement savings for middle-class Americans to amass 5 billion in venture capital income, uncut. But it’s not just clever accounting tricks for tax avoidance. A Republican, Thiel has ramped up political involvement in the past decade. After being seriously considered for a position in the Trump cabinet in 2016 and abstaining from support in 2020, he’s been tentatively drawn back to Trump’s side given his choice of a former employee and protégé —JD Vance—for vice president. The election results and the future Although ultra-rich donors backing both US 2024 presidential candidates have expressed discontent for the aggressive approach to antitrust of the head of the FTC, Trump’s election has all but sealed Lina Kahn’s fate. Elon Musk, known for cutting Twitter’s staff by half a week after acquisition and now the co-head of the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has stated that she “will be fired soon”. The change would most definitely mark a decrease in state checks on private power in the interest of the consumer. This administration marks a decisive step at the crossroads between state and private power. Trump’s cabinet picks have already indicated his readiness to enact significant reform on the government apparatus. It’s not just the role of the FTC that’s about to experience seismic change, but the nature and freedom of big tech and business as a whole—very likely at the cost of that of the consumer.

< Back Famine et politique: l’Éthiopie dans la tourmente By Elian Jorand March 30, 2024 Dans les étendues arides d'Atsbi, à l'est du Tigré, où des teintes d'ocre remplacent ce qui autrefois étaient des parcelles de terre prospères, une bataille silencieuse se déroule entre la faim et le déni politique. Le Monde et des sources internationales rapportent une situation préoccupante, où les autorités régionales déclarent un état de famine, mais le premier ministre Abiy Ahmed refuse de reconnaître la gravité de la crise alimentaire, transformant une catastrophe humanitaire en champ de bataille politique. Comme le souligne la correspondant du Monde Noé Hochet-Bodin, Atsbi, autrefois symbole de prospérité agricole, témoigne désormais sombrement des séquelles d'une guerre civile brutale qui a sévi entre 2020 et 2022. Les rebelles Tigréens ont affronté les forces fédérales éthiopiennes, entraînant un bilan de décès estimé à 600 000. Le conflit a laissé derrière lui une région luttant non seulement avec les cicatrices de la guerre, mais aussi avec les dures réalités d'une grave crise alimentaire. Tesfaye Hailu, administrateur du village de Fellag Weyni, peint un tableau vivant de l'abandon et du désespoir. Les fermes vides et le bétail mort racontent une histoire d'une communauté forcée de fuir la brutalité du conflit, abandonnant ses moyens de subsistance. Les champs autrefois fertiles de Teff, la céréale principale de l'Éthiopie, sont désormais stériles, recouverts de poussière qui tourbillonne autour des sandales en plastique de Hailu. En dépit des déclarations alarmantes de famine par les autorités locales, le gouvernement d'Abiy Ahmed à Addis-Abeba nie la gravité de la crise, créant un contraste marqué entre la reconnaissance du désespoir sur le terrain et les manœuvres politiques au niveau national. Le leader éthiopien, autrefois salué comme un lauréat du prix Nobel et un symbole d'espoir, fait face à des accusations d'abandon de la population tigréenne pour consolider son pouvoir. Cette double narration d'une nation en crise n'est pas nouvelle dans l'histoire troublée de l'Éthiopie. Les échos des famines passées utilisées comme armes politiques résonnent dans la situation actuelle, laissant les habitants du Tigré pris au piège entre le déni et le désespoir. Alors que le monde est témoin de cette tragédie en cours, c'est un appel à l'action pour la communauté internationale, afin de confronter l'intersection entre la politique et la crise humanitaire. L'avenir de l'Éthiopie, autrefois prometteur, est maintenant en suspens, et la résilience de son peuple fait face à un test redoutable à la suite d'une bataille silencieuse qui pourrait bien déterminer le cours de la nation.

For most of us, the French-Italian frontier in Menton is a concept, a sort of imaginary line of cheaper groceries and good pizza. One could possibly remain oblivious to this privilege as long as they never venture towards the Ventimiglia train station, where some are desperately trying to cross a very real border in the hopes of a safer life. To try to alleviate their struggles, SciencesPo Refugee Help and Cinementongraphe decided to team up and organize a screening of Lebanese director Nadine Labaki’s film, “Capernaum.” < Back Thou Shall Not Be Indifferent: Nadine Labaki’s Wake Up Call to the West By Krzysztof Kaluzny October 30, 2021 For most of us, the French-Italian frontier in Menton is a concept, a sort of imaginary line of cheaper groceries and good pizza. One could possibly remain oblivious to this privilege as long as they never venture towards the Ventimiglia train station, where some are desperately trying to cross a very real border in the hopes of a safer life. To try to alleviate their struggles, SciencesPo Refugee Help and Cinementongraphe decided to team up and organize a screening of Lebanese director Nadine Labaki’s film, “Capernaum.” All the proceeds funded food distribution for refugees and immigrants in Ventimiglia. The film’s title refers to the biblical city of Capernaum, a place damned and abandoned by God. The protagonists of the film are also forgotten, not necessarily by any form of divine power, but by the Western world and the international public. We follow the life of a 12-year old Zain, whom we meet in court as he tries to sue his own parents, through retrospections of his childhood on the streets of Beirut. Labaki’s decision to cast herself as Zain’s lawyer was purely symbolic. After all, just like her character, the director is giving a voice to the voiceless by providing them with a floor to share their stories. The main character is played by a Syrian refugee who himself grew up in Beirut’s slums, Zain Al Rafeea. The name used in the film was no coincidence: Labaki had changed it after casting the boy, highlighting that the protagonist’s experience in the film reflects the reality of children living in Lebanon. Neither of the Zains had received any schooling. Al Rafeea had to learn his lines by having them read to him as he was illiterate at the time of the shooting. It is impossible to tell that Al Rafeea is not a professional actor throughout the film. He lived that life, he did not have to act. It is perhaps the profound sadness in his eyes that shows the hardships he has been through despite his young age. After having run away from his parents, we witness Zain trying to survive in a hostile urban jungle. Long, stunning shots resemble a fairytale-like child’s odyssey, however, the story is far from The Little Prince’s narrative. The boy interacts with a lot of strangers who all have their problems and shattered dreams of a better life. One of them is a young girl, a refugee from Syria. She tells Zain she received food and is going to move to Sweden. Zain asks her how he could receive the same benefits, and she answers point-blank: you are not a Syrian refugee. This one sentence struck me, especially looking at the girl’s t-shirt which reads “I am Lebanese.” That’s precisely how selective the West is when it comes to providing help. When Zain is referred by the girl to a human trafficker, he receives another blow - he lacks any documents, or as the trafficker describes it, ‘a proof you’re a human being.’ The issue of undocumented people is a recurring theme over the course of the film. Those in power expect a birth certificate from people who can’t afford medical aid in a life-threatening emergency,much less to deliver an infant in a hospital. The film’s somber atmosphere was amplified by a haunting score by Khaled Mouznar, Labaki’s husband who collaborated closely with her in the production of the film, making it, as Labaki called it in her acceptance speech of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, a “family film created at home.” Given how heart-breaking the story was, it would be simply cruel if the film ended without some positivity or a glimpse of hope. We saw how Zain posed for a camera to have a picture taken for his ID card. Finally, Zain was recognized as a ‘human being.’ What we consider to be a rather inconvenient chore every few years was a life-changing moment for him. The real Al Rafeea also moved forward; his family has been granted asylum in Norway. When Labaki called Al Rafeea to share the news that the film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, Al Rafeea was in school with teachers and new friends. Labaki might not have won the Academy Award, but I believe the opportunity to make a difference in Al Rafeea’s life was the biggest prize she could gain for this film. As her own character in the story, she was not able to change the system. The best she could do was help an individual. The rest, as for judges in a courtroom, is for the audience to reflect on and decide.

During the European Union Foreign Ministers’ meeting on Jan. 22, the Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz presented a video discussing the creation of an artificial island off the coast of Gaza to serve as a maritime port and potentially an airport for the strip in the future. < Back Artificial Island Proposal for Gaza By Jad Toufic Toutinji February 29, 2024 During the European Union Foreign Ministers’ meeting on Jan. 22, the Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz presented a video discussing the creation of an artificial island off the coast of Gaza to serve as a maritime port and potentially an airport for the strip in the future. Even if this proposal was found “very interesting” by the EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell, it was also regarded as off-topic amidst the current war in the Gaza Strip. In fact, Katz was recommended to focus more on the security concerns in the region instead of suggesting a proposal which has been mentioned on several occasions since 2011. Many skeptics regarded this artificial island as an indirect response to the question on the future of the Gaza Strip. Due to its timing, many perceived the proposal as a suggestion to relocate the Palestinians living in Gaza to the island in the long term in order to eliminate Hamas or to annex the Gaza Strip. Nevertheless, the Israeli Foreign Ministry denied that Katz made any claim of relocation of Gaza’s population in his defense and insisted that the plan was only a commercial vision for the Strip. What is the Proposal Really About? In its essence, the project is an alternative proposal to building a coastal port in the Gaza Strip. Since Gaza is a coastal region surrounded by Israel to the East, a method of achieving economic development through trade would be to build a maritime port. Given that there exists no secure connection to the West Bank, and thus the Arab world, and a limited crossing in Rafah connecting to the Sinai Peninsula, the path towards integrating Gaza into the global economy is to look to the Mediterranean Sea as most civilizations of this region have done historically. Based on the security concerns presented by Hamas, Israel suggests that the port be controlled by an international force inland while the Israeli navy takes responsibility for securing the maritime borders. Even if little information has been disclosed regarding the matter, the main idea is to build an island port for Gaza in an endeavor to prevent a coastal port, which Hamas might utilize to strengthen its armament. In the video presented by Katz, some commercial installations were also displayed, alongside a potential airport lane, which might replace the Gaza airport that Israel destroyed earlier this century. What are the Potential Complications? Many Israeli ministers, headed by the main proposer, Israel Katz, have been complimenting the idea, claiming that it would bring an infrastructural tool for the economic development of Gaza without threatening Israel’s security. However, skeptics have not been silent on the matter every time the proposal resurfaces. Most evidently, the main predicament behind the proposition is the sovereignty question: can a Palestinian state be created if Palestinian authorities do not cement their control over their main economic infrastructure? Not only so, but others even go as far as saying that the maritime control by Israeli forces, as well as inland control by international ones, will legitimize the Israeli blockade of Gaza, not to ignore in this situation Israel’s historical tactics in breaching sovereignty through claims on security. In this situation, it would be unsurprising that Israel pressures the future Gazan authorities by blocking maritime trade for security concerns. Also, despite some calling for a cooperation between international forces and the Palestinian authorities inland, it is not even known who are the proposed ‘legitimate’ authorities, especially after current events. Regarding the costs of the port, which are projected to reach $5 billion dollars, it is unclear who will cover them. If the future Gaza authority is held responsible for the charges, then it is doubtful that such an authority will be able to fund an artificial seaport and rebuild the demolished strip. Other reports in years past hinted that China and Saudi Arabia are willing to build and fund the project. However, considering the unstable geopolitical situation of the region, and in parallel with the detrimental invasion, it would be unlikely for the Chinese to invest in the Gaza strip. As to the Saudis, as long as an Iranian proxy exists, they will not invest in the region, considering the case of Lebanon with Hezbollah. Moreover, Israel will have a role in the investment, yet not only might Palestinian authorities reject it to avoid public discontent and political dependency, but also the Israeli public will be reluctant, especially after the Oct. 7 attacks. On the other hand, Israeli authorities, depending who reaches power at that time, might regard such an investment as a way to correct Israel’s public image in the international media. Environmentally, there will inevitably be negative consequences; however, no prominent studies have been conducted on whether a coastal seaport will be more environmentally friendly or not. Reality of the Current State? In the current state of war, with more than 90 percent of the Gaza population staying around the Rafah crossing in the south, it is expected that allegations regarding the relocation of Gazans on to the proposed island would surface. Realistically, however, three points can be made: first, it would be cheaper for Israel and the U.S. to pressure Egypt, as well as Gulf countries, to host the 1.8 million refugees than to build a costly island. Furthermore, building an artificial island requires years to be finalized: if Israel lacks something, it is time, especially with the rising death toll of Israel Defense Force soldiers as well as public anger. Finally, it is unlikely that Israeli allies will accept the relocation due to potential infringement of further human rights, which will arouse the already incessant fury amongst pro-Palestine manifestations in Western communities. It is important to note that when Katz displayed the video, it was also followed with another video that proposes a trade route connecting India to the Middle East. As readers were shocked with the timing chosen to revive the island seaport proposal, many overlooked the second proposal, thus little information has surfaced around it. Yet, the second video most probably refers to the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC) trade route proposed in September, prior to the Oct. 7 attacks. This trade route which would connect India to Europe through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel, thus bypassing the Suez Canal, throws doubt on the economic efficiency of an Island in Gaza. Putting into perspective, the already pre-constrained island would be competing with an international trade route a few kilometers away; in other words, even if the seaport provides integration for Gaza into the globalized world, the competition will demolish potential long-term investments, possibly leaving the future Palestinian authorities in huge debt. Clearly, no trade route through the island can be made into the region without passing through Israel, so IMEC will be more favourable for traders. A Political Message? Finally, the timing of the videos, amidst International Court of Justice trials on genocide allegations, reflects an indirect message to Hamas and the world: Israel has won the war against Hamas and it will do as it sees appropriate with the Gaza Strip in the future. Moreover, both videos can also be a political pressure to Egypt to accommodate the refugees or else face the crippling economic effect of a cheaper alternative to the Suez Canal.

Just as the early 20th century saw an arms race over battleships, today’s world is entering a new era of aerial arms competition, where superiority is not only measured by performance but also by how well systems communicate, adapt and dominate. Ultimately, the effectiveness of these next-generation systems will not be fully known until they are tested—not in simulations, but in war. < Back The Future of Air Warfare: Sixth-Generation Aircraft & the Race for China, Europe & the U.S. Theo Hisherik for Sciences Defense April 30, 2025 During a high-profile announcement on March 21 in the Oval Office, U.S. President Donald Trump revealed that Boeing had been officially selected to develop the U.S. Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance fighter aircraft. According to Pentagon officials, the F-47 will have stealth and penetration capabilities far exceeding those of the current U.S. fleet, a crucial step in preparations for a potential conflict with China. The F-47 is a nod both to its WWII predecessor and the current president, who is believed to have saved the program for Boeing, and is also symbolic of America’s dedication to air superiority post-WWII. Trump described the aircraft as “the most lethal aircraft ever designed,” though critics note China’s rapid advancements in Sixth-generation fighter technology as a counterbalance to supposed American dominance. For Aviation enthusiasts, the term “Sixth-generation Aircraft” will be familiar. For the uninitiated majority, it refers to the next major leap in jet aircraft technology and the next iteration of a post-WWII classification. The F-47 supposedly usurps the U.S. F-22 and F-35, previously perceived as hegemons in modern air power, as improved radar systems and advanced air defense technologies begin to challenge the heavyweights of the fifth generation. Since the late 2010s, the U.S., China, the UK, Italy, Japan, and Russia—among others—have launched Sixth-generation fighter programs. Despite their promise, doubts persist over these jets' battlefield viability. China Concurrently with the U.S.’ NGAD developments, China has been advancing its own sixth-generation fighter programs. In December 2024, China flew its first next-generation fighter prototype, the J-36. Known as the Baidi, the J-36 was developed by the Chengdu Aircraft Industry group and was observed conducting test flights on December 26th (interestingly coinciding with the birthday of the infamous Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong); it features a tailless delta wing design. China’s second, Sixth-generation fighter, the Shenyang Aircraft Corporation’s J-50, was spotted undergoing flight testing similarly in December 2025, in footage shared by a Douyin user. These aircraft are part of China's Nantianmen Project, which aims to integrate space-air capabilities and incorporate advanced technologies such as stealth aircraft and laser weaponry. China’s military modernization efforts have been substantial, with defense spending increasing from approximately USD $115 billion in 2010 to USD $246 billion in 2025. This investment reflects China’s strategic objectives, primarily the reunification with Taiwan through military means, a scenario that China expects would involve direct confrontation with U.S. forces, a fight with advanced U.S. aircraft, primarily the F-35, F-22 & B-21. While the exact capabilities of the J-36 and J-50 remain classified, their introduction signals a significant shift in the balance of air power. The USAF leadership believes the J-36 is an air superiority fighter, while analysts from institutions like the Australian Strategic Policy and Royal United Services Institute suggest that both of these aircraft could serve as platforms for long-range missiles, electronic warfare and as command hubs for coordinated operations of both manned and unmanned systems. However, questions persist regarding their performance in high-intensity conflict scenarios, such as a contested Taiwan Strait, where stealth, offensive capabilities and maneuverability against sophisticated air defenses and aircraft would be critical. Regardless of its role or abilities, the emergence of these aircraft has prompted U.S. military leaders, such as General Kenneth Wilsbach of the Air Combat Command, to advocate for the continued development of the NGAD program to counterbalance these advancements. In summary, the advancements in Chinese sixth-generation fighter programs underscore a new era in aerial combat, characterized by rapid technological innovation and possible competition and catch-up for the U.S., Europe and the rest of the world. The United States The United States has embarked on the development of several Sixth-generation aircraft, ranging from strategic bombers to air superiority fighters. Since the 2020s, the U.S. has increasingly pivoted towards combating China’s growing military influence in the Indo-Pacific. In response to Chinese technological advances, programs like NGAD and the B-21 Raider have been developed under strict secrecy since 2020 and 2011, respectively. The Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider represents a key asset in the USAF’s future strategic bomber fleet. Although conceptualized over a decade ago, the B-21 only made its maiden flight in November 2023 during a high-profile unveiling. The B-21, developed under the Long Range Strike Bomber program, is built to deliver precision strikes over long distances, especially in the Indo-Pacific region. With a radar cross section smaller than an insect to enemy radars, and with an unrefueled range exceeding 4,000 kilometers, American officials intend to use the aircraft to penetrate deep into heavily defended airspace to target key Chinese assets-ranging from command centers to critical infrastructure and nuclear facilities dotted around China. The aircraft is slated to enter operational service by 2027. However, analysts and critics argue that the U.S. may be displeased by reality. Critics, including Dr. Mel Deaile, a former USAF Colonel and Director of the School of Advanced Nuclear Deterrence Studies, warned that by the time the B-21 is fully operational, it may already be obsolete, facing significant threats from rapidly advancing Chinese anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities. In December 2023, Asia Times reported that China had conducted simulated engagements to intercept and destroy B-21 aircraft, using a combination of new stealth aircraft, advanced radar systems and hypersonic missiles. While the validity of such reports is debatable, given the opacity of Chinese military disclosures, it has prompted U.S. defense planners to reassess the long-term viability of the B-21 and, more generally, strategic bombers in high-threat environments. Some analysts now question whether the 21st century could mark the end of manned Strategic Bombers. In contrast, the F-47 is projected to be a true leap forward in aerial combat and ‘superior’ to any Chinese Sixth Generation aircraft. Although many technical details remain classified, the F-47 is expected to have a "significantly longer range, more advanced stealth, be more sustainable, supportable, and have higher availability than our fifth-generation fighters.” It is believed to be able to operate alongside autonomous drone swarms and, in future versions, to be unmanned. The aircraft will likely achieve speeds around Mach 2 and is expected to be cheaper, and aims to resolve the maintenance burdens associated with current fifth-generation fighters like the F-22 and F-35. The F-47 could also be configured with larger fuel tanks, enabling longer-range missions, potentially significant in a large-scale air war with China, where distance and logistical endurance will be decisive. Despite its promise, uncertainty lingers over the aircraft’s battlefield performance due to its projected full-service entry in 2029. With China rapidly progressing in anti-stealth and air defense technologies, there are concerns about whether even the most advanced U.S. fighter can retain air dominance. Still, American officials remain confident. General David Allvin, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, remarked , “We’re going to write the next generation of modern aerial warfare with this (F-47).” That said, historical precedent suggests the F-47, like many U.S. aircraft before, may debut with operational issues but also with considerable technological advantages shaping air combat for decades. Europe In the current global defense landscape, Europe continues to trail behind its competitors, particularly the U.S. and China, in developing next-generation air combat systems. Europe’s most ambitious effort to leap ahead is the Tempest , a Sixth-generation fighter aircraft under development by the UK-led Team Tempest. This team comprises major industry players such as BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, Leonardo UK, and MBDA. The project forms the centerpiece of the Global Combat Air Programme—a trilateral partnership between the UK, Italy and Japan. The aircraft is designed to replace the Eurofighter Typhoon and is expected to enter service by 2035. Technologically, the Tempest is envisioned as a leap forward. It will incorporate AI and deep learning, the capability to operate swarming drone technology, hypersonic capabilities, directed energy weapons and modular design allowing for mission-specific customization. The UK government has allocated £2 billion for the Tempest program, with the first flights expected by 2027. However, consistent with historical patterns in British defense procurement, there are already worries about the program. The Commons Defence Committee warned that, “All too often, multilateral defence programmes are beset with soaring costs and mounting delays. Tempest must break the mould.” Meanwhile, potential partners such as Australia and Saudi Arabia have expressed interest in joining the program. Elsewhere in Europe, another Sixth-generation project is underway: the Future Combat Air Systems, led by France, Germany and Spain. At the heart of the project is the Next Generation Fighter. It is designed to operate alongside drones, known as “remote effector,” which will carry out missions such as electronic warfare, missile delivery and target designation. This aligns with Europe’s concept of network-centric warfare, integrating the aircraft with satellites, naval ships and AWACS platforms to create a shared real-time environment. A demonstrator flight for the NGF is anticipated around 2027, with full operational capability planned for 2040. However, progress has been marred by delays and internal disagreements. The key dispute lies between Dassault Aviation, the French contractor, and Airbus, representing German and Spanish interests. At times, industrial competition and national pride have slowed technical cooperation and jeopardized timelines. There are greater concerns about the aircraft’s strategic viability by the time of its deployment in the 2030s. Due to the development of Russian advanced air defenses like the S-500, and the rapid development of Sixth-generation aircraft by China, questions therefore linger over whether these European aircraft can outmatch global rivals. Moreover, geopolitical shifts, including America's shifting foreign policy priorities and its announcement that any export version of the F-47 will be significantly downgraded, have driven home the message that Europe must achieve strategic autonomy, particularly in air power. Ultimately, the future of air warfare will be far more complex than in previous generations. In the evolving landscape of military development, having the fastest, stealthiest, or most heavily armed aircraft is no longer the singular advantage it once was. Sixth-generation aircraft are not just standalone weapons platforms; they are components of a broader, integrated multi-domain warfare strategy. These jets are designed to operate in concert with naval forces, ground components, drone swarms and AI, forming part of a larger network defining the modern battlefield. Just as the early 20th century saw an arms race over battleships, today’s world is entering a new era of aerial arms competition, where superiority is not only measured by performance but also by how well systems communicate, adapt and dominate. Ultimately, the effectiveness of these next-generation systems will not be fully known until they are tested—not in simulations, but in war. Photo source: US Air Force on Flickr

Bien qu’il soit très important de protéger sa peau grâce à un écran solaire lors d’une exposition prolongée, les crèmes solaires sont aujourd’hui nocives pour l’espace marin, selon une étude de Environmental Health Perspective. < Back L’Impact de la Crème Solaire sur l’Environnement/ Sunscreen’s Impact on the Environment By Esther Boulekouane September 30, 2021 Les faits : Bien qu’il soit très important de protéger sa peau grâce à un écran solaire lors d’une exposition prolongée, les crèmes solaires sont aujourd’hui nocives pour l’espace marin, selon une étude de Environmental Health Perspective. En effet, elles contiennent des composants nocifs comme l’oxybenzone, le benzophénone pour ne citer qu’eux. Lorsqu’ils se retrouvent dans la mer, ces composants se décomposent très lentement et peuvent être absorbés par la biodiversité marine. L’oxybenzone provoque notamment le blanchissement des coraux et perturbe les niveaux d’hormones des animaux. Ainsi au Mexique, certaines plages interdisent la crème solaire sur les baigneurs. Selon National Geographic, entre 14 000 et 25 000 tonnes de crèmes solaires se retrouveraient chaque année dans les océans. Quelle alternative ? Puisqu’il est hors de question de ne pas protéger sa peau du soleil, comment pouvons-nous agir ? Très simplement, les vêtements offrent une bonne protection contre les UV. Toutefois pour aller à la plage, il existe également des écrans solaires plus respectueux de l’environnement comme ceux qui portent le label Ecocert, Protect Land + Sea. Alors la prochaine fois que vous achetez de la crème solaire, pensez à vérifier qu’elle ne contient pas d’oxybenzone et qu’elle est éco-certifiée ! The facts : Although it is crucial to protect our skin from sun exposure, sunscreens are a big issue for marine life nowadays, according to Environmental Health Perspective. Indeed, they contain toxic elements such as oxybenzone, benzophenone — just to mention a few. When these components end up in the sea, they take a long time to degrade and are therefore absorbed by marine life. Oxybenzone causes coral bleaching and damages animals' hormonal systems. To remedy this issue, in Mexico, some beaches have been declared “sunscreen free” to protect the environment. Based on the searches of National Geographic, 14.000 to 25.000 tons of sunscreen could end up in the oceans each year. What can we do? Because it’s unthinkable to not protect our skin from the sun, we have to ask, what are the sustainable options? First of all and very simply, wearing covered swimming gear (such as a full swimming costume) is the best protection against ultraviolet rays. As for the beach, one can find labelized sunscreens such as Ecocert and Protect Land + Sea. So next time you buy sunscreen, check the ingredients, make sure there’s no oxybenzone and always choose a sustainable one!

Cancel culture is a movement denoted by the accountability of celebrities and people with platforms; however, it has more recently progressed into a worldwide attempt to exercise justice through online discourse. < Back Cancel Culture: The Delivery of Justice? By Rozy Betrosian “Ashton Kutcher fears being cancelled for sex trafficking scandal.” Kutcher is a public figure predominantly associated with the comedic series “That ‘70’s Show” and his inaugural organisation against sex trafficking. Recently, his co-star Danny Masterson was convicted of the sexual assault and rape of two women, rendering him sentenced to thirty years in prison. Danny Masterson's connection to Ashton Kutcher put him in the spotlight for Masterson’s transgression. Kutcher is a board member of Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children (i.e., Kutcher's and Moore’s sex trafficking organisation); therefore, fans expected a response to Masterson’s transgression. Kutcher provided a legal deposition for Masterson, including characterizations such as “dedicated and loyal [husband]” and “excellent role model” alluding to the support for Masterson. As the founder of an anti-sex trafficking organisation, Kutcher was scrutinised for his allegiance to his former cast member, and his punishment included reassigning his organisation to new leadership. Was the scrutinization of Kutcher efficient in promoting justice? Cancel culture is a movement denoted by the accountability of celebrities and people with platforms; however, it has more recently progressed into a worldwide attempt to exercise justice through online discourse. Believers of cancel culture argue that it resembles the public sphere– a means of democratic and open discourse, and “being cancelled” is the sheer and unavoidable consequence for people who have wronged, thereby violating the quest for social justice. Furthermore, fervent advocates for cancel culture have an imperative significance in holding celebrities with far reaching platforms accountable for harm to communities and minorities. However, further contemplation on cancel culture and counter-arguments to the movement highlight that it has degenerated into mass media bullying and revoking the right to free speech. The primary question of the efficacy of cancel culture lies on the legitimacy of the “enforcers of justice.” Are internet users legible social justice advisors? Criticising in an impersonal forum empowers people to become more vicious and spiteful, legitimising verbal violence. Hateful commentary against public figures enables and fuels the crowd, signalling an attack on an individual. This potent and overwhelming reception of negative and disapproving evaluation of behaviour, inevitably results in “cancelling.” It is understood that cancel culture is not serving its purpose of serving justice on the internet but rather initiates debate on the application of democracy online and the limitations of free speech. A common phenomenon is retrospective cancellation; this requires the inspection of a person’s past and questions problematic behaviour in the public arena. Common examples include the lead singer of The Smiths, Steven Patrick Morrissey. Morrissey has been outspoken about his extremist views that align with far-right ideology in Britain, he has been characterized as xenophobic and racist as he has claimed that “the gates of England are flooded [by foreigners].” His statement from 2010 has been reviewed under the cancel culture lens, with heavy media scrutiny of Morrissey and widespread boycotts of his music. Regardless of the reprehensibility of his statements, the artist is merely expressing his political ideas. One could argue that he is just acting upon his right to freedom of speech. Moreover, it is interesting how former claims and “problematic” behaviour resurfaces for the sole purpose of scrutiny. Overall, critics of retrospective cancel culture argue that it risks erasing the nuances of history and failing to acknowledge the context of past eras and diverse opinions. They suggest that judging figures solely based on contemporary values may oversimplify complex historical narratives and hinder the understanding of societal progress and transformation over time. Specifically, in the case of The Smiths singer, the question of whether cancel culture has been efficient, rematerialized. Is Morrissey’s cancellation stopping fans from listening to The Smiths? This brings about another debate known as separating the art from the artist dilemma. Cancel culture has brought the longstanding debate surrounding the separation of art from the artist into sharper focus, a phenomenon exemplified by the intense scrutiny directed at acclaimed author J.K. Rowling. Widely revered for her monumental contributions to literature, particularly through the globally cherished Harry Potter series, Rowling faced substantial backlash due to her contentious statements on matters related to gender identity and transgender rights. This provoked an intricate discussion concerning the balance between celebrating her literary achievements and critiquing her personal convictions – presenting a challenge to the concept of separating the artist from their art. While her literary works continue to resonate deeply with audiences worldwide, her vocal stance on issues related to transgender rights prompted a reevaluation of her public persona and creative legacy. As cancel culture advocates for the decisive reprimand of objectionable behavior, supporters of Rowling's work grappled with reconciling their appreciation for her literary contributions with their disapproval of her personal views. In the face of dynamic sociocultural shifts, her case reflects the ongoing challenges of navigating the relation of an artist's creations and their personal beliefs. The debate revolving around J.K. Rowling underscores the inherent tension between the desire to preserve an artist's creative legacy and the need to hold them accountable for their personal beliefs and actions Cancel culture, initially an emblem of accountability, has transformed into a global instrument for justice in the online sphere. Advocates contend that it represents a form of social justice, imposing repercussions for those who have caused harm, especially to marginalized communities. However, it has drawn censure for descending into mass media bullying, hindering free speech, and lacking a structured system of justice.The question of the legitimacy of online "justice enforcers" becomes inevitable. Impersonal criticisms often fuel online attacks, legitimizing verbal violence and leading to cancellations. This prevalent culture of "cancelling" frequently falls short of delivering online justice, prompting reflection on the boundaries of free speech and the application of democratic principles in the digital sphere.

In the digital age, the responsibility of verifying and trusting information falls on us, the users. While content under the branding of Save Europe might not be falsified, it is deliberately presented with emotional imagery, evocative music and slogans—blurring the line between political activism and propaganda. < Back Who is “Saving” Europe? Stanimir Stoyanov March 31, 2025 Loud electronic music, vibrant landscapes and the statue of a stern man. These are the ingredients used to produce a social media-driven movement with political undertones now growing in popularity. If you have browsed social media recently, it is possible that you have encountered one of these short videos promoting traditional European values while opposing migration and progressive views on gender and sexuality. Coinciding with the recent rise of the right in European politics, this movement appeals to social media users by inciting a sense of doom and urgency to “Save Europe.” It all started with music. In May 2024, a video went viral, depicting people in Germany chanting “foreigners out” and “Germany is for Germans” to the song “L’Amour Toujours” by Gigi D’Agostino. Following this incident, the song was used at demonstrations and by Nazi sympathisers, replacing the lyrics with the above slogan, which was also used by Hitler. This led to significant backlash, ultimately resulting in its ban at the 2024 Oktoberfest celebrations. The song itself is about the artist’s love towards his wife, but coupled with other disco hits, it can be found in music playlists using the slogan “Save Europe.” The most popular music compilations are called “Aryan Classics” or something similar and they remain widely available on streaming platforms such as YouTube and Spotify. Continuing in this vein, 2024 saw the rise of short-form content using these songs on platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram. The average video juxtaposes clips involving historical European landmarks, nationalist symbols and modern-day street scenes, with footage of protests, immigration or urban unrest. The combination of nostalgic imagery with urgent messaging aims to evoke a sense of loss, framing contemporary societal changes as an existential crisis for European identity. These videos are often structured in a way that maximizes engagement—quick cuts, dramatic text overlays and emotional music. The messaging varies, with some videos calling for cultural revival and others pushing conspiracy-led narratives about demographic change. What can be noticed is a rebranding of nationalistic ideologies under the guise of social media culture. By blurring the line between meme culture and political activism, the visual and musical style of the short-form content makes it more accessible to mainstream audiences, especially younger viewers. The icon of this movement is the bust of a muscular male figure supposed to invoke a feeling of strength and resilience. The statue “ La Force ” is by the artist Arno Breker, who was a Hitler-appointed official sculptor for the Nazi regime in Germany. Breker’s work, heavily influenced by totalitarian aesthetics, was designed to showcase national pride and a rigid sense of cultural identity. Its prevalence in Save Europe content is no coincidence, as it aligns with the movement’s broader theme of rejecting a perceived societal decline. The clips used often depict immigrants in a negative light, aiming to incite fear of a cultural takeover and impending doom. By painting Europe as being in crisis, the movement fosters a narrative of salvation from decline in order to bring Europe back to a “golden age” through images of nature and grand architectural marvels. What makes the movement especially alluring to audiences is the fact that it feeds not only on xenophobic narratives, but also on actual current socio-political discourse. Save Europe claims to expose acts of social deviance committed by individuals. In doing this, it often portrays groups of people in a negative light, aimed at bringing up fear and even hatred on a racial and religious basis. The rise of Save Europe coincides with a turbulent European political landscape. The increasing number of people supporting the far-right signals a shift in the continent’s political landscape, and Save Europe is actively contributing to it. It is both reiterating existing rhetoric but also introducing it to new audiences. While the movement itself cannot be directly linked to any political party, its message is one of the most hotly debated in recent EU politics. Days before the German election, the eventual winner of the election, the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), collaborated with the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) to pass migration policies, highlighting concerns that mainstream parties are legitimizing extremist positions on immigration. An interesting recent development is the introduction of new rhetoric surrounding Save Europe. Instead of talking solely about migration and social policies, a lot of recent clips under the tag have been connected to the effort of European Union rearmament, using the quote “ReArm Europe,” in conjunction with the recent change in U.S. foreign policy regarding the EU. It seems the movement is evolving to the narrative of Europe standing alone, with clips ranging from portrayals of Europe as a lone soldier to calling for the federalization of the EU. With clips following the same format popping up in support of European rearmament, this could be considered as an adaptation of the movement to current political narratives, in turn making it more appealing to general audiences. At the same time, it could be a sign that other movements, such as ReArm Europe, are beginning to use the platform SaveEurope has created to spread their narratives through social media. While Save Europe and other such movements are gaining traction, the platforms they use have not taken an official stance towards them. A large number of the accounts using phrases like “Save Europe” are short-lived, as they often face restrictions or bans for posting inappropriate content. However, new accounts with these names are being created all the time. At the beginning of 2025, Meta, owner of platforms Instagram and Facebook, even loosened its fact-checking and content monitoring policies. This change has allowed for a more unrestricted flow of information, opening the gates for misinformation, a prime tool for manipulating opinions. In the digital age, the responsibility of verifying and trusting information falls on us, the users. While content under the branding of Save Europe might not be falsified, it is deliberately presented with emotional imagery, evocative music and slogans—blurring the line between political activism and propaganda. If you haven’t personally been exposed to Save Europe content, keep in mind that it is not the only politically charged content online. Even the simplest online meme can influence us, sometimes unconsciously. As this movement gains traction, its influence on public discourse and electoral politics remains uncertain. Whether it fizzles out as just another viral trend or evolves into a significant force in this rebirth of European nationalism depends on how political actors, social media platforms, and, most importantly, we, the public, respond to it. Photo source: Matthias Berg on Flickr

La liberté implique-t-elle nécessairement la solitude? Ou bien avons-nous, malgré tout, besoin d’un témoin, d’un appui, d’une présence pour exister pleinement? < Back Corps et Conscience: L’Écriture révoltée de Nawal El Saadawi Christy Ghosn for Feminist Union February 28, 2025 Lire Combien de cœurs , c’est s’exposer au feu d’une parole qui ne s’éteint jamais. Nawal Al Saadawi, écrivaine égyptienne, médecin et militante féministe , ausculte son propre corps, le corps d’autres femmes et, à travers eux, la maladie qui gangrène nos sociétés: le patriarcat. Née en 1931 dans un petit village égyptien, El Saadawi a consacré sa vie à dénoncer les injustices faites aux femmes, tant dans ses écrits que dans ses actions militantes. Fondatrice de l'Association de solidarité avec les femmes arabes en 1982 (ensuite interdite en 1991) et militante pour l'abolition des mutilations génitales féminines, ses prises de position souvent exprimées à travers ses œuvres lui ont valu des persécutions et des contraintes à l'exil. En 1981, sous le régime de Anwar el-Sadate en Égypte, son opposition à la loi instaurant le parti unique conduit à son emprisonnement. Libérée après trois mois de détention suite à l'assassinat du président Sadate en octobre 1981, et après plusieurs années d'exil aux États-Unis, Nawal El Saadawi revient en Égypte en 1988, continuant son combat pour les droits des femmes. Elle décède au Caire le 21 mars 2021, laissant derrière elle un héritage littéraire et militant. Son écriture ne rassure pas, elle bouscule. Elle refuse la complaisance, l’illusion du progrès sans combat. Dès les premières pages, son texte crépite comme une autobiographie, bien que l’autrice s’en défende. Ce n’est pas seulement son histoire que l’on traverse, mais une mémoire collective pour toutes celles qui, un jour, ont senti leur existence corsetée par des traditions, des lois, des silences imposés. Al Saadawi regarde la médecine comme elle regarde la vie: sans fard. Déconstruisant la binarité des rôles genrés, elle révèle une vérité crue et universelle: nous sommes toutes prisonnières d’un système qui a fait de nos corps des objets de contrôle, de convoitise, de domination. La science au service de Saadawi Dans Combien de cœurs, premier roman de Saadawi publié en 1957, l’autrice ne se contente pas de nourrir son propos d’émotions et de réflexions philosophiques: elle intègre également des arguments scientifiques pour étayer sa vision d’une égalité fondamentale entre les hommes et les femmes. Elle écrit: « La science nous enseigne que les organes de la vie, qu’ils soient féminins ou masculins, fonctionnent avec la même logique, la même recherche de survie et de bien-être. Toute prétention à l’infériorité est une erreur de lecture des faits. » Saadawi utilise la science avec une intelligence stratégique, la transformant en un outil de démystification pour rappeler que les différences biologiques entre les sexes n’ont rien à voir avec une quelconque infériorité intellectuelle ou physique des femmes. L’un des aspects les plus frappants de Combien de cœurs est la manière dont Saadawi aborde la place des femmes dans le milieu médical. Malgré leurs compétences, elles restent toujours sous-représentées aux postes de pouvoir. En Égypte aujourd’hui, beaucoup de femmes médecins sont largement cantonnées à la pédiatrie et à la gynécologie, les spécialités « attendues » pour elles, tandis que la chirurgie reste dominée par les hommes. Au Moyen-Orient, il nous est souvent appris dès l’enfance que nos mains sont faites pour caresser, non pour inciser. Que nos esprits doivent comprendre le corps des autres, mais jamais prendre le pouvoir sur lui. Féminité en cage Nawal El Saadawi fustige également avec une acuité poétique la dévalorisation de la féminité à travers une citation qui frappe par son imagerie singulière: « Dieu devait sans doute préférer les oiseaux aux filles. » A la fois dérangeante et profondément évocatrice, cette phrase incarne le rejet systématique de la grâce et de la liberté inhérentes à la féminité dans une société patriarcale. Les oiseaux représentent tout ce que la culture dominante refuse d'attribuer aux filles: l’innocence libre et la capacité de s’envoler sans entrave. Par contraste, les filles sont présentées comme des êtres destinés à porter le poids de la conformité, à être façonnées par des normes qui les limitent dès leur plus jeune âge, sans possibilité de fuir. « Le conflit entre ma féminité et moi-même a commencé bien avant que je n’aie des attributs féminins, avant même que je puisse reconnaître en moi ce qui, par la force des conventions, devait être perçu comme une faiblesse. » écrivait-elle. Un cœur libre, mais vulnérable Alors que tout au long de l’œuvre, Saadawi se présente comme une femme farouchement indépendante, affirmant sa capacité à se suffire à elle-même sur les plans intellectuel et émotionnel, elle conclut pourtant par ces mots troublants: « J’avais besoin d’un homme pour pleurer. » Cette confession ouvre un débat sur la nature même de l’émancipation féminine dans son récit. En effet, certains critiques y perçoivent une contradictio n avec l’ensemble du discours de Saadawi. Dans un livre où elle prône l’égalité et l’autonomie absolue, admettre une forme de dépendance affective envers un homme peut sembler en décalage avec ses idéaux. La liberté implique-t-elle nécessairement la solitude? Ou bien avons-nous, malgré tout, besoin d’un témoin, d’un appui, d’une présence pour exister pleinement? Avec réflexion et d’un point de vue ‘humaniste,’ j’y vois une reconnaissance sincère de la com plexité des émotions humaines. Loin de contredire son engagement féministe, cette phrase pourrait illustrer l’idée que l’indépendance ne signifie pas l’absence de vulnérabilité, mais plutôt la capacité à accepter ses émotions sans crainte, y compris dans le cadre de relations interpersonnelles. L’œuvre de Saadawi, tout en relevant des questionnements intimes, ouvre en somme la voie à une analyse concrète des avancées et des défis rencontrés par les femmes dans le monde arabe. Outre la médecine, d’autres secteurs témoignent également d’une montée en puissance des femmes. Dans l’enseignement supérieur, par exemple, les femmes représentent souvent une majorité dans de nombreuses disciplines, et en droit comme en sciences humaines, elles occupent de plus en plus de postes de responsabilité. Toutefois, le chemin vers une égalité totale reste semé d’embûches. En effet, dans l’ensemble du monde arabe, la condition féminine oscille entre avancées et régressions. Si certains pays, comme l’Arabie Saoudite, ont récemment levé certaines restrictions (droit de conduire, accès au marché du travail,..) d’autres durcissent leur contrôle sur les femmes, notamment en matière de droits civils et vestimentaires. Le combat de Nawal al Saadawi reste donc d’une actualité brûlante. Son roman n’est pas seulement une critique du passé, mais un miroir de luttes toujours en cours. Combien de coeurs est une œuvre à lire, pour être secoué, pour questionner et pour ne jamais accepter ce qui nous est présenté comme une fatalité. Photo credits: freshheadfilms on Flickr

In the face of Brazil’s largest corruption scandal to date, Brazilians directed their rage at the once beloved former president, Lula, whose entanglement in the scheme paved an easy path to victory for the fringe right-wing candidate, Jair Bolsonaro. < Back Has Brazil’s Largest Corruption Scandal Irreparably Damaged Democracy? By Lara-Nour Walton April 29, 2022 Something sinister was afoot in 2012 Brasilia. Money was moving unnaturally — streaming in and out of a local gas station in abnormally large quantities. Officials believed that they had flagged a routine case of laundering in the nation’s capital and zeroed in on the usual suspect: small-time doleiros (black market dealers). What their investigation uncovered was even bigger and far more unsettling. What they found imprisoned presidents, bankrupted billionaires, and paved the way for Jair Bolsonaro’s election. In 2014, Operation Lava Jato (Car Wash) was formally launched when police discovered a suspicious email correspondence in doleiro Alberto Youssef’s inbox. Youssef had been involved and apprehended on laundering counts in the past, but had proven to be quite the recidivist. The email in question discussed a Range Rover that the doleiro had recently bought. But, this was no above-board car purchase. Youssef had bought a Range Rover for none other than the high profile Petrobras petroleum company executive, Paulo Roberto Costa. Under questioning, a somber Youssef informed police, “If I speak, the Republic is going to fall.” And fall it did. Operation Car Wash is Brazil’s largest corruption scandal to date. The operation earned its name from being hatched at the Brasilia gas station and car wash. The scheme began as a way for the construction conglomerate, Odebrecht, to secure constant and overly-lucrative business at the national petroleum company, Petrobras. To accomplish this, Odebrecht, the ringleader of the scandal, developed a cartel of engineering companies which set inflated contract prices for petrochemical complex building projects. In custody, Costa revealed how this intricate scheme functioned: first, Petrobras directors intentionally overpaid cartel contractors for construction, drilling, exploration vessels, and refinery. Then, 1% to 5% of the profit from those shady contracts was funneled into clandestine slush funds. Elected politicians (who incidentally appointed Petrobras officials) were the beneficiaries of the funds and used them to finance personal agendas and election campaigns. Bribes were the currency of Brazil’s elite. Everyone involved in the scandal was paid off in cash, luxury automobiles, art, Rolex watches, yachts… Money cascaded into Swiss accounts, a bevy of oversea properties were purchased, elderly mules, strapped with bricks of cash, flew from city to city, inconspicuously distributing bank notes. By the time Operation Car Wash was on law enforcement’s radar, Petrobras and Odebrecht had paid off over 16 companies, 1,000 politicians, 50 congressmen, and four former presidents (including Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as Lula) with a whopping sum of $5.3 billion. The victims of this kafkaesque scheme? Average Brazilians. Not only was the potency of their vote diluted by this operation, but their own tax dollars were funding it. No strangers to institutional corruption, Brazilians directed the entirety of their rage at the once beloved former president, Lula, his successor, president Dilma Roussef, and other members of the Workers’ Party. The party was not the only culpable entity implicated in the scandal, but received the most popular backlash — and perhaps justifiably. The political group ascended to power to fight Brazil’s seemingly untreatable case of corruption. Yet, the disease only seemed to have metastasized in the Lula administration. Elected in 2002, Lula suffered from having a minority Workers’ Party in congress. Although he denies any knowledge of involvement in the scheme, Operation Car Wash would have allowed for the president to buy the support of small parties, thus permitting him to pass legislation through congress. The Lula administration improved the condition of working class Brazilians through policies that reduced poverty and increased social safety nets and environmental controls. He left office with an unprecedented approval rating of 80%. Lula attributes his success to securing a symbolic majority in congress through political allegiances. Instead, the immense progress he made was found to have a morally and legally unsound infrastructure. These findings eventually culminated in his 2018 arrest. Brazilians have a complex relationship with Lula — they continue to reap the benefits of his presidency while lamenting his hypocrisy. The true test of national sentiment will be reflected in the result of the upcoming October presidential elections, which the now-released Lula has announced his candidacy for. The imprisonment of Lula created an easy path to victory for the fringe right-wing candidate, Jair Bolsonaro. Due to the elimination of his main opponent and his anti-establishment, anti-corruption platform, Bolsonaro, sometimes referred to as the “Trump of the Tropics,” waltzed into office in spite of his notoriously racist, homophobic, and misogynistic public persona. However, the comparison to Trump is misleading. Despite sharing some qualities with the former United States president, Bolsonaro is more akin to the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte. And this makes him all the more dangerous. Unlike Trump, Bolsonaro and Duterte actually followed through with their alarming campaign trail claims. Similarly to Duterte, Bolsonaro has an affinity for militarizing state police, cracking down on crime, and green-lighting extrajudicial killings. He waxes nostalgic for Brazil’s military dictatorship and has been openly threatening Brazil’s increasingly tenuous checks and balances. According to United Nations human rights activist, Clément Nyaletsossi Voule, the Bolsonaro administration encourages violence towards women, favela community leaders, journalists, quilombolas (Afro-Brazilians), and indigenous peoples. Bolsonaro shamelessly intimidates the Supreme Court, which has active investigations into his conduct, threatens his critics' freedom of speech, and makes baseless claims about fraud in the Brazilian electoral system. To Voule, it is clear: the world’s fourth largest democracy hangs by a thread. On September 7, 2021, Brazilian Independence Day, Bolsonaro proclaimed, before tens of thousands of supporters, “Only God will remove me from power.” This ominous statement follows months of disinformation, propagated by Bolsonaro himself, about Brazil’s supposedly “fraudulent” electronic voting system. It has been speculated that such allegations intend to lay the groundwork for canceling the upcoming October 2022 elections or to contest a potential presidential loss. With the president trailing behind his perennial foe Lula in the polls, fears that Bolsonaro will refuse to accept defeat have increased. As such, Brazil’s top election authority, Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (TSE), has invited the European Union and other international bodies to monitor the validity of the October elections. The EU plans to send a mission to Brazil this May to assess whether it can fulfill the duties of official observer. From the outside, Operation Car Wash is a juicy scandal indeed. But at its core, it is a tragic case of government inefficiency. Lula was charged with serious crimes, to be sure, but the consequences of his alleged actions should not spell another Bolsonaro victory. Brazil might not survive it. Democracy becomes more fragile every day that Bolsonaro presides. His record-level deforestation is leaving the Amazon more vulnerable than ever. Climate expert, Marcio Astrini, has determined that the forest will not be able to withstand another four years of a Bolsonaro presidency. Brazilians are at a critical crossroads. On October 2, 2022 they may sow the seeds of their own destruction or secure their survival. But if Brazil has learned anything from its past, it is that the power should and must, lie in the rightful hands. The people must be the final deciders — not between Lula or Bolsonaro — but rather life or death.

< Back Students Blockade Campus in Protest of Free Speech Limitations By Lara Harmankaya December 31, 2023 On Thursday, Nov. 16, Sciences Po students united behind the cause of protecting free speech and blockaded the Menton campus. From 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., they barricaded the entry with determination in protest of “Sciences Po's policy of censorship against any student support for Palestine,” as voiced in the email sent out by Solidaires the day of the blockade. Their persistence was forced to come to a conclusion with the arrival of police forces who physically dragged students away from the gates. This momentous day, for many, was the culmination of tensions in a growingly-hostile campus atmosphere following the events of Oct. 7. Now, more than a month later, it is important to look back on this event and evaluate whether real change has been effectuated since. Have students’ and the administration’s attitudes improved? What do Science Po students think about the event in hindsight? To understand the extent to which things have changed since, we must identify the causes that induced the blockade in the first place. For the students I have spoken to (whose identities will not be disclosed throughout the rest of this article to ensure their safety) the primary impetus for participation was a feeling of concern that there was an active curtailment of expression by the administration. One student described this as a prevention of “any opinion, or any input related to Palestine especially, but also about the situation in general.” There were undeniable clashes of opinion that prevailed among the polarized student body, but what elevated such contentions was the apparent bias of the school’s administration when determining which acts of expression constitute as acceptable. This was evinced by the fact that the activities of the student club, Palestine: Understanding the Struggle (Sciences UTS), were largely restricted. Similarly, the administration’s interference in some students’ private social media accounts was interpreted by many as an act of censorship. For one student, the problem was the “threatening” way in which this was done, not the actual act itself. This, compounded by “the total lack of support by the administration “in response to threats” received by some students online, contributed to the very “atmosphere of denunciation” that prompted the blockade. The invitation to participate that was sent out at 7:15 a.m. through email that morning, therefore, was the final push for a row of dominoes that were already shaking by tremors deep underneath. The Palestinian cause is embraced by many students on our campus. Therefore, creating the impression that holding this opinion is not supported by the campus intensified the impression of censorship. One student, who had not read the email before arriving on campus that morning, describes this sentiment when explaining why she participated in the blockade: “seeing the Palestinian flag hanging from the railing and a sign saying ‘ceasefire now’ was really all that I needed to sit down with the others.” The course of events that took place during and immediately after the blockade presented the students sitting in front of the campus gates with many frustrations and hopes. From the refusal to broadcast the meetings that were taking place by student representatives and the administration, to the arrival of the police, a general feeling of disappointment with the responses of the administration was felt by many students. Students conceded that it is understandable that the administration wished to reopen the campus without having to cancel all of the planned lectures for the day. However, they could have searched for an alternative means to reach a resolution. One described the presence of the police as “unnecessary”; “We were just a bunch of students sitting and calling for our right of free speech – it was almost laughable when we saw the police arrive in full riot gear with shields and batons.” Many, therefore, were of the opinion that there should have been a “formal apology from the administration regarding their attitudes and actions,” especially for the treatment of the students by the police because there was “a bit of violence there.” There is a consensus among the students I spoke to that the blockade was effective. In the most obvious terms, the disruption it caused succeeded in turning the spotlight on the pressing issue. With French news outlets and Mentonese locals now also conscious of the students’ protest and demands, they could no longer be ignored. “It made the administration realize, not just what were we asking for, but the general sentiment – which was a very a frustrated one.” Given the isolation and the small size of the Menton campus, one student argued, other means of protest, such as a campus walk-out, simply would not have been as “publicly seen.” Since then, students I have spoken to argue that things have changed for the better, at least to some extent. They pointed out that there is now greater “sensitivity” from the administration regarding the issue and an “awareness that we want to talk about it and have it discussed on campus.” The recent holding of two conferences centered around Palestine and the Israel-Hamas war, for many students, was therefore a manifestation of a promising beginning of a more constructive academic environment. The relations between the administration and students seem to have also improved, particularly “regarding student safety” according to one student. This should continue to remain as a priority to avoid politically-charged conflicts within the Sciences Po community. Moreover, efforts by students to arrive at a point of mediation have been enacted since; more students are now acknowledging the importance of not posting or saying disrespectful statements that can easily be construed as inappropriate or offensive. Like the students themselves, the administration is also showing signs of a greater willingness to become involved in constructive discussions. This “shift in tone” is more in line with the expectations of students who came to this institution with the hope of engaging with diverging variants of political thought and opinion. Although declaring that the tensions that were prevalent in the pre-blockade environment have dissipated would be going too far, it can be stated that the very need for recognition and reconciliation that brought about the blockade is now finally being responded to. Whether real policy changes will be implemented is more ambiguous, and the work to attain true freedom of speech has not yet been finalized, but at least it has left the ground. We have the blockaders to thank for that. The key takeaway from this consequential moment in the history of the Menton campus is that Science Po students, after all, are resolute in their commitments to free speech. This is precisely why they are the students of this institution.

Neo-Baathism finds its roots in the thought of the Syrian intellectual Michel Aflaq, who was able to inspire generations of anti-imperialist revolutionaries and radicals. < Back Arab Intellectuals that Every Sciences Piste Should Know: Michel Aflaq By Emilia Kohlmeyer November 30, 2022 Michel Alflaq’s Baathism is difficult to recognize in contemporary Baathist ideology that still occupies Syrian and Iraqi thought. However, neo-Baathism finds its roots in the ideas of the Syrian intellectual Michel Aflaq, who inspired generations of anti-imperialist revolutionaries and radicals. Michel Aflaq was born to a middle-class Greek-Orthodox family in Damascus. He received western education during his childhood under the French Mandate and later studied on a scholarship at the Sorbonne. His politics were strongly influenced by the instability Syria experienced during the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925 and post-WWII Europe, which brought uncertainty to the Middle East. During his time in Paris, he first interacted with ideologies such as communism, Marxism, socialism and nationalism. He formed the Union of Arab students, which called for the decolonization of Arab lands. Upon his return to Syria, Aflaq and Salah al Din al Bitar, a Sunni Muslim, co-founded the Baath “renaissance” party, which would extend to many other Arab countries, most notably Iraq. Michel Aflaq’s principles are embodied in the Baathist slogan, “unity, freedom and socialism.” Aflaq’s quest for unity stems from his conception of the Arab nation. The essence of the Arab nation unveils itself through an eternal Arab revelation, which experienced its last rise when Islam unified the Arab world. The Arab nation is primarily bounded by its common language, which Aflaq regards as its primary source of social norms and perception. Restoring the glory of the Arab world, in his view, was only possible by a complete structural transformation achieved only through a revolution, “inqilab,” on the foundation of nationalism and socialism. Nationalism, as an ideology, was to be the key vehicle in unifying the lower classes against the political elites. Aflaq, a Greek Orthodox Christian, pursued a secular pan-Arab nationalist vision, which regarded religion as a force of division within the Arab nation. However, he regarded Islam by its “intense moral” nature to have inspired Arabs to “break through their entrenched reality,” as he outlined in a lecture in 1943. According to him, Islam represents an innate part of Arab culture, and he asserted that “Islam was an Arab movement. Its meaning was Arab renewal and its perfection. So the language that Islam descended with was Arabic. Its outlook and understanding were of an Arab mind. The qualities it encouraged were apparent or hidden Arab values, and the faults it addressed were faults the Arabs were to vanquish.” Furthermore, his writings were known to contain numerous Quranic references. The second pillar of his strategy of transforming the Arab world was socialism. During his studies in France, he was particularly exposed to Marxist thought, although he later declared communism to be “Western and alien to everything Arab.” Instead of relying solely on pure ideology, Aflaq drew on certain Marxist tenets, such as dialectical materialism. However, he translated the struggle of the working classes into the united Arab struggle against Western capitalists. While supporting inheritance rights and private ownership, Aflaq advocated for wealth redistribution, greater public ownership of key industries, and workers’ participation in profit-sharing and managerial matters. His socialist vision envisaged economic justice as forming the foundation of the new Arab nation-state, which should be democratic and a defender of fundamental rights such as free speech. However, despite supporting these values, he considered it necessary for the Baath party to claim the required authority to create the conditions where individual ideas could flourish after decades of imperialism and elitist ideology. Only then would the people be capable of forming their demands. His politics have been described as many things, from radically leftist to fascist, although in practice, they were rather vague and formulated to appeal to the masses. After the split of the United Arab Republic, a union between Syria and Egypt under Nasser that Aflaq had cautiously advocated for, the influence of the original Baathist generation began to decline. Successive military coups during the 1960s and a humbling defeat against Israel in 1967 culminated in a neo-Baathist coup instigated by Hafez al-Assad, whose son remains president today. Aflaq fled Assad’s Syria to Iraq under the protection of his follower Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi branch of the Baath party. Michel Aflaq died in Paris in 1986 and was buried in a mausoleum in Iraq, which, upon the American invasion, was repurposed as a gym for US soldiers and is now a shopping mall.

It was then that the ceremony began with the traditional words, “we are gathered here today... ” but it wasn’t before long that a telenovela unfolded on the steps at Bastion. < Back Weddings: A Menton Tradition By Viola Luraschi September 29, 2021 If you were to walk past Bastion on Tuesday the 7th of September at around 9pm, you would notice a large group of people suddenly go quiet and arrange themselves in two neat rows. At this odd time of the night, the formally dressed rows lined with students and wine bottles appeared eager and impatient. It was not until the arrival of Jessica Cheng and Stavriana Delipetrou that “Dancing Queen” began to play, initiating an upheaval of excitement. Confused, Jessica and Stavriana were led down the aisle and placed in front of Ada Başer, the officiant for the night. It was then that the ceremony began with the traditional words, “we are gathered here today... ” but it wasn’t before long that a telenovela unfolded on the steps at Bastion. Lilinaz Hakimi and Barbara Kuza Tarkowska were the first to interrupt the ceremony. Yelling at the top of their lungs, they declared their love for each other in front of the whole crowd. This was followed by the intervention of Nikola Avramovic and Frida Hellen, who played the roles of parents deeply opposed to the marriage. Luckily for the reader, the story would not end there. The plot later thickened. First, it was revealed that Stavriana and Jessica had a hidden child. This news was met with a great deal of shocky by the crowd, but by no means did it receive the loudest reaction from the crowd. The interruptions continued with an astrologist objecting to the match, and Jessica’s mother revealing her affair with Stavriana. Regardless of all the scandals that unfolded, the night came to an end with a newly-wed couple: Stavriana Delipetrou and Jessica Cheng, along with some empty bottles of wine and a group of drunk students screaming and moving to the rhythm of the music. The night not only marked the wedding as a Mentonnaise tradition, but also the final opportunity for many to say goodbye to an important member of the Menton family: Stavriana, or “the queen of Menton.” Jessica only stayed in Menton for a short amount of time last year, and she was Stavriana’s iDaughter. She was married to Stavriana because of the stark contrast in their Mentonnaise experiences, with Stavriana being one of the longest student-residents of Menton as a 3A, and their completely incompatible star signs. While this wedding was a new tradition for the 1As, those who were in Menton last year will remember the two weddings organized by Ysabella Titi, a current 3A student. After contracting COVID-19 and quarantining with her two roommates, Audrey Kost and Olivia Jenkins, Ysabella decided to bring an American university tradition to Menton with some added Mentonnaise drama in order to celebrate the end of isolation. So nearly a year before this year’s wedding, on the 21st of September 2020, a group of people, unsure of what to expect, gathered together at Bastion and surprised Audrey and Olivia into a marriage. At the wedding, Ysabella explained that although in reality the American tradition isn’t quite as chaotic as that which she set in Menton, since the Menton campus never has a quiet week, it just didn’t seem right to have a standard wedding without any drama. The wedding was therefore nothing short of chaotic, with shouting and arguing between groomsmen and bridesmaids, familial disputes, clothing and spouse choice disapproval. There were even drinks thrown in people’s faces. Because the wedding took place on the 21st night of September, the night couldn’t end in any other way than with Lilinaz, Lena, Moira and Zain singing “September” by Earth, Wind, and Fire. Ysabella organized a second wedding after this one, uniting Nour Aljowaily and Joseph Moussa. Combining cultures in creating the Mentonnaise wedding tradition, this wedding was conducted in the Arab tradition. Due to their brother-like relationship, described by Ysabella as a love/hate relationship, the wedding was “chaotic and amazing.” The way I see it, this Mentonnaise tradition stands as a representation of our community — one big dysfunctional family that, through thick and thin, will always choose itself.

Cela serait-il la quête d'une époque où la musique semblait davantage vivre à travers l'âme de l'artiste, plutôt que d'être le produit d'une industrie froide et formatée? Si les jeunes préfèrent parfois la musique « vintage, » c’est peut-être parce qu’ils y trouvent un souffle d’humanité, de passion et d’authenticité, fréquemment absent dans la pop trop lissée et sur-produite d’aujourd’hui. < Back Quand la musique ancienne résonne de nouveau Christy Ghosn November 30, 2024 Selon les données de MRC Data , la musique ancienne, définie comme celle enregistrée il y a plus de dix-huit mois, a représenté en 2022 70 % du marché musical américain, et ce chiffre ne cesse de croître. Les décennies 60 à 90, véritables tournants dans la musique populaire, connaissent aujourd'hui un retour triomphal auprès des jeunes générations. Les ventes de vinyles, par exemple, ont atteint leur plus haut niveau en 20 ans en 2021, malgré des retards de production et des difficultés de fabrication. Mais comment s’explique cette fascination pour les sons d’autrefois? Qu’est-ce qui pousse les jeunes à rechercher des mélodies empreintes de sens, à une époque où la signification des chansons semble s’effacer? La musique comme voix de résistance Dans un contexte sociopolitique marqué par la guerre du Vietnam, les luttes pour les droits civiques ou encore la montée des inégalités sociales, la musique s'est imposée comme un moyen de contestation puissant. De Pink Floyd à Bob Marley, ou encore John Lennon, la musique a été un miroir de l’époque et une voix de résistance. Pink Floyd, avec The Dark Side of the Moon, est connu pour offrir une critique acerbe de la société de consommation. Dans « Money, » David Gilmour critiquait ouvertement l’obsession pour l’argent et l’avidité qui mènent à la corruption et à l’injustice sociale. Il chantait: “ Money, it's a crime Share it fairly, but don't take a slice of my pie Money, so it's said It's the root of all evil today But if you ask for a rise It's no surprise that they're giving none away.” Bob Marley, quant à lui, s’est fait le chantre de la liberté avec des titres comme « Redemption Song. » Inspirée par le discours de Marcus Garvey, la chanson encourage les opprimés à « s’émanciper de l’esclavage mental. » Les paroles de Marley dénoncent l’oppression historique et coloniale tout en transmettant un message universel d’espoir et de résilience. Par ailleurs, au-delà des artistes, des genres musicaux entiers incarnaient la rébellion. Dans les années 80, le punk prend par exemple racine dans les quartiers populaires des États-Unis et du Royaume-Uni, exprimant la colère d’une jeunesse révoltée contre l’injustice. Il était une arme contre le système, une explosion de rage brute. Le mouvement Riot Grrrl , influencé par le punk rock et avec des groupes comme Bikini Kill, a fait entendre la voix des femmes face au sexisme, au racisme et aux abus de pouvoir. Ces artistes révoltées, souvent marginalisées, ont amplifié leur message dans une société dominée par les hommes. De plus, la musique ne se limite pas à refléter une époque ou une lutte, elle devient souvent un refuge émotionnel et un point de ralliement collectif dans les moments de crise. L’ascension récente de Fayrouz sur les réseaux sociaux par exemple, en plein contexte de conflit entre le Hezbollah et Israël, en est une parfaite illustration. À l'instar de la musique des décennies passées, utilisée pour mobiliser et inspirer, Fayrouz rappelle que les artistes peuvent eux aussi jouer un rôle fondamental dans la préservation de l’espoir collectif. L’impact de TikTok : La reprise des classiques Une tendance alimentée par la montée de plateformes comme TikTok, permet aux utilisateurs de partager de courts extraits de chansons, et d’offrir une nouvelle visibilité à ces classiques d’hier. Par conséquent, des chansons autrefois porteuses d’un message politique ou social fort, sont aujourd'hui souvent utilisées dans des vidéos légères et divertissantes, loin du contexte originel. L’utilisation de ces morceaux sous forme de courts extraits sur TikTok entraîne une transformation de leur signification . En isolant une phrase ou un refrain, l’essence même de la chanson se perd. Ce qui était autrefois un cri de révolte devient une simple toile de fond, transformant la mémoire culturelle collective et vidant ces œuvres de leur portée critique. Si vous utilisez fréquemment les réseaux sociaux, vous avez forcément entendu "Fortunate Son" de Creedence Clearwater Revival sortie en 1969. Cette chanson écrite dans le contexte de la guerre du Vietnam visait à dénoncer l'injustice sociale et l’hypocrisie des classes privilégiées face à la guerre du Vietnam. En effet, Creedence Clearwater Revival y critiquait le fait que les jeunes hommes des classes populaires étaient envoyés au front, tandis que les fils de familles influentes en étaient exemptés. Cependant, « Fortunate Son » est fréquemment utilisé comme fond sonore pour des vidéos mettant en scène des voitures de luxe, des scènes de vie glamour ou encore des défis humoristiques. Les phrases « It ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no senator's son » perdent leur connotation de protestation contre l’élite et deviennent simplement un accompagnement musical accrocheur. De plus, en mettant en avant des valeurs opposées à sa critique originelle, « Fortunate Son » est dépouillée de sa portée protestataire. Au lieu d’être un hymne contre l’élite, elle est parfois utilisée pour accompagner des modes de vie qu'elle dénonçait initialement. Toutefois, il est important de noter et reconnaître que certaines chansons trouvent encore une place dans les débats contemporains. Par exemple, de nombreuses chansons qui revendiquent l'égalité et les droits civiques étaient reprises lors du mouvement Black Lives Matter telles que “ A Change Is Gonna Come ” de Sam Cooke sortie en 1964, révélant l'intemporalité de certaines chansons qui transcendent leur époque en ralliant les générations actuelles autour des luttes sociales. L’exposition des individus à ces chansons politiques et leur diffusion peuvent alors être des outils puissants pour raviver des thèmes, idées et discours du passé qui regagnent aujourd’hui en pertinence. Ainsi, il apparaît que de plus en plus de jeunes se tournent vers la musique des décennies passées. Certains avancent que cette tendance traduit une quête de style ou une volonté d’adopter une esthétique « rétro ». Cependant, cette fascination va au-delà du simple effet de mode: aujourd’hui, il semblerait que la musique moderne devienne progressivement dépourvue de son humanité, lisse et parfaite à cause des logiciels qui corrigent tout, des rythmes aux voix... Dans les chansons plus anciennes, l’authenticité derrière ces imperfections qui laissent transparaître l'émotion humaine est palpable, et elle était essentielle pour créer une connexion avec le public. De plus, en matière d’originalité, les années 60, 70 et même 90 étaient marquées par une volonté constante de repousser les frontières et d’innover. À l’époque, les artistes ne cherchaient pas à reproduire des succès préexistants, mais du neuf, de l’époustouflant. Cela serait-il la quête d'une époque où la musique semblait davantage vivre à travers l'âme de l'artiste, plutôt que d'être le produit d'une industrie froide et formatée? Si les jeunes préfèrent parfois la musique « vintage, » c’est peut-être parce qu’ils y trouvent un souffle d’humanité, de passion et d’authenticité, fréquemment absent dans la pop trop lissée et sur-produite d’aujourd’hui.

During this time of the year, the internet is always full of unsolicited advice on surviving the holidays with our families without harming either them or ourselves. As someone who enjoys a good “tip from a therapist” video on Instagram, my for-you page is always full of posts like this. Although I sometimes find the advice too vague or unfitting to my situation, I almost always watch it. So this year—purely to entertain myself and without any real hope for getting along better with my relatives—I decided to implement, besides my real-therapist-approved tricks, some of the advice that the gurus on Instagram had revealed to me. < Back Christmas: The Cheerful Holiday of Stress Viktorie Voriskova January 31, 2025 The Christmas Break. Although a long-awaited time for many, it is rarely the happy, calm and peaceful time that we wish for it to be. Despite being able to hit pause on academia and work, kicking back with a cold glass of eggnog and luxurious Christmas candy, many people experience stress and anxiety during this time. Oftentimes, the capitalistic whirlwind is what goes hand in hand with Christmas—making sure that you are giving a present to everyone who is giving one to you, ensuring that the gifts are nicely packed and ready to be exchanged at an appropriate time. However, for better or worse, our families also create stressful and anxiety-filled atmospheres that embody the opposite of what the ideal Christmas spirit represents. Be it contrasting political opinions, intrusive questions about personal life, unhelpful comments on how much one is eating, or just the overall stress of having so many people in one room. As a child of divorce, I have what some might call the luck—and others the horror—of getting to celebrate Christmas twice. Although I do not consider any of my relatives my lethal foe and have a working relationship with all of them, sometimes (too often) I find myself in interactions that make me question the sanity of both of us and have me searching for same-day flights to anywhere else on earth. During this time of the year, the internet is always full of unsolicited advice on surviving the holidays with our families without harming either them or ourselves. As someone who enjoys a good “tip from a therapist” video on Instagram, my for-you page is always full of posts like this. Although I sometimes find the advice too vague or unfitting to my situation, I almost always watch it. So this year—purely to entertain myself and without any real hope for getting along better with my relatives—I decided to implement, besides my real-therapist-approved tricks, some of the advice that the gurus on Instagram had revealed to me. “To engage or not to engage?” That is the question. A classic, and one of my family’s favorite conversation starters, is the “Oh, but have you heard?!” These arguments are usually kicked off by a relatively innocent “They want to increase taxes!” which then turns into “They are stealing our jobs!” and which can spiral as far as “There are chips in vaccines!” Most of the time I have just answered with: “Sure, Grandma, I am too convinced that the government has a deep desire to know what we talk about at Christmas dinner.” Not that telling her this has ever stopped her from conspiring further. I tried. Multiple times. Personally, these interactions have always been painfully irritating because it is obvious to me that these fears and anxieties are the result of populist and extremist propaganda they have encountered and naively trusted. For someone who has always tried to check my sources and stay as objective as possible, this has always been hard to deal with. For years, I used to argue, trying to show them that they were being manipulated and free them from their fabricated illusions. Unsurprisingly, this has never worked. It only made them resent me or laugh at me. This year, I tried out the Instagram advice: “ Don’t engage, don’t reply, change the topic.” Although at first this was very difficult and frustrating since I felt that it was my responsibility to try to help them see things as they were, once I embraced this strategy, I felt better. At the end of the day, if they were open to hearing me out and changing their opinion, they would have done so many Christmases ago. Me trying to argue with them made no difference. Even though it was frustrating, it felt freeing. 9/10. “Your body, your choice” Food is one of the core elements of any holiday for my family, deeply rooted in all our celebrations. Therefore, unsurprisingly, it—specifically the amount which we consume—is a common topic around this time of the year. “ Are you sure you really want to eat another piece?” is repeated like a broken record. For many years, these types of questions sent me into a spiral. But, yet again, Instagram therapists rushed in with advice on how to deal with this. Besides applying the previous advice of not engaging, “I will honour my cravings” and “I will respect my hunger cues” became my daily mantras. Even though I was not capable of fully enjoying my Christmas candy after someone commented on me eating it, I mostly managed not to spiral or have my day ruined. To be completely unaffected by these comments, I would need to practice setting my boundaries for longer, but I was pleasantly surprised nonetheless. 8.5/10 (+0.5 if you eat the candy while keeping intense eye contact with the relative who asked the question—that did actually make me feel pretty great). “Fighting the crazy opinion with an even crazier opinion” As I already mentioned, some of my relatives are, unfortunately, easily manipulated by populist and extremist politicians, making my Christmas full of radical opinions. Arguing with them is pointless, as well as trying to debate with facts and reason. Therefore, although not a therapist but a comedian , Dan Donohue shared the advice “If they say something crazy, say something even crazier” on Instagram a couple of days before the holidays. As already made clear in earlier parts of this article, I am not above teasing (i.e. making fun of) my relatives, and so I did try this advice out a couple of times. Mostly, I was successful in ending the discussion, which felt quite gratifying. However, once or twice, I just spurred my relatives on, which was quite horrifying. Nevertheless, it was quite entertaining and effective. 7/10. The long-awaited happiness, calmness and peace At the end of the day, I love my family, and I was happy to get to spend Christmas with them, although, like most of us, I did not enjoy every single minute of our time together. Despite everything, I did manage to relax this Christmas, watch all my favourite fairytales and savor all my favorite traditional foods. My ability to set my boundaries and not be affected by the emotions and opinions of others is still developing, occasionally leading to frustration and upset during the holidays. Nevertheless, some of these tips did make a difference when the conversations got too heated or when I felt too overwhelmed. Although I do not know how I feel about having to thank a social media platform for making my holiday break more survivable, the tips I gathered there did make a difference; I am obliged to give credit where it is due. Thank you, Instagram Gurus. Photo credits: Creative Commons

< Back Climate Headaches: Dispatches from Wales By Gruffudd ab Owain March 30, 2024 Prior to the election of Vaughan Gething as new First Minister in March, the first black leader of any country in Europe, the political sphere in Wales has been hit by a turbulent period, with two major issues regarding climate change. The first was the fierce opposition to the Welsh government’s Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS). Its parliament, the Senedd in Cardiff Bay, saw the biggest turnout to a protest on its steps since its inauguration in 1999 on Feb. 28, 2024. The devolved parliament holds powers over a select number of policies, including agriculture, while the UK Government in London reserves responsibility over policy areas such as justice, policing, and defense. The Labour Party has been in government for the entirety of the Welsh parliament’s 25-year existence. The Senedd didn’t garner law-making powers until 2011, owing to a referendum in which 63.49% voted in favor, yet only reached the height of public awareness following its Covid lockdown policies, which differed significantly from those of the Johnson administration in London. In another referendum, the Brexit referendum, Wales voted with England to leave, in contrast to Scotland and Northern Ireland, by a margin of 52% to 48%. Oxford University research attests that this swing towards leaving was due to retired people who moved over the border from England. ‘Genuinely Welsh’ areas, as described by the researcher Daniel Dorling, voted firmly to remain; areas where agriculture is prominent, albeit not exclusively. It is worth noting that Wales benefitted hugely from the EU’s Rural Development Funding, and the SFS is partly a replacement for that scheme and partly a response to the fact that agriculture accounts for 12-14% of overall emissions in Wales. It requires farmers to plant trees on 10% of their land, a policy which the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) claims will cost 5,000 jobs nationally. The thousands present were also voicing concerns regarding the spread of bovine TB in cattle, and policies pertaining to preventing river pollution. The situation has prompted a rare and unexpected, if modest, boost to the Conservative Party’s fortunes in the country, a party who hasn't been at the top of the political tree there since the 19 th century. They have been accused of hypocrisy, however, in claiming to be the voice of farmers after leading Wales out of the EU and its funding scheme. Their young Welsh-speaking MS Samuel Kurtz led the party’s presence in what he described as ‘the proudest moment of my life’ , later quoting from the patriotic song ‘Safwn yn y Bwlch’ and its lyrics “together we will stand” on his X account. The Tories’ leader in Wales, Andrew R.T. Davies, who doesn’t speak Welsh, proudly shared a video of himself shaking hands with protesters while ‘Yma o Hyd’ was playing in the background, a song which, ironically, has explicitly anti-Tory lyrics. A recent poll projected that the Tories would only hold on to two border constituencies at the next General Election, after winning an historic 14 Welsh seats at the 2019 General Election. It must be said that changes to constituency boundaries will see Wales lose 8 of its 40 MPs at Westminster; nevertheless, this collapse in support is certainly reflective of a broader UK-wide mood. After months taking up the mantle of criticizing the Welsh government’s 20mph rollout, they have finally been handed a different policy to attack. They have been more vocal on the issue than the third biggest party, the left-leaning nationalist Plaid Cymru, who find themselves in a somewhat awkward position, rather clumsily described by previous leader Adam Price as ‘co-opposition’, of cooperating with the government on a select number of policy areas, nonetheless excluding the SFS. This will come as a partial relief for the Tory Party, amid turmoil in the rest of the UK in an election year, not least due to a series of historic by-election defeats. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak finds himself grappling with challenge after challenge, attempting to appease the right of the party to avoid losing votes to the resurgent Reform Party, without facing backlash from those to the center. He was forced to remove the whip of MP Lee Anderson in February, who said that “Islamists” have “control” over London and its mayor Sadiq Khan, calling his comments “wrong” but not Islamophobic nor racist. Sunak himself was seen posing with some farmers and Welsh farming personality Gareth Wyn Jones on a rare visit to the north, alongside protesters holding bright yellow ‘No Farmers No Food’ placards. These posters have appeared widely in the country, even in schools, with their simple message. Less well-known, however, is the NFNF campaign’s connections with anti-net zero stances, including extreme conspiracy theories. Wyn Jones compared the potential job losses to those of the miners under Margaret Thatcher exactly 40 years ago, comments that Plaid Cymru’s Llŷr Gruffudd later echoed at the protest. That said, some sympathize with farmers and are indeed disgruntled by climate change policies, with comments appearing on social media platforms along the lines of ‘Wales is too small a country, it cannot make a difference in tackling climate change’. One protestor told The Guardian that “a more pressing thing than climate change is Mr Putin. We’re teetering on the edge of world war three. This is about food security. We should be self-sufficient.” The quality of political debate in Wales is often poor, succumbing to simplicity. Some farmers have even demanded to eradicate the Welsh parliament altogether, with graphics saying ‘we can live without politicians, we can’t live without farmers’ doing the rounds on Facebook. However, farmers risk losing broader public support in Wales for cozying up to unpopular anti-net zero and anti-Senedd stances, along with the equally unpopular Conservative Party. It seems all rationality has been too easily lost in the debate regarding the SFS. Anthony Slaughter, leader of the Wales Green Party, who have no representation in parliament, implied on the Sunday Supplement radio programme that the government’s demands were not unreasonable, given that trees already cover 6-7% of Welsh farmland. He sympathized with farmers, however, for the policy’s ‘top-down’ implementation and lack of consultation, echoing similar comments by fellow independence-supporting Plaid Cymru. Consultation was open up to March 7, 2024, with the government pledging to seek compromise. A consultative vote in the Senedd on scrapping the SFS saw 26 votes in favor by Labour MSs and 26 votes against by opposition parties. This triggered a rule forcing the deputy presiding officer to vote, and his vote with the government meant that the proposal didn’t pass. As this saga rolled on, so did the election for the leadership of the Welsh Labour Party, and thus of the next First Minister. Incumbent Mark Drakeford announced in December that he would step down after the election of a new leader in March. Only two candidates, Vaughan Gething (Minister for Economy, was Minister of Health during the pandemic) and Jeremy Miles (Minister for Education and the Welsh language), were up for election. The former, who succeeded with 51.7% of the vote, became the first First Minister from an ethnic minority, while the latter would have been the first openly gay First Minister. The election was criticized for lacking a female candidate, given that the Welsh parliament became the world’s first legislative body to achieve 50:50 gender parity in 2003 . Miles is the only Welsh speaker among the two, and his firm pro-devolution stance and willingness to “always fight Wales’ corner” [my translation] would have made him a headache for Plaid Cymru in opposition. Gething was seen as the candidate closest to UK party leader Keir Starmer. He also garnered support from prominent members skeptical of devolution, such as Neil Kinnock. The election, which balances members’ votes and trade union nominations, was hit by turmoil in this sense as an unknown rule change by the influential trade union Unite, deemed Miles ineligible for the union’s nomination. Furthermore, it became obvious that there was no mechanism within the party’s One Member One Vote system to prevent members from voting more than once. It then emanated that Gething’s campaign for election had received an unprecedented and eye-watering £200,000 donation by the Dauson Environmental Group; for context, Mark Drakeford only raised £25,000 for his successful campaign for election in 2018. It arose later that the group was awaiting Welsh government approval for a solar farm on a Site of Importance for Nature Conservation and a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Likewise in 2018, Dauson Environmental Group’s director, David Neal, received a suspended prison sentence for illegally dumping waste on a conservation site. Wales is already significantly behind its climate targets, and with February bringing criticisms of Welsh Labour’s nevertheless flawed SFS and UK Labour reversing their £28bn green investment pledge if they were elected to Westminster, the obstacles to climate policy are surmounting. And for as long as the almost proverbial phrase that you could stick a red Labour rosette on a donkey in Wales and it would still win, it seems that the pace required for meaningful, lasting change is rapidly becoming unmatchable.

Promoting finance to tackle climate change in developing countries is one of the pillars of the Paris Agreement. Yet the investment world, which seemingly has a never-ending stream of scandals and mis-selling driven by greed and lack of ethics, is yet again undermining the existentially important issue of climate change. < Back Regulating ESG Investments Becomes More Pressing Amidst Greenwashing Trends By Noor Ahmad November 30, 2022 The 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP27, is convening in the Egyptian coastal city of Sharm el-Sheikh between the 6th and 18th of November 2022. The conference seeks to tackle global climate emergency issues: how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to the effects of climate change and finance climate action in developing countries. The conference seeks to build on the Paris Agreement in 2015, which set out goals to guide nations on how to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and limit global temperature increase to two degrees Celsius. The agreement is a legally binding international treaty with 194 signatory Parties. The issue of climate change and financing the fight against it are nothing new. Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing has been rising for the last decade. ESG incorporates a broad set of principles that socially responsible investments should follow and are sometimes commingled with “green” investments, which focus primarily on environmental impact. While there is no clear taxonomy for ESG, it broadly aims to curtail the effects of climate change, carbon emissions, environmental pollution, deforestation and water scarcity. The non-environmental categories of ESG encompass a wider scope, including community impact, human rights, diversity in company boards, bribery, and corruption. A report by the consulting firm Deloitte published earlier this year estimated $39 trillion of assets in 2020 were ESG-focused versus $19 trillion in 2014. This represents 36 percent of total global investments in 2020. The magnitude and proportion of ESG investments are expected to rise dramatically in the coming years, reaching $96 trillion by 2025 and representing 58 percent of worldwide investments. Other measures put the projected amount invested in ESG funds at a few trillion dollars. What is indisputable is that this sector is proliferating. As interest in the environment and sustainability has increased, so has regulatory focus. In 2021, the European Union introduced its Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, which requires asset managers to provide information regarding their adherence to ESG investment standards. Three categories were introduced in classifying investment funds: article six funds, which do not take sustainability into account; article eight funds, which promote ESG practices; and article nine funds, which is the highest ESG category, with sustainability at the heart of its investment policies. Moreover, since August 2022, the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II, a regulation seeking to protect investors and standardize practices across the European Union, now requires financial advisors to evaluate not only the client’s risk tolerance but also their preferences for environmentally sustainable investments. The regulatory changes by the union are timely and possibly the beginning of a worldwide regulatory convergence in how to classify environmentally responsible investments. The changes have come against a background of mis-selling and misrepresentation by some of the world’s largest asset managers. DWS, Deutsche Bank’s asset management arm, recently saw its CEO step down after evidence emerged that the firm failed to classify investments labelled ESG against the necessary criteria correctly. The term “greenwashing,” which aptly describes DWS’s behavior, is one where a company tries to portray itself as more socially responsible and environmentally friendly than it is. The company may not meet the necessary standards and continue investing in environmentally harmful businesses. A German consumer group recently filed a lawsuit against DWS alleging that its ESG Climate Tech fund was marketed as having zero percent investments in polluting sectors such as coal. Yet, the fund’s investment policy allowed for investments in companies where up to 15 percent of their revenues could be generated from these harmful industries. The problems faced by DWS are not a one-off event, and the prevalence of misrepresentation of what investment funds are doing versus what they are advertising is an issue concerning regulators beyond the European Union, with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority reviewing both conduct and current regulation. Promoting finance to tackle climate change in developing countries is one of the pillars of the Paris Agreement. Yet the investment world, which seemingly has a never-ending stream of scandals and mis-selling driven by greed and a lack of ethics, is yet again undermining an existentially important focus. As the awareness of climate change has begun to alter the behavior of both individual and institutional investors and centered them on environmentally positive goals, the investment world must step up and learn to police itself. Regulators will eventually catch up and create guidelines, but the intermediaries have a significant role as time passes and environmental catastrophe descends on humanity. Let us hope that the outcome of COP27 is a clear message to the investment industry that it needs to address these shortcomings and take substantial steps to finance positive change.

From Shatila to Menton, artist Maryam Samaan turns puppets and knitting into spaces for healing and dialogue. < Back Beyond Ceasefires: Building Lasting Peace with Art Emilie Pezet November 13, 2025 From Shatila to Menton, artist Maryam Samaan turns puppets and knitting into spaces for healing and dialogue. 128,349— that is the number of combatants and civilians that died in state-based conflicts in 2024. 20 years ago, it was only 19,646. In recent years, rising conflict has made peace a pressing concern. Peace, understood as the absence of war, can take many forms, from ceasefires to negotiated treaties. However, those mechanisms can be insufficient on their own. Building lasting peace necessitates creating an atmosphere of trust and understanding between former enemies. This difficult, essential work means confronting the painful past, learning from it, and rising above it to prevent repetition. Because the hardest part is relational — healing wounds, rebuilding trust, and restarting dialogue — art has a role. Art can offer safe expression, foster cooperation, encourage constructive engagement with conflict, help people cope with trauma, and preserve memory, which are the basic conditions for cooperation. Syrian-Palestinian artist Maryam Samaan’s workshops, One hand Puppet and Tricot d’âmes , offer a concrete example of these dynamics in practice. Art and Peacebuilding Arts-based peace building is implemented through arts and art-therapy programs including drama, puppetry, music, dance and filmmaking. These practices can support “healing and reconciliation, promoting dialogue, preventing conflict, engaging marginalized communities, challenging injustices, and influencing policy,” as scholars Breed, Pells, and Elliott argue in their 2022 article on arts-based peace building. In this sense, art contributes to “positive peace”: not only the absence of violence but also the presence of social justice, as theorized by leading peace scholar Galtung. Translating that concept into practice starts with how art operates. By communicating beyond words, art affects both artists and audiences. In reality, its contributions fall into two strands: supporting internal healing, and facilitating understanding between adversaries, thus promoting reconciliation. Artistic activities foster changes at the individual level. As a means of expression, artistic activity helps people process emotion and feel empowered, foundations for non-violence. In Art as Peacebuilding , Laurie Marshall, an artist and educator focused on arts-based peace work, describes “art transforming individual violence”. She explains how art can function therapeutically, providing a platform for feelings that words cannot carry. This internal work matters for peace building; without healing, cooperation falters because unprocessed pain keeps resurfacing in talks and everyday coexistence. Laurie Marshall builds her theory on one of her student, a survivor of child abuse that used drawing to release trauma. The arts educator writes that “By healing herself, Josie was then able to help heal the world.” This rests on a common idea in arts-based peace building: personal healing usually comes first and makes collective peace work possible. Artistic activities develop confidence and useful skills, such as public speaking, teamwork, creativity, which in turns empower the participants. Furthemore, art can build capacities for more constructive engagement with conflict and ultimately, more cooperative relationships, often through transformative learning. As peace education research April Bang notes, art places people in situations that challenge assumptions and invite self-reflection and critique. For victims and former combatants alike, participation can help shift anger, resentment and fear toward understanding and willingness to cooperate. In Colombia, for example, the ‘Art for Reconstruction’ program brought victims, army veterans, and former members of illegal armed groups together to co-create art; its evaluation found reduced intergroup hostility and increased willingness to cooperate and reconcile among participants. To ground these dynamics, artist Maryam Samaan shared her experience in artistic workshops. Invited to the Menton Campus for World Peace Day (September 21) by MEDMUN, she discussed how her puppetry sessions in Shatila and her knitting initiative, Tricot d’âmes , opened spaces for expression and connection, which are small steps toward peace in participants’ daily lives. Puppetry in Shatila : Maryam Samaan’s Workshop From 2017 to 2019, Maryam lived in Shatila, a camp set up for Palestinian refugees in 1949, in South Beirut. After the Syrian Civil War began in 2011, Shatila welcomed Syrian refugees that fled the country. However, UNRWA’s mandate only serves Palestinians in Shatila, leaving Syrians with little support. Syrians rather benefit from all services provided by UNHCR, but using the UN Refugee Agency’s facilities from Shatila can be challenging. With the Lebanese state’s presence historically limited in the camp and services split among agencies and NGOs, access to schooling and basic services is difficult for Syrians in the camp. Coming to Shatila was, for Maryam, a way to channel her energy into supporting Syrian children who are not enrolled in school. As a Syrian-Palestinian who studied in France, she felt close to their situation and wanted to use her energy and knowledge to support Syrian families exhausted by displacement. Aware of the precarious living conditions, where families shared a single room, often just separated by curtains, she set up art workshops to give children a space to process their experience, express themselves, develop creativity and imagine a better future when institutions failed them. Taking place in a Syrian alternative school, her workshops gathered children aged from eight to 16 years old who had fallen too far behind on school to be placed in classes. Lasting two to three hours at first, sessions then expanded to full days. They involved designing and making puppets operated by the children themselves, preparing performances and giving several public presentations. The workshops were participatory as children co-created every stage of the show. By developing their own scenarios, children were able to directly address issues related to life in the refugee camp, such as unsafe housing and access to safe drinking water and electricity, while building confidence and cooperative habits that lay the groundwork for peace building later on. Marionnettes en mousse et différentes matières, One Hand - Puppet, Camp de Chatila, Liban 2018. At first, Maryam explained that the characters mirrored the children’s daily lives: their families, their displacement and their hardships. As they began building puppets and writing dialogues from scratch, the puppets gave them safe distance to project and rework their experiences. One girl created a half-black, half-white puppet (second from left) as a symbol of her doubts. At the time, she was torn between her family, who pressured her to marry against her wishes, and her feelings for another boy. The two colors captured her mix of optimism and pessimism, and crucially gave her a way to voice it. How does this contribute to peace building? According to Maryam, these workshops helped children voice difficult feelings, build confidence and work with others; skills that support cooperative relationships. Over time, she saw participants become more sociable – some even led workshops themselves. She mentioned a girl who initially stuttered but then gradually gained assurance and later performed on stage “like a real star”. Of the twenty children involved, four went on to pursue artistic paths. Art, in short, helps children make sense of what they feel and practice more peaceful ways of relating; adults can use it, too, to express memories and move toward reconciliation. La rue des Planètes, Scénographie et création des marionnettes, One Hand - Puppet, Camp de Chatila, Liban 2019 Knitting memory : Tricot d’âmes Maryam’s second project, Tricot d’âmes , illustrates art as a tool for sharing memories that foster understanding. Created in 2015, this collective knitting workshop—presented on campus for World Peace Day—aims to create a space where anything can be shared. Born from photographs of tents in Shatila decorated with embroidery and knitted pieces, the project is simple: people bring old clothes, cut and spin them into yarn, and, while knitting, share memories, moments and stories. In other words, the fabric itself already carries traces of a life, and the act of knitting becomes a way to speak safely. From there, the goal is not only artistic but social. Maryam wanted to transform a gendered activity into a shared, human one: anyone can benefit from a moment of peace, exchange, and release. At the same time, she chose to put women’s rights and living conditions at the center of the workshop. She explained that, in multi-day sessions, men would often watch from a distance at first, refusing to knit because they saw it as “women’s work.” With time, some of them would sit and try it. That moment, when they finally touched the yarn, became an opening to talk with them about the women in their lives. This approach is consistent with Maryam’s broader philosophy. She believes art can act as a therapeutic tool, but not in the sense of telling people how to heal. Her workshops are about giving participants a place of liberty, reflection and technique. The idea is not to instruct them on what to feel, but to let them express what they choose to share. Over time, Tricot d’âmes has also become collective in scale, not just in intention. Since 2015, more than 500 people have taken part in the workshop, coming from around 50 different nationalities. For Maryam, this turns the workshop into a bridge between individuals and stories. It invites people to not rush to judge and actually get to know each other’s paths. It has also crossed class and social lines, taking place in refugee centers, cultural centers and universities. The structure itself has grown, too. At the beginning, only five people could knit at the same time around the frame; now, up to 22 can sit and work together. To understand what this looks like in practice, Maryam shared a story from a three-day workshop. On the first two days, most of the participants did not share a common language, so they mostly sat together, sang and worked with their hands. On the third day, with a translator present, some of the women began to open up. One Afghan woman explained the origin of the piece of fabric she was using. She had been forced to leave Afghanistan in a hurry, without spare clothes. A charity gave her a bright shirt she didn’t like, but she wore it for her whole journey until she finally reached France. After she settled, she never wore it again, but she also couldn’t throw it away because of everything it represented. Instead, she cut it, spun it and knitted it into the shared work. For Maryam, moments like this are the point of Tricot d’âmes . By turning a personal object into something collective, the woman wasn’t just recycling fabric. She was sharing a memory in a way that could be witnessed by others and asking for recognition without having to justify herself. This, for Maryam, is already a kind of peace building: you learn someone’s story before deciding who they are. Discovering Maryam’s commitment on World Peace Day, themed “Act Now for a Peaceful World”, sheds light on the role that art can play in peace building. In a moment when conflict is rising, art helps people move beyond traumatic experiences and sustain constructive, cooperative relationships, linking healing with reconciliation. Speaking to the theme, Maryam offered a simple reminder: limit quick judgments and make room for women’s voices, because a society cannot be rebuilt if women are kept in the shadows. The work begins small, thread by thread, but that’s how durable peace is stitched. Photos Used: All with the permission of the owner: Maryam Samaan

“Les yeux sont le miroir de l’âme” dit-on souvent. Et dans Incendies de Denis Villeneuve, les yeux se font le reflet d'âmes agitées, tourmentées, torturées mais aussi exhumées. < Back Critique du Film: Incendies By Salim Ouartini November 29, 2021 “Les yeux sont le miroir de l’âme” dit-on souvent. Et dans Incendies de Denis Villeneuve, les yeux se font le reflet d'âmes agitées, tourmentées, torturées mais aussi exhumées. Le regard possède une place éminente dans la compréhension et la contemplation du film, tant il est porteur de sens et miroir de la décadence psychologique des personnages. Selon moi, l’essentiel du film pourrait être résumé à travers l’analyse du regard. Le regard de l’enfant face caméra dans la séquence d’ouverture, grave et noirci, qui a tout à envier à la blanche candeur d’un regard enfantin, et qui vous scrute et se rapproche tant la caméra s’en approche, brisant le 4e mur et déroutant le spectateur dès les premières minutes. Ce 1er regard qui fait écho au dernier. Celui de l’adulte qui observe la tombe d’une mère qu’il n’aura connu qu’à travers son absence, son viol et sa mort. Mais le regard qu’il nous sera donné de voir le plus souvent et qui ponctuera le film est sans aucun doute celui de Nawel, la mère. Du regard vide et traumatisé d’une mère à qui l’on arrache l’enfant et tue le compagnon, au regard déterminé et brave d’une mère qui traverse un pays en guerre pour retrouver son fils, qui se transformera en un regard de terreur et de désolation qui succède à l’absurde boucherie du bus, et qui murera en un regard de rancoeur et de haine qui poussera au meurtre, faisant place à un regard de folie et d’agonie humaine dans la prison de “Kfar Ryat” avant de retourner à ce 1er regard glacial, emplit de vide et de traumatismes mais regard qui cette fois-ci sera conjugué au visage de la mort. Et par un montage parallèle, le regard de Nawal du “Passé” se superpose à celui de sa fille Jeanne au présent qui lui aussi se modifie et s’intensifie au rythme des révélations toujours plus obscures et tragiques. Il conviendra donc de saluer le talent des acteurs qui ont su faire parler leur regard pour mieux nous porter dans l’histoire. Car si l’on nous donne souvent à voir le regard des personnages, ce regard, et donc le point de vue qui l’accompagne, est celui que nous adoptons également. Car lorsque l’on assiste à la scène du massacre du bus, avec une camionnette transpercée de balles et aspergée de sang et d’essence avant de se consumer dans des flammes aigres d’atrocité, notre regard ne peut que s’assombrir et notre coeur s’alourdir. Toutefois, il arrive que le film, à coup d'ellipses et de hors champ, nous épargne quelques images noires et “malséantes” telles celles du viol, mais en n’en laissant juste assez pour susciter effroi et horreur. On se fait spectateur d’une tragédie recque faite d’une mère, de jumeaux, d’une quête de sens, de violence, de meurtre, d’inceste, de catharsis, de coup de théâtre…. Certaines caractéristiques telles l’enfermement pendant 15 ans, la quête de sens dans un monde absurde, l’inceste entre parent et enfant annoncé en plot twist de fin semble faire écho au film sud Coréen “Old Boy” de Park Chan-Wook qui lui aussi laisse une marque indélébile de par la consternation qu’il provoque en nous. Plus encore, ce film à travers les regards qu’il nous montre et tout ce qu’il force notre regard à voir, cherche peut être également à changer le regard que l’on porte sur notre réalité, sur le monde qui nous entoure. Car l’absurdité d’une guerre qui provoque massacre et destruction pour des raisons politiques et religieuses n’est pas quelque chose qui relève uniquement de la fiction mais également d’une réalité qui a existé, va exister ou continue d'exister . La référence faite au Moyen Orient (peut être particulièrement à la guerre civile au Liban qui oppose Chrétiens et musulmans) semble assez évidente sans pour autant être au centre des considérations faites par le film. Car ce que l’on retient d’abord, c’est que peu importe le camp, la guerre est ignoble. Si l’on nous montre tant de regards que l’on n’aimerait jamais voir, c’est peut être parce qu’il nous faut les voir pour nous rappeler de la chance que l’on a d’avoir notre regard.