The Region That Wasn’t Consulted

There is no meeting where the Gulf calls Cairo or Amman to say, 'We are about to change the sky above your head.' There does not need to be. No treaty requires it. No regional body has the authority to stop it. And so, over the past two decades, the six Gulf states have built one of the most ambitious weather modification programmes on Earth, largely alone, largely unregulated, and almost entirely without the input of the twenty-odd other Arab states that share the same atmosphere, the same weather systems, and, in some cases, the same drought.

This is not a story about a secret plot. Everything described here is public, funded openly, and defended proudly by the governments running it. That is precisely what makes it worth examining. The Gulf states are not hiding their geoengineering ambitions. They are broadcasting them as innovation, as climate leadership, and as proof of technological sovereignty. What is missing is any serious accounting of what happens to the rest of the region while the clouds are being harvested next door.

What Is Actually Happening

The United Arab Emirates has run a cloud-seeding programme since the 1990s, and it has scaled dramatically. In 2026 alone, the National Centre of Meteorology carried out roughly 80 seeding missions in the first months of the year, targeting convective clouds with hygroscopic salt flares fired from Beechcraft King Air aircraft. The National Centre of Meteorology has carried out around 80 cloud-seeding missions since the start of 2026, as part of ongoing efforts to enhance rainfall and strengthen the country’s water reserves. The UAE runs four to six of these aircraft out of Al Ain, conducting between 300 and 350 operations a year, dispersing flares made largely of potassium chloride at the base of storm clouds to encourage droplets to clump together and fall as rain.

Saudi Arabia is not far behind, and it has larger ambitions still. Riyadh’s cloud seeding effort began in the early 2000s, stumbled, and has since been rebuilt with AI-assisted meteorology and international research partnerships. In 2023, the program targeted six regions in Saudi Arabia, conducting 415 cloud-seeding flights and dispersing 7,876 flares with four aircraft for over 1,300 hours. Crucially, the Kingdom’s deputy environment minister has been explicit that Saudi Arabia does not intend to keep this within its own borders. The country now aims to roll the programme out elsewhere within its borders and to lead broader regional research into the practice. The very name of the initiative gives the game away: it is officially called the Regional Cloud Seeding Program, run out of Saudi Arabia’s National Centre of Meteorology, with a stated aim to utilise technological and scientific innovations in the planning and execution of cloud seeding initiatives aimed at weather systems impacting the Kingdom, enhancing rainfall and supporting ecosystem restoration for the region.

Read that carefully. A programme with “regional” in its title, designed around weather systems that by definition cross borders, is being planned and executed by one government, for one government’s benefit, with the rest of the region positioned only as a downstream beneficiary or bystander — never as a partner in the decision-making.

The Uncomfortable Physics

Cloud seeding works, roughly, by introducing particles into clouds that already contain moisture, encouraging that moisture to fall as rain sooner and more heavily than it otherwise would. The atmospheric physics community broadly agrees the technique can increase rainfall from a given cloud system by a meaningful margin. It does not agree that this water appears from nowhere.

This is the part rarely mentioned in Gulf government press releases: a cloud that is seeded and made to release its rain over the UAE or Saudi Arabia is a cloud that, in an unmodified world, might have continued drifting and released some of that same water somewhere else — potentially over Oman, Iran, Iraq, or further afield. Weather systems in the Gulf and the greater Middle East do not respect the borders on a map. Analysts writing on the broader global rise of cloud seeding have flagged this directly. If a country decides to make it rain on its territory, it may be stealing rain that would have fallen later in a neighbouring country — and as water resources grow scarcer, this stops being a theoretical concern and starts becoming a live source of interstate friction.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been blunter still, warning that as the technology scales, it opens the door to weather modification being used politically to deprive certain regions of rainfall or to claim water that would otherwise be more widely distributed and that without a clear international policy for transboundary cases, the most powerful actors will benefit at the expense of others. The article points to China’s 2020 “Sky River Plan", a cloud seeding scheme designed to divert water vapour from the Yangtze River basin to the Yellow River basin, covering an area half the size of India, as proof that this is not a hypothetical scenario dreamed up by critics. It is already state policy elsewhere, and Gulf states are moving in the same direction with none of the scrutiny that China’s programme has attracted.

A Precedent the Gulf Is Ignoring

Central Asia offers a live case study in what proper conduct is supposed to look like — and in how easily it can be ignored. When Kazakhstan expanded its own cloud seeding trials, regional water experts immediately invoked the country’s obligations under an existing international agreement. As one expert put it, Kazakhstan signed the Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in a Transboundary Context and undertook obligations that before doing something that may affect neighbouring regions, it must conduct consultations and scientific assessments.

No equivalent convention binds the Gulf states to their neighbours on this question. The Espoo Convention that Kazakhstan is being held to has never been extended to the Middle East in any meaningful weather modification context. The Arab League has tried, and failed, to build binding regional water frameworks even for far older and more established problems. A United Nations review of climate security risks in the region notes plainly that efforts by the League of Arab States to agree on a binding Arab convention on the use of transboundary water have been unsuccessful, and the draft convention remains unratified — and notably, the League’s membership does not even include Turkey, Israel, and Iran, all of which significantly influence the region’s transboundary water resources.

In other words, the one regional body that might have created rules for exactly this situation has spent years failing to agree on rules for ordinary river water. Weather modification, a newer and technically murkier problem, has never even reached the table.

Who Gets a Seat, and Who Doesn’t

It is worth being precise about who is inside this conversation and who is outside it. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are wealthy enough to fund cloud-seeding fleets, AI-driven meteorological modelling, and international research partnerships with institutions such as the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research. Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq are not. These are also, not coincidentally, the countries facing some of the most acute water stress in the region, propped up in many cases by fragile aquifers, foreign aid, and increasingly by desalination they cannot easily afford to scale.

This is where the framing pushed by some Gulf-adjacent commentary — that cloud seeding is a gift the wealthy Gulf states will eventually pass down to their poorer neighbours — deserves scrutiny rather than repetition. One regional outlet has suggested that Gulf countries can export this cheaper, greener alternative to the rest of the region and that if cloud seeding works as well as its proponents hope, it has a promising future across the Middle East from Libya to Yemen. That is a possibility, not a plan. No funding commitment, technology-sharing agreement, or timeline accompanies it. It is aspiration dressed as strategy, and it conveniently reframes a unilateral programme as a future act of regional generosity — one that has not been offered, let alone accepted.

When the Sky Turned Against Them

The clearest illustration of what is at stake arrived in April 2024, when catastrophic flooding hit the UAE and Oman. The death toll from severe flooding that hit the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and other Gulf countries rose to almost 20, with homes and businesses across the Gulf damaged by the heavy rains. UAE officials denied cloud seeding caused the disaster, and independent meteorologists mostly agreed the primary driver was a genuinely exceptional storm system intensified by climate change. A University of Reading meteorologist who studies the region called it a very rare rainfall event, even for a part of the world characterised by long dry periods followed by irregular, heavy rain, while a colleague noted the storm’s intensity was record-breaking and consistent with a warming climate, since more moisture available to fuel storms makes heavy rainfall events and associated flooding more potent.

Whatever the precise cause, the episode did two things worth noting. First, it proved that a government running a weather modification programme cannot always control the narrative once something goes wrong — the public assumption, however unproven, was cloud seeding, not climate change. Second, and more troubling, it triggered a wave of geopolitical conspiracy theories across the wider region. Months later, viral claims — traced in one case to a now-deleted post from the Iranian embassy in Afghanistan — asserted that Iran had struck the UAE’s rain enhancement facilities and that this explained subsequent snow and rain over Tehran. The embassy’s post reportedly claimed Iraq and Iran were experiencing changed weather patterns after Iran destroyed the UAE’s secret climate change centre. It was false. But the fact that it spread widely and was taken seriously by segments of the public says something important: in a region with no transparent framework for weather modification and no shared data on what these programmes actually do beyond national borders, speculation fills the vacuum left by silence. That is a predictable consequence of one bloc of countries modifying a shared sky while treating the rest of the region as spectators rather than stakeholders.

The Deeper Pattern

None of this exists in isolation. Regional climate governance across the Middle East and North Africa is, by the assessment of researchers who study it closely, thin to the point of near-absence. A Chatham House review of the region’s climate institutions found that existing bodies – the Arab League, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the Middle East Green Initiative – have an important role to play but have not yet built the technical working groups needed to jointly develop regional guidelines that states could adapt locally. A separate review of Arab environmental institutions concluded that despite decades of effort, a significant gap remains in the ability of these frameworks to manage the sustainable development process effectively, rooted in a sector-based approach to environmental management rather than an integrated one.

Weather modification has simply walked through this gap. It is not that the Gulf states broke a rule. There is no rule to break, and the states with the resources to build such programmes have shown no urgency about closing that gap themselves, because the current arrangement costs them nothing and constrains them not at all.

The Honest Assessment

Strip away the framing on both sides, and a few things are true simultaneously, and they do not resolve neatly into a villain-and-victim story.

The Gulf states have a legitimate water crisis. The UAE receives well under 200 millimetres of rain a year; Saudi Arabia’s totals are similarly punishing. Desalination is expensive and energy-intensive. Cloud seeding, by comparison, is remarkably cheap — one estimate puts the UAE’s unit cost of harvestable water at between $0.01 and $0.04 per cubic metre. Pursuing it is a rational response to a genuine national problem, not a frivolous vanity project.

At the same time, the claim that this activity is purely domestic and has no bearing on neighbours does not hold up to the physics or the precedent set elsewhere in the world. And the absence of any consultative mechanism is not an accident of underdevelopment — it is a choice, sustained by the fact that no other Arab state currently has the leverage, funding, or unified regional institution to demand a seat at the table.

The scientific uncertainty cuts both ways, too. Efficacy claims from Gulf and Saudi researchers – rainfall increases of 10 to 30 per cent in some studies and jumps as high as 550 per cent in monthly totals in isolated Saudi trials – are dramatic, but independent verification at that scale, across an entire region, over years rather than single events, remains thin. The transboundary harm being warned about may be smaller in practice than in theory. It is equally possible that no one will know until the water disputes it is expected to cause have already begun.

What Accountability Would Actually Look Like

If the Gulf states want to keep expanding these programmes — and every signal suggests they will — the minimum credible response is not a press release about regional benevolence. It is a binding transboundary environmental impact assessment process, modelled on the kind of process Kazakhstan is already being held to under international convention; shared meteorological data with neighbouring states in real time, not after the fact; and a genuine seat at the table for Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, and others whose weather systems intersect with the ones being modified.

None of that currently exists, and there is no visible pressure building to create it. The Gulf states are betting on the sky. The rest of the Middle East is simply hoping the bet does not come due at their expense.

Six years after the deposit freeze, no one has been convicted — a forensic look at why

In October 2019, Lebanese banks held roughly $169 billion in customer deposits. By 2024–25, independent estimates put the figure still owed to depositors at somewhere between $86 billion and $93 billion, spread across about 1.26 million accounts, according to data cited by The National and Almodon. The gap between those numbers is not a rounding error. It is the largest unexplained loss of private savings in Lebanon’s modern history, and six years on, it remains exactly that: unexplained and almost entirely unpunished.

This is not a story about a single bad actor. It is a story about a financial and political class that built a system designed to extract value upward for two decades, recognised it was collapsing in 2019, and then spent the years since making sure that the cost of the collapse landed on everyone except themselves. The facts below are drawn from forensic audits, court filings, sanctions notices and reporting from outlets including The National, Reuters, the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP), L’Orient Today and the IMF’s own briefings. A full source list is at the end.

The Engineering Behind the Disappearance

Lebanon’s currency was pegged to the dollar for over two decades. Maintaining that peg required a constant inflow of fresh dollars. When that inflow slowed in the late 2010s, the central bank, Banque du Liban (BDL), began borrowing dollars from commercial banks at extraordinarily high interest rates to keep defending the currency and financing government deficits that the World Bank later said had run between 11 and 26 per cent of GDP. The World Bank’s own description of the resulting structure was blunt: it called it “Ponzi finance". New deposits were effectively used to pay off the obligations created by old ones.

The system seized in October 2019. Mass protests against the political class broke out on October 17. Banks shut their doors, reopened roughly two weeks later, and immediately began rationing withdrawals — without any actual law authorising them to do so. There was no legislated capital-control regime. Banks simply decided, collectively, to stop giving people their money, and the state let them. In March 2020, the government formally defaulted on a $1.2 billion Eurobond, the first sovereign default in Lebanon’s history. The Lebanese pound has since lost more than 90 per cent of its value.

Whose Banks Are These, Really

To understand why accountability has been so hard to achieve, you have to understand who owns Lebanon’s banks. A widely cited 2016 study by economist Jad Chaaban, referenced in research published by the Project on Middle East Political Science and the Moshe Dayan Centre, found that individuals closely linked to the political elite controlled 43 per cent of assets in Lebanon’s commercial banking sector. Eighteen of the country’s twenty banks had major shareholders tied to political figures. Just eight families controlled 29 per cent of the entire sector’s assets, worth more than $7.3 billion in equity. Bank Audi, one of the largest commercial banks, counted a holding company wholly owned by Fahad al-Hariri – brother of former prime minister Saad al-Hariri – among its major shareholders.

This overlap matters because every law written to address the crisis since 2019 has had to pass through a parliament substantially populated by, or beholden to, the same families who own the banks taking the losses. Lawmakers regulating the banking sector and the people whose personal wealth sits inside that sector are, in many cases, the same people.

The Audit Nobody Wanted Finished

In September 2020, the Lebanese government hired the consultancy Alvarez & Marsal to conduct a forensic audit of BDL’s accounts, a precondition donors had set for any international rescue package. Two months later, A&M withdrew, saying BDL had refused to hand over the documents it needed, citing the country’s own banking secrecy law. Parliament responded with a non-binding recommendation that all state institutions be audited “without invoking banking secrecy or anything else". It took until 2021 for A&M to be re-engaged and until August 2023 for a preliminary 332-page report, covering 2015 to early 2020, to finally reach caretaker officials.

What it found was damning. BDL’s foreign reserves had gone from a $7.2 billion surplus in 2015 to losses exceeding $50 billion by 2020, a collapse the bank’s own financial statements never disclosed, because, in the auditors’ words, losses were buried through netting and vague catch-all accounts like “other assets” and “clearance and settlement accounts". No loss appeared on the balance sheet at all. The audit calculated that the financial engineering used to attract high-interest deposits cost the country $7.7 billion between 2015 and 2020 alone, and it identified $111 million in what it called “illegitimate commissions” funnelled through a central-bank consultancy account — the same mechanism later tied to Forry Associates, an offshore company owned by former governor Riad Salameh’s brother.

That audit still only covers a five-year window ending in 2020. As of late 2025, the Middle East Institute reported that a full asset quality review of the banking sector, the step both the IMF and World Bank say is necessary before any credible restructuring plan can be built, remained stalled.

One Man, Six Jurisdictions, Zero Convictions

Riad Salameh ran BDL from 1993 to 2023, longer than any other living central bank governor, and is the closest thing this crisis has to a named defendant. Tracking the cases against him is the clearest way to see what “accountability” has actually amounted to.

Switzerland opened an inquiry into suspicious transfers in 2020. Lebanese prosecutors followed with a domestic probe into the same Forry Associates transfers in April 2021. France opened its own investigation in July 2021. In January 2022, Lebanon imposed a travel ban and asset freeze on Salameh; two months later, Mount Lebanon’s prosecutor charged him with illicit enrichment and money laundering over apartments bought and rented in Paris. In August 2023, the US, UK and Canada sanctioned Salameh and several relatives and associates. Germany’s Munich prosecutors confirmed a money-laundering investigation and issued an arrest warrant in February 2024. Luxembourg opened its own inquiry into property holdings linked to him in Germany and the UK.

Domestically, a second arrest warrant followed in October 2024, and Salameh spent roughly a year in pretrial detention — the most senior Lebanese official jailed since the crisis began — before being released in September 2025 on $14 million bail. In January 2026, Lebanese prosecutors charged him and two lawyer-advisers with embezzling $44.8 million from a central bank “consultancy account". The case was referred to the financial public prosecutor and, by early 2026, to the Court of Cassation for further review. Most recently, in June 2026, French prosecutors charged HSBC’s Swiss subsidiary with money laundering and criminal conspiracy as part of the same embezzlement probe, requiring the bank to post an €80 million guarantee.

Add it up: more than five years, at least six jurisdictions, sanctions from three Western governments, and one domestic indictment covering $44.8 million – a fraction of even the $7.7 billion the BDL’s own auditors attributed to financial engineering between 2015 and 2020 alone. As of June 2026, there has been no conviction anywhere and no prison sentence. Salameh is free on bail in Lebanon, under a travel ban, denying wrongdoing and describing his fortune as the product of his earlier banking career.

This Is the Playbook, Not the Exception

It would be convenient to treat Salameh’s case as uniquely obstructed. It isn’t. The investigation into the August 2020 Beirut port explosion, which killed roughly 220 people, shows the same mechanics operating in a completely different case.

Judge Fadi Sawan was removed from the port-blast investigation in February 2021 after officials he had summoned challenged his impartiality. His successor, Tarek Bitar, issued arrest warrants for senior politicians, several of whom — including allies of parliament speaker Nabih Berri — refused to appear, citing parliamentary immunity. Lebanon’s own Internal Security Forces at times refused to execute Bitar’s warrants. The country’s top prosecutor at the time, Ghassan Oueidat, who was himself later indicted in the case on negligence charges, ordered the release of detained suspects and sued Bitar for exceeding his authority, freezing the investigation for roughly two years.

The investigation only resumed after a new president and prime minister took office in January 2025. The first tangible accountability measure to emerge, in January 2025, was not a conviction over the explosion itself — it was a civil ruling ordering two former ministers to pay about $111,000 for obstructing the investigation. A full charge sheet naming 70 people was finally completed in March 2026, nearly six years after the blast, with no trial date yet set.

The pattern is identical in both cases: officials invoking immunity, prosecutors who are themselves implicated controlling whether investigations proceed, multi-year procedural freezes, and a resumption of momentum only when the political leadership at the very top changes. Those are not two unlucky investigations. It is how Lebanon’s system handles elite accountability by design.

Formalising the Loss, Not Recovering It

Lebanon’s reform track since 2025 has produced real legislative movement—but movement that manages the crisis rather than resolves who caused it. In April 2025, parliament amended the banking secrecy law to let authorities and independent auditors access account information for officials and major bankers, though depositor advocates noted it was not made retroactive. The same month, parliament passed a bank restructuring law requiring politically exposed people and major shareholders who moved significant capital abroad after 2019 — while ordinary depositors were locked out — to repatriate it within three months or face fines.

The centrepiece is the so-called “financial gap law", approved by the cabinet on December 26, 2025, and sent to a divided parliament. It splits an estimated $70–83 billion gap between the state, BDL, commercial banks and depositors. Depositors holding under $100,000 — about 85 per cent of all accounts, per Prime Minister Nawaf Salam — would recover their money in full over four years. Larger depositors would get the first $100,000 in cash, with the remainder converted into bonds backed by BDL’s roughly $50 billion remaining asset portfolio.

Even this compromise has drawn internal resistance: Lebanon’s own central bank governor, Karim Souaid, publicly called the proposed cash-repayment timetable “somewhat ambitious". Independent analysts cited by The National point out that the draft law does not establish a clear hierarchy of claims or require a full write-down from bank shareholders – meaning it may administratively manage the crisis without ever legally establishing who was responsible for it. Meanwhile, an IMF programme first agreed at staff level in April 2022, worth roughly $3 billion, remains exactly that: an agreement, not a disbursement. As of the IMF’s own December 2025 briefing, talks were still focused on the banking-restructuring strategy and the 2026 budget — nearly four years after the original staff-level deal was announced.

What “Accountability” Has Actually Delivered

Tally the record honestly. Six-plus years. Tens of billions of dollars unaccounted for. One forensic audit took three years to deliver a partial report covering five of those years. One domestic indictment covering roughly half a per cent of the financial-engineering losses the central bank’s own auditors identified. Multiple foreign investigations have produced sanctions, asset freezes and now criminal charges against a global bank’s subsidiary — but, as of June 2026, not a single conviction in any jurisdiction and no one in prison.

What has moved is legislation: a banking secrecy amendment, a capital-repatriation requirement for politically exposed people, and a loss-distribution law still working through parliament. What hasn’t moved is the underlying question the audits and indictments keep circling without answering — where, specifically, did the missing tens of billions of dollars actually go, and which of the families who control 43 per cent of the banking sector’s assets will be made to absorb losses proportionate to the role that concentration of ownership played in building a system that was, by design, unsustainable? Until that question has an answer enforced by a court rather than a press release, “accountability” in Lebanon’s banking crisis will remain a word used mainly by the people who have so far avoided it.

REFORMISTS WITHOUT REFORMS

In the summer of 2024, Masoud Pezeshkian stood before Iran’s voters and offered them something they had not had in years: the language of hope. He spoke of economic openness, diplomatic engagement with the West, and a government that would serve the people rather than the system. Millions — many of them young, educated, and furious — voted for him. Two years later, that hope has collided with a reality that economists, protesters, and even members of Pezeshkian’s own administration can no longer obscure. Iran’s economy is not merely struggling. It is in a structured, accelerating collapse.

This is the story of how a reformist presidency became a case study in the limits of reform — and why Iran’s Generation Z, the country’s largest youth cohort, may be the last generation willing to work within the system at all.

I. The Economy That Greeted Pezeshkian

When Pezeshkian took office in August 2024, the economic inheritance was already severe. The Iranian Statistical Centre reported an official national unemployment rate of 7.8%, a figure that independent analysts immediately dismissed as a significant undercount. The more revealing numbers were embedded in the generational breakdown. For Iranians aged 20 to 24, unemployment stood at 23.1% — more than three times the national average. For the 25–29 age group, the figure was 17%. Over 40% of those unemployed held university degrees.

But even these numbers carry a structural flaw. They do not capture the millions of young Iranians who have stopped looking for work entirely — the technically ‘inactive’ population that official methodology systematically excludes. As a report from the Majlis Research Centre, the Iranian parliament’s own research arm, confirmed in 2025, youth unemployment in some provinces reached between 50 and 63 per cent. The government, the report noted, lacked a coherent strategy to address it.

The currency had already begun its long unravelling. In mid-2024, the rial was trading at roughly 580,000 to 630,000 per US dollar on the parallel market. By December 2025, the rate had collapsed past 1.4 million rials to the dollar – a 40 per cent drop in under a year. By early 2026, the currency had deteriorated further, with the euro trading at around 1.72 million rials. The Central Bank Governor resigned. Protests broke out in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar.

In the Iranian year ending March 2024, annual inflation had already been running at chronically high levels. By December 2025, Iran’s state statistics centre reported inflation at 42.2%. Food prices told a more brutal story: year-on-year food inflation reached 72%, with bread and cereals up 140%, and oils and fats up 219% by early 2026. Healthcare costs climbed nearly 50%. The IMF, in its World Economic Outlook, projected the Iranian economy would shrink by 6.1% in 2026 with inflation reaching 68.9%. In a single decade, Iran’s GDP had contracted from approximately $600 billion in 2010 to an estimated $356 billion in 2025.

II. The Promise of the Reformist Path

Pezeshkian’s election was not an accident. It was, in part, a product of the demographic reality that the Islamic Republic now faces. Iran’s population skews overwhelmingly young. The generation that has come of age since the 2009 Green Movement – and more acutely since the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising – has no nostalgic attachment to the revolutionary project. They are digital, internationally connected, and economically desperate. They are Iran’s Gen Z.

The comparison with the Khatami era (1997–2005), the last period of reformist governance, was immediately drawn by Iranian economists. During those eight years, Iran recorded some of its highest GDP growth rates since the founding of the Islamic Republic. Employment grew by 5.7 million net jobs between 1997 and 2005, with the employed share of the population rising from 24.2% to 29.7%. Investment, household consumption, and government expenditure all expanded in tandem.

Pezeshkian’s backers — including former presidents Mohammad Khatami and Hassan Rouhani — argued the reformist coalition could replicate those conditions. The logic rested on a simple chain: diplomatic engagement would soften Western sanctions; softer sanctions would allow oil revenues to flow more freely; freer revenues would fund economic stabilisation and investment. The president made Western outreach a centrepiece of his early foreign policy, with his administration openly advocating renewed dialogue with Washington and Brussels.

But there was a structural assumption buried in that logic that few of Pezeshkian’s supporters examined carefully enough: it assumed the president had meaningful control over the economy, or the system, to begin with.

III. Reformism Without Power: The Structural Cage

Iran’s political economy is, by design, not governed by its elected president. The Islamic Republic operates through what analysts describe as a dual parallel system — one of formal governmental administration and one of revolutionary institutional authority, the latter encompassing the Supreme Leader’s office, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and a web of quasi-state foundations known as bonyads.

The IRGC is not merely a military organisation. It is an economic empire. Through its construction arm, Khatam al-Anbiya, and an expanding network of affiliated companies, the Guards have over four decades built an industrial and commercial presence that spans construction, telecommunications, oil, energy, and foreign trade. One analysis by Clingendael, the Dutch foreign affairs think tank, describes the resulting structure as a ‘military-bonyad complex' – a fusion of security power and economic patronage that no elected government has successfully penetrated.

As Foreign Affairs noted in 2025: ‘The heavily sanctioned Iranian economy spins off billions of dollars in smuggling revenues that the [IRGC] dominates. That money, in turn, supports conservative patronage networks and funds Iranian proxies across the Middle East. In effect, the IRGC runs a complex Ponzi scheme that perpetuates the authority and influence of a select few at the expense of ordinary Iranians.’

The implications for Pezeshkian were visible from his first cabinet formation. As the Israel Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) observed in August 2024, the president ‘refrained from assigning ministers with distinctly reformist views to major government ministries, which the conservative establishment regards as sensitive.’ He appointed pragmatists and technocrats in their place — a signal, analysts noted, that economic reform had been prioritised over political or civic reform, and even that had required visible concessions to the security establishment.

The public sector accounts for approximately 70 to 80 per cent of Iran’s total GDP. Former President Ebrahim Raisi’s government had systematically redirected the national budget towards what researchers at the Global Policy Journal describe as the Islamic Republic’s ‘trinity’: the security-military apparatus, its propaganda networks, and the commercial-clerical establishment. Pezeshkian was attempting to reverse this redistribution. What he found was that the budget was not fully his to redirect.

A former head of Iran’s Planning and Budget Organisation described the core dysfunction publicly in late 2024: ‘Our financial system has two treasuries — one for the government and one for the Supreme Leader. No other country has such a system. The Supreme Leader’s treasury includes oil and gas revenues, which are used to fund the so-called Resistance Front, while the government treasury relies solely on taxes.’ The reformists had inherited a government with one treasury. The security establishment retained the other.

IV. Sanctions, Snapback, and the Geopolitical Trap

Even where Pezeshkian retained theoretical authority, the external environment worked against him with precision. The reimposition of US maximum pressure sanctions under the Trump administration limited Iran’s oil export revenues and its access to the global financial system. In September 2025, the UN Security Council failed to pass a resolution to preserve sanctions relief, triggering a ‘snapback’ of UN measures that included a conventional arms embargo, ballistic missile programme restrictions, targeted asset freezes, and travel bans. The EU simultaneously tightened its own sanctions architecture, citing both Iran’s nuclear activities and its supply of drones to Russia.

The December 2025 currency crisis was precipitated partly by a decision within Pezeshkian’s own administration that, however economically defensible in isolation, proved catastrophically timed: the elimination of the preferential exchange rate of 285,000 rials for imports of essential goods including oilseeds, livestock feed, and fertilisers. Restricted in hard currency access by sanctions, the administration replaced the subsidy with a monthly electronic coupon worth 10 million rials for approximately 80 million Iranians. The rial collapsed within weeks. Food prices surged. Shopkeepers closed in protest. Chants outside Tehran’s mobile phone market began with economic grievances and, within days, turned political.

This was not simply poor crisis management. It reflected the impossible arithmetic of governing a sanctions-throttled economy without access to the foreign exchange reserves that any functional transition policy would require. The Pezeshkian administration had publicly advocated sanctions relief as a precondition for economic stabilisation. That relief did not come. What came instead was the snapback.

V. The Generation That Cannot Leave — and the Generation That Can

For Iran’s young people, the economics are not abstract. They are daily and suffocating. An economist and public policy researcher, Hussein Raghfar, warned in August 2025 that nearly 26% of youth aged 15 to 25 were neither studying, working, nor in any form of training — a figure the NEET (not in employment, education, or training) category captures but official unemployment statistics obscure. ‘This reality is producing a generation vulnerable to frustration, violence, and crime,’ Raghfar told state media. ‘The anger of young people is directed at decision-makers, and they are right to see them as responsible for their misery.’

The state-run newspaper Shargh, reporting in September 2025, collected testimonies from educated young Iranians who described themselves as the ‘poor middle class’ — people with degrees, multiple jobs, and no ability to save, buy a home, or plan a future. ‘When I compare myself to four years ago, everything is different,’ one young woman told the paper. Housing affordability has become a symbol of structural despair: not merely unaffordable in the conventional sense, but described by young Iranians as beyond imagination.

For those with options, the answer has been emigration. Iran’s brain drain is no longer a crisis in formation; it is an established, accelerating condition. In 2019, Iran ranked second globally for brain drain. Government-affiliated newspaper Hamdeli reported in mid-2024 that the rate of departure had increased by 141% in a single year, reaching 115,000 new entries abroad in one year. According to the IMF, between 150,000 and 180,000 educated Iranians apply to emigrate annually.

Iran’s Minister of Science confirmed in November 2024 that approximately 25% of university faculty members had emigrated in recent years. According to the World Bank, Iran’s annual brain drain cost was estimated at roughly $50 billion as far back as 2017 — more than twice the country’s oil export revenues at the time. The healthcare sector is in acute crisis: the secretary-general of Iran’s Medical Community warned that 80% of medical students were considering emigration. Three thousand nurses leave the country every year, each one representing approximately $68,000 in state training investment that will never yield a domestic return.

Only 1% of emigrated Iranian elites report considering a return, against a global average return rate of 7%. The country is not experiencing a temporary flight of talent. It is experiencing a permanent divestment of its future.

VI. The IRGC Tightens Its Grip

By late 2025 and into 2026, the structural limits of Pezeshkian’s authority had become visible not just in economic data but in overt institutional confrontation. As protests erupted across Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, and Mashhad in December 2025 — described by observers as the most significant wave of public demonstrations since the 2022 uprising — the president found himself constrained on every front.

Sources with knowledge of the matter told Iran International in early 2026 that the IRGC had begun blocking presidential appointments and rejecting proposed cabinet candidates. Efforts by Pezeshkian to appoint a new intelligence minister collapsed under direct pressure from IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi. The IRGC’s position was explicit: during wartime conditions, all critical and sensitive leadership positions would be selected and managed directly by the Guards.

In private communications reported by Iran International, Pezeshkian warned the IRGC leadership that without a ceasefire, Iran’s economy could face total collapse within three to four weeks. He called for executive and managerial powers to be returned to the civilian administration. The request was firmly rejected. The IRGC responded by blaming the economic crisis on the government’s failure to implement structural reforms before the conflict began — a charge of audacious circularity, given that the Guards themselves had consistently blocked the institutional conditions under which such reforms could have been attempted.

Ben Taleblu, a researcher cited by Fox News, offered a blunt assessment: ‘Those who worry about Pezeshkian’s potential sidelining need to consider what he realistically was or wasn’t able to do mere months ago when the regime slaughtered 40,000 Iranians in the streets.’ The presidency, in this reading, was never the centre of power. The reformist illusion was the belief that it could become one.

VII. What ‘Reform’ Actually Meant

The gap between what Pezeshkian promised and what was structurally possible was visible before his election, to anyone willing to look at it directly. Iranian economists who wrote an open letter to the president in late 2025, urging transparent and fair economic reforms, were politely but specifically ignored. Critics noted that the letter itself focused on cultural and non-essential institutions — a small fraction of public expenditures. Iran’s real fiscal burdens lay elsewhere: in massive pension fund deficits, in opaque quasi-state companies operating largely beyond government oversight, and in an extraordinary tax exemption regime. Parliamentary research confirmed that tax exemptions alone amounted to approximately 2,200 trillion tomans — nearly equalling the government’s total projected tax revenues for 2025.

The Clingendael analysis described the fundamental condition clearly: ‘The reformist rhetoric of Masoud Pezeshkian has thus far shown no sign of altering this structural reality.’ The military-bonyad complex, built over forty years of revolutionary governance, was not going to dismantle itself because a reformist president asked it to.

This is not a failure unique to Pezeshkian. It is the central contradiction of Iranian reformism since 1997. Every reformist president has faced the same ceiling: they can adjust tone, rebalance some resource distributions, and modestly ease social restrictions. They cannot dismantle the IRGC’s economic empire. They cannot redirect oil revenues away from the resistance axis. They cannot restructure the dual treasury. The structural power of the Islamic Republic does not reside in the executive. It never did.

VIII. The Generation That May Not Wait

Iran’s Gen Z did not, in the main, boycott the 2024 election. Many voted for Pezeshkian — not with enthusiasm, but with a pragmatic calculation: the reformist path, however constrained, was preferable to the hardline alternative. Two years on, the evidence suggests that calculation has not yielded a meaningfully different outcome. Youth unemployment remains above 20% by World Bank estimates. Inflation has exceeded 40% and food prices have soared past any threshold of affordability for lower-income households. The currency has lost decades of value. The brain drain accelerates. The protests recur.

The question that now hangs over Iran is not whether the reformist project has failed. That failure is structural, documented, and largely complete. The question is what comes next for a generation whose defining political experience has been watching a system absorb their demands – for economic dignity, for personal freedom, for a government that governs – and produce, in return, an apology from a president who cannot control his own generals.

In December 2025, standing before cameras as the rial collapsed and crowds gathered outside Tehran bazaars, Pezeshkian apologised. It was not the first time he had done so. Earlier in the year, he had apologised for what he called ‘fire at will’ attacks on neighbouring countries by Iran’s armed forces. He had instructed the military to stop. The attacks continued shortly after the video was released.

Apologies, it turns out, are not structural reforms. And a generation raised on broken promises has learned, if nothing else, to tell the difference.

The headline statistics are alluring. The fintech sector in Africa has doubled from 450 companies in 2022 to over 1000 by the year 2024. Topics revolving around financial inclusion in sub-Saharan Africa have grown from 34% of adults holding a financial account in 2014 to nearly 50% by 2023. Uganda now processes 65% of all its electronic transaction values through mobile money. Nigeria, with half its population still unbanked, has nonetheless become the global co-leader in mobile banking activity, with 83% of adults using mobile banking services.

These are not fabrications. They are genuine shifts. But they are also incomplete pictures presented in a language that has been consciously crafted to reassure investors, satisfy development mandates, and keep regulators at arm’s length. The story of fintech banking Africa’s unbanked is, in reality, two stories running in parallel – one of genuine structural transformation and one of market capture dressed up a social purpose.

The honest version requires holding both at once.

What did M-Pesa actually prove?

Any serious analysis must begin in Kenya in 2007, when Safaricom, backed by Vodafone, launched M-Pesa on a network of basic mobile phones. Before M-Pesa, Kenya was a cash-dominated, largely informal economy. Bank branches were concentrated in urban centres. Minimum balance requirements, documentation demands, and physical distance locked low-income and rural households out of the formal financial system entirely. M-Pesa did not build a bank. It made banking irrelevant to the transaction.

The impact was real and, in parts, transformative. M-Pesa incorporated tens of millions of previously unbanked individuals into Kenya’s financial system, enabling people to store and send money using the devices they already owned. Research by economists Tavneet Suri and William Jack found that access to M-Pesa lifted approximately 2% of Kenyan households out of extreme poverty between 2008 and 2014. The financial inclusion gender gap, which exceeded 12 percentage points in 2006, narrowed considerably; women with access to mobile financial services shifted from subsistence agriculture into small-scale retail and entrepreneurial activity. By almost any development metric, M-Pesa worked.

But here is what the M-Pesa success story also proved and which its many imitators have been less willing to acknowledge: even after M-Pesa’s meteoric rise and the emergence of similar services, 90% of transactions in Kenya were still conducted in cash. Financial access and financial behaviour are not the same thing. Opening a digital account does not mean someone has crossed into economic security, and having a mobile wallet does not mean the underlying poverty that made you “unbanked” in the first place has been addressed.

M-Pesa was proof of concept. It was not proof of a self-correcting model that the market would replicate automatically, equitably, and without risk to the people it purported to serve.

The Billion-Dollar Repackaging of a Social Problem

What the success of M-Pesa did generate was investor appetite. Between 2020 and 2024, the number of fintech companies in Africa nearly tripled. Debt financing alone accounted for $1 billion of total capital in 2024. The African and Middle Eastern fintech market was valued at $15.5 billion in 2024, with projections placing it at $33 billion by 2029. Nigeria, in the first half of 2024 alone, secured $140 million across 24 fintech deals — outpacing Kenya, Egypt, and South Africa combined.

The sector has produced genuine unicorns. Moniepoint, a Nigerian all-in-one banking, credit, and cross-border payments company, processed over one billion transactions monthly in Q1 2025 and hit a valuation reflecting its $110 million Series B raise in October 2024. TymeBank in South Africa became the first digital bank in Africa to achieve profitability, serving over 10 million customers. M-KOPA, a pan-African asset-financing pioneer, has disbursed over $2 billion in digital credit to more than 7 million customers across Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, and Ghana, growing at 65% year-on-year in 2024.

These are legitimate companies doing significant work. But the framing that surrounds them — and that surrounds the sector as a whole — deserves scrutiny. A 2025 analysis in the African Journal of Political Science and International Relations reviewed the sector’s own narrative apparatus and found that in the majority of media and governmental reporting, fintech is depicted as an unambiguously positive force for financial inclusion. Critical voices on its negative social and economic impacts are, in the study’s words, largely absent. Only 2% of surveyed articles made any reference to gender inclusivity in concrete rather than rhetorical terms. What gets reported is the funding round. What does not get reported is what happens to the borrower at the other end.

The Debt Trap Nobody Is Disclosing

In late 2024, Nigeria’s inflation crisis had pushed household finances to breaking point. Food inflation soared to 40%. According to Nigeria’s Central Bank, consumer credit debt climbed 11.1% to ₦4.72 trillion ($3.27 billion), driven largely by personal loans — Nigerians were not borrowing to purchase durable goods. They were borrowing to eat, pay rent, and cover transport. This is the context in which digital lending apps proliferated.

The rise of digital lending apps in Nigeria has compounded financial challenges for low-income populations through exorbitant interest rates and coercive repayment tactics. TechCabal’s December 2025 investigation into predatory lending documented users like Micheal Orji, a Lagos-based construction engineer who found ₦290,000 deposited into his account without consent — a “loan” he had never applied for, followed immediately by threats of public humiliation if he did not repay. This is not an isolated incident. It is, in fact, a documented product design strategy: apps engineered to create obligation before the user has understood what they signed.

Again, in 2025, the same academic paper from the African Journal of Political Science and International Relations cited this explicitly as certain fintech platforms employing exploitative business models based on high-interest loans and data exploitation, creating what the researchers call “poverty traps” rather than economic opportunities. The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission in Nigeria has intervened — including a $220 million fine against Meta for data practices — but the underlying tension between rapid digital lending scale and consumer protection infrastructure remains unresolved.

Regulatory fragmentation makes this worse. The gap between Nigeria’s Central Bank and its Communications Commission, for instance, creates enforcement blind spots that enable identity theft and unauthorised transactions. The result is that the most financially vulnerable population, the very people fintech claims to serve, absorb the highest risk when the system fails.

Who Is Still Left Out, and Why That Matters

The gender data is where the inclusion narrative collapses most clearly. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 52% of women held a financial account in 2024, compared to 64% of men. That 12-percentage-point gap is the second largest globally. In Togo, it reaches 25 points; in Nigeria, 22 points. The gender gap in digital payment usage has actually widened over the past decade — men have outpaced women in opening accounts, meaning that as the overall system expands, women are falling further behind in relative terms.

In North Africa, the situation is more stark. Two-thirds of the adult population remains unbanked, and the gender gap in financial access is the highest in the world, at 18 percentage points.

What drives this? It is not simply a lack of phone ownership, though that matters — 1 in 5 unbanked women report that the absence of a government-issued ID prevents them from opening an account. It is also cultural: deeply rooted social norms in many communities position men as the rightful managers of financial decisions, making women’s independent access to digital financial tools socially contested. It is infrastructural: rural connectivity gaps hit women hardest because women face greater mobility constraints. It is also by product design — financial tools are frequently built without considering the specific needs of women, resulting in a mismatch between what the market offers and what women actually require.

The fintech sector frequently talks about gender inclusion. It delivers on it inconsistently, and in several contexts, its expansion has made the gap worse.

A Neo-Colonial Pattern in Digital Form

There is a structural argument that the sector’s most prominent voices prefer not to make explicitly, but which the research makes difficult to avoid. The 2025 Democracy in Africa analysis identified what it describes as foreign-dominated technological supply chains and capital flows facilitating resource extraction and data exploitation — patterns that echo neo-colonial economic control in digital form.

This requires careful handling, but it should not be avoided. The majority of Africa’s most-funded fintech companies are backed primarily by foreign capital — SoftBank and Sequoia in OPay’s case, QED Investors in Raenest’s, IFC and DPI in MNT-Halan’s. The business model, in many cases, is straightforward: acquire data on Africa’s unbanked populations, use that data to build credit profiles, extend loans at high interest rates, and generate returns for investors based in the United States, Europe, and Asia. The continent’s financial exclusion is being monetised.

This does not make every foreign-backed fintech predatory. Many are doing genuinely useful work. But the structural incentive that underpins the model is investor return, not development outcome. These are not contradictory, but they are not identical either, and conflating them — as much of the sector’s marketing does — is a distortion.

Africa’s digital economy is expanding faster than its privacy protections. The Privacy Scorecard Report 2025 by Unwanted Witness assessed 286 organisations across nine African countries and found that the continental privacy compliance score stands at 46% — a figure that represents moderate progress but confirms that privacy protection remains structurally weak and uneven. Eleven African Union member states still have no data protection legislation at all.

For the unbanked populations being onboarded into digital financial systems at scale, this is not an abstract regulatory concern. It is a concrete and immediate vulnerability.

What Genuine Inclusion Actually Requires

None of this is an argument against fintech. It is an argument for precision about what fintech can and cannot do.

What it has demonstrated it can do: eliminate the physical and documentation barriers that made formal banking inaccessible to large populations; reduce the transaction costs of remittances; provide a credit history infrastructure for people with none; and, as M-Pesa showed, create measurable poverty-reducing effects when deployed at scale with appropriate local architecture.

What it has not demonstrated: that market logic alone produces equitable outcomes; that digital access resolves the structural poverty that created financial exclusion; that women are served as well as men; or that rapid scaling without adequate consumer protection does not create new forms of harm.

The researchers behind the 2025 AJPSIR paper proposed a policy framework that is worth taking seriously: invest in digital infrastructure and education to close rural and gender-based digital divides; strengthen regulatory oversight of fintech platforms to prevent predatory lending and data misuse; and promote locally designed financial products that support small business development rather than consumer debt.

Rwanda’s trajectory is instructive here. With a policy-first approach that made gender equality a core pillar of its financial sector development strategy, the country increased women’s access to financial services from 36% to 63% between 2016 and 2021. That is not a fintech story. That is a governance story in which fintech was a tool, not the solution.

The Conclusion the Sector Won’t Write for Itself

The fintech companies quietly banking Africa’s unbanked are doing something real, something that traditional banking demonstrably failed to do, and something that has improved the material lives of millions of people. That is true, and it should be said clearly.

But the framing of “banking the unbanked” as though financial access is itself the destination — as though an app solves what structural inequality created — is a narrative that serves investors and marketing departments more than it serves the 57% of Africans who still lacked access to traditional banking services as recently as 2021.

The sector’s most honest question is not how many people have been onboarded onto mobile money platforms. It is: on whose terms, at what cost, and with what protections? Until that question is placed at the centre of how the industry measures its own success, “financial inclusion” risks becoming the most sophisticated rebranding of exclusion in the continent’s economic history.

They grew up watching their governments fail them, their culture get flattened by algorithms, and their people die on livestreams. Now they are building a new definition of Arab identity, one that the old guard did not see coming and cannot fully control.

On a Wednesday in late 2025, Jordanian gamers opened their laptops and found Discord gone. No announcement. No warning. Just a blank page where their community used to be. The timing, as anyone paying attention knew, was not random. Weeks earlier, young Moroccans had used the same platform to organise the GenZ 212 protests, rattling their government with a speed and discipline that old opposition movements had never managed. Jordan’s authorities saw the template. They pulled the plug before the fire could spread across the border.

That moment, small as it sounds, tells you everything about where Jordan’s Gen Z stands today. They are watched, restricted, and occasionally silenced. But they are not going away. And more importantly, they are not arguing on the terms their parents used.

The question of what it means to be Arab — what it means to carry that identity with pride — is being renegotiated in real time by a generation that is simultaneously the most connected and the most politically frustrated in the Arab world’s modern history.

“The post-Arab Spring, COVID-19, and Gaza War generation does not reject politics as much as it rejects its traditional forms.”

Politics and Society Institute, Amman, October 2025

The Old Pride and Why It Broke

For decades, Arab pride in Jordan was structured around a specific set of loyalties: the tribe, the monarchy, and a pan-Arab solidarity that was expressed loudly in speeches but quietly abandoned in policy. The Hashemite state built its legitimacy on a careful balancing act — tribal allegiance from East Bank Jordanians, Palestinian-origin Jordanians kept at arm’s length from power, and a peace treaty with Israel that the population never wanted but the government needed.

Researchers at Tandfonline described this as a “holy trinity” of Jordanian identity: monarchical, territorial, and tribal. It held together because the alternatives were worse, and because economic dependency — on Gulf money, Western aid, and IMF loans — left little room for serious political alternatives.

For Gen Z, this formula is not just unsatisfying. It is transparently broken.

Jordan’s unemployment rate: 21.4% overall — 32.9% among women. Among youth, the figure is estimated to be significantly higher. (The New Arab, 2025)

The shrinking public space, the growing sense of disconnection from national life, the sharp critiques of the state’s crisis management performance — these were not the complaints of a fringe. According to a discussion session held by the Politics and Society Institute in Amman in October 2025, these were the dominant themes among young Jordanians across backgrounds. The session noted that apprehension about discussing tribal identity has become “more profound than before” among Gen Z, as a direct result of the successive disappointments of the Arab Spring, the pandemic, and the Gaza war.

Put simply: the old pride was built on loyalty to institutions. Gen Z watched those institutions fail in succession, and they stopped pretending not to notice.

Gaza Changed Everything

If there is a single event that accelerated the rewriting of Arab pride in Jordan, it is the Israeli assault on Gaza that began in October 2023. Jordan sits on the edge of this conflict in ways no other country does. More than half of Jordan’s population is of Palestinian origin. The country hosts over three million Palestinian and Syrian refugees. The West Bank is Jordan’s eastern neighbour in the most immediate sense. And the state’s 1994 peace treaty with Israel has always been a wound that the government refuses to acknowledge properly.

From the moment the war began, Jordanian streets filled with protesters. The government issued careful criticisms, organised aid airdrops, and tried to contain public anger. It did not work. As the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs reported in January 2026, “citizens demanded more.” Hardline calls to boycott Israel and end the peace treaty helped the Muslim Brotherhood’s political wing, the Islamic Action Front, win the September 2024 parliamentary elections in what the article called a victory that “alarmed officials.”

“Anti-Israel protests saturated the Jordanian public during 2023–24. The post-October 7 protest coalition brings together diverse ideological groups from leftists to Islamists to nationalists.”

— Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS), 2024

But here is where it gets more interesting and more complicated. What Gaza produced in Jordan’s Gen Z was not simply more of the same nationalism. It was a shift in what nationalism means.

Research conducted with young refugees in Jordan aged 19–24 in early 2024, published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, found something striking: “historically refugees have tended to refrain from public political discourse,” but the Gaza conflict “triggered increased political expression by young refugees.” Girls in particular were mobilising in unexpected numbers, prompting researchers to call for programmes that specifically address their participation.

Arab pride, for this generation, is not about which tribe you belong to or which passport you hold. It is measured in whether you spoke up, whether you showed up, and whether you refused to let it pass quietly.

The Keffiyeh as a New Grammar

Nothing captures this shift more precisely than what happened to the keffiyeh. The black-and-white scarf has been a symbol of Palestinian resistance since the 1930s, associated globally with Yasser Arafat, who wore it folded in the shape of historic Palestine. For Jordanians, there is also the red-and-white shemagh, traditionally Bedouin, used on national occasions.

After October 2023, these distinctions blurred in a generative way. Young Jordanians — East Bankers and Palestinian-origin alike — began wearing the keffiyeh not as a statement of ethnic ownership but as a shared declaration. The symbol crossed the old tribal and identity divides that have fragmented Jordanian society for decades. As one source from Arab America described it: the shemagh and keffiyeh “defy claims of racism and discrimination with the slogan ‘one people, not two.’”

For Gen Z, this was not nostalgia. It was a practical political grammar – a way to express solidarity that did not require agreeing on who had the right to call themselves more Jordanian or more Arab. The keffiyeh became the thing they could hold in common, precisely because it belonged to the cause rather than to any tribe.

Digital Arabic: A Language Being Born

The rewriting of Arab identity is also happening at the level of language itself. Research published in January 2026 in a peer-reviewed academic study on Jordanian Gen Z found that these young people have developed what researchers call a “dynamic, hybrid, and highly integrative” vernacular on social media. TikTok videos blend Arabic, English, and local slang. Meme-driven expressions carry political weight. Code-switching between languages is not a sign of cultural confusion but of a generation that refuses to be limited by any single cultural frame.

The same study noted that TikTok and Snapchat are used to “produce short videos that blend humour and sociopolitical talk” — a practice aligned with what researchers call “creative media insurgency among Arab youth". This is not a trivial observation. It means that political critique is arriving dressed as entertainment, which makes it harder to censor and easier to spread.

Arab pride, in this register, is not expressed through formal declarations. It is expressed through a joke that everyone who understands the context will recognise immediately, and no algorithm can easily flag.

The State Pushes Back

None of this is happening without resistance. The Jordanian state has not been passive. In April 2025, officials banned the Muslim Brotherhood — a move critics called a political crackdown dressed as a security measure. Protests over the Gaza war were suppressed. The government tried to limit Islamist influence after the Islamic Action Front’s election victory. And Discord was blocked after Morocco’s youth showed what a single platform could do when a generation decides to move together.

More telling still: Jordan reinstated mandatory military service in 2025 for the first time in over three decades. Six thousand young men, selected by lottery, were sent into uniform to receive not just weapons training but “lessons in Jordanian national identity". The state’s response to a generation redefining Arab pride was to try to reteach them the old version at gunpoint.

This is the crux of the tension. As ISD Global’s 2025 report on digital polarisation in Jordan found, there is still a “belief in tribal hierarchy” running through Jordanian online discourse, with divisive speech between different tribal backgrounds and prejudice against Palestinian-origin Jordanians. The new pride has not erased the old fault lines. It is running alongside them, competing with them.

“The crisis is not in the absence of hope but in the vagueness of direction and the severing of bridges between official rhetoric and the street.”

Politics and Society Institute, Amman, November 2025

Pride Without Permission

What distinguishes Jordan’s Gen Z from previous generations is not that they are louder. It is that they have stopped waiting for permission. Older forms of Arab pride required institutional validation — from the state, from religious authorities, from tribal elders. This generation is building pride from the bottom up, through shared symbols, shared suffering, and shared refusal to accept the official story.

A young marketing student in Dubai, interviewed by Fast Company ME, summarised something that applies equally to Jordan: “Our generation has had the chance of growing up with a mentality that allows for out-of-the-box thinking. We don’t just buy things from a certain brand because everyone does; we research, look up brand values, and do the work before financially committing.” Apply that same instinct to political identity, and you understand what is happening.

They are researching. They are comparing. And they are refusing to buy the old brand of Arab pride that was sold to their parents.

The Morocco GenZ 212 movement that rattled governments across the region was “born online” with “no central committees, charismatic leaders, nor headquarters". As The Graduate Press reported in November 2025, “a single post on TikTok, Telegram, or Discord mobilised thousands of people within hours.” Jordan’s government saw that and blocked Discord. But you cannot block a generation’s desire for something real.

What Comes Next

The honest answer is that nobody knows. Jordan sits in a position of extraordinary fragility. The Gaza war has not ended the underlying conditions that created it. Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank continues. Jordanian officials have called any mass displacement of Palestinians into Jordan a “red line” and a “declaration of war.” The state is caught between a population that wants more and allies that demand less.

Gen Z is the pressure that does not go away when the news cycle moves on. They are twenty-one percent unemployed in official figures — unofficially much higher. They are politically awakened by a war they watched on their phones. They are linguistically and culturally hybrid, connected to global movements, and unwilling to accept the tribal arrangements their grandparents were handed as facts of life.

What they are building in place of the old Arab pride is not fully formed yet. It is a work in progress — messy, contradictory, sometimes fragile. It contains within it real tensions: between Palestinian-origin and East Bank Jordanians, between secular and Islamist currents, and between local identity and pan-Arab solidarity. None of these tensions have been resolved.

But the direction of travel is clear. Arab pride, for Jordan’s Gen Z, is no longer about which tribe gave you your family name or which government gave you your passport. It is about whether you refused to look away. Whether you wore the keffiyeh even when it was inconvenient. Whether you stood in the street when standing in the street cost something. Whether you kept talking on platforms your government tried to silence.

That is a harder pride to manage than the old kind. It cannot be handed out as patronage or revoked when it becomes inconvenient. It is, in the most literal sense, ungovernable.

And that is exactly why governments across the Arab world are afraid of it.

Editor's Opinion

There is something worth being honest about here. Governments across the Arab world – Jordan included – have spent decades performing Arab pride while systematically avoiding anything it demands in practice. They signed peace treaties, maintained normalisation, sold oil, and collected aid. They invoked Palestine in every speech and then quietly arrested the people who took it seriously.

What is happening among Jordan’s Gen Z is therefore not just a cultural shift. It is a reckoning. These young people are not naive. They have watched the Arab Spring get crushed. They watched their unemployment numbers rise while officials spoke of modernisation. They watched Gaza on their phones in real time and then watched their government try to manage their outrage rather than share it. The outrage they feel is not irrational. It is, if anything, the most rational response to decades of being told that Arab pride matters, while the systems built in its name failed to deliver anything that pride should logically protect.

That Jordan’s government banned Discord is not a sign of strength. It is a sign of fear. And the thing it fears is a generation that has stopped believing the story.

Pakistan’s Indus Plain is no longer flooding seasonally. It is flooding permanently, and the cause is not only a changing climate. It is also a state that has consistently failed to act, plan, or reform.

The Indus River has been flooding for thousands of years. The civilisations that built along it did so knowing the river would swell, retreat, and reshape the land on its own schedule. What is happening to Pakistan now is categorically different. The floods are no longer seasonal disruptions that communities absorb and recover from. They are compounding catastrophes, arriving sooner, lasting longer, and destroying more with each passing year. The question is no longer whether Pakistan’s agricultural heartland will flood. It is whether parts of it will ever reliably drain again.

In 2022, the Indus burst its banks and inundated an area of 75,000 square kilometres, roughly the size of Ireland. At least 33 million people were affected, and approximately eight million were displaced. The economic losses exceeded $30 billion. In 2024, the national monsoon rainfall ran 51 per cent above average, killing hundreds and causing widespread infrastructure damage. In 2025, floods killed more than 1,000 people, displaced over 1.5 million, and caused at least $150 million in documented property damage — with losses in agriculture and livelihoods far higher and harder to count. Three consecutive catastrophic monsoon seasons. That is not a weather anomaly. That is a structural shift.

The Physics of the Problem

Pakistan’s geography creates a natural funnel for disaster. The country sits at the convergence of three of the world’s great mountain ranges — the Hindu Kush, the Himalayas, and the Karakoram. It holds more glacial ice than any country outside the polar regions, including 13,032 glaciers covering over 13,500 square kilometres. Those glaciers feed the Indus and its major tributaries: the Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Sutlej, and Kabul rivers. For centuries, the glaciers released water slowly and predictably, filling rivers in summer and replenishing groundwater aquifers through the dry season.

That predictability is collapsing. A 2024 study found that glaciers in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya-Karakoram region are melting approximately 65 per cent faster now than in the decade between 2001 and 2010. Research has also found a 30 per cent increase in glacial melt in Pakistan, specifically over the past 50 years. This does two things simultaneously: it adds abnormal volumes of water to already swollen rivers during monsoon season, and it accelerates the formation of glacial lakes in the high-altitude valleys – lakes that can burst without warning in events called 'Glacial Lake Outburst Floods', or GLOFs. In 2025, GLOF events in Gilgit-Baltistan added a third dimension to flooding, on top of monsoon rains and regular riverine overflows.

The monsoon itself is also becoming more violent. Climate scientists from the World Weather Attribution group found that the 2022 extreme rainfall — examining both the 60-day and five-day peak periods — constituted what statisticians call a “one-in-100-year event” in the current climate. But the operative phrase is “in the current climate". As global temperatures rise, events of that magnitude will occur not once a century but far more frequently. Balochistan — historically one of the driest regions in Pakistan — recorded a 500 per cent increase in rainfall in July 2022 compared to its historical average. That single data point illustrates the degree to which Pakistan’s climatic baselines are being rewritten.

“These are not irregular events anymore. Every submerged village, every washed-away bridge, every family camped under tarpaulins on a hot roadside is a reminder that climate inaction has human faces.”

— Tariq Aziz, Environmental Scientist, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad

The Human Architecture of Catastrophe

Climate change is the accelerant. But the structural damage is built by human hands. The floods in Pakistan are not simply what happens when too much rain falls on a poor country. They are what happens when too much rain falls on a country that has spent decades building on floodplains, clearing forests, silting reservoirs, allowing drainage systems to rot, and permitting governance failures to calcify into permanent institutional incompetence.

Deforestation is one of the most direct and measurable contributors. Pakistan lost nearly eight per cent of its total tree cover between 2001 and 2024, according to Global Forest Watch. Forest cover is not merely an environmental nicety — it is the primary mechanism by which hillside catchments absorb rainfall before it reaches rivers. Without tree roots holding soil and slowing water movement, rainfall runs off rapidly, carrying sediment into rivers that raises their beds and reduces their capacity to hold water. Pakistan’s rivers are increasingly unable to contain normal monsoon volumes, let alone the amplified flows now arriving from melting glaciers.

Urban planning — or its absence — has made cities into flood traps. In July 2025, Rawalpindi received approximately 230 millimetres of rainfall within a single 24-hour period. The city’s drainage system, designed for a different era of rainfall and a far smaller population, failed completely. Islamabad, Lahore, Jhelum, and Karachi all experienced similar inundations from rainfall events that a properly maintained urban infrastructure could have managed. The Panwal dam in Chakwal, a small embankment structure, breached on July 17, 2025, sending floodwater into surrounding villages and severing road access. It was not an isolated incident — it was symptomatic of a national infrastructure backlog that has been allowed to accumulate for decades.

Critically, many of the most vulnerable communities live exactly where they should not be living: on active floodplains, in the beds of seasonal rivers, in low-lying areas adjacent to the Indus and its tributaries. This is not a failure of individual judgement. It reflects the absence of enforced land-use regulation, the pressure of a rapidly urbanising population with nowhere else to go, and a government apparatus that has consistently failed to demarcate floodplain zones and enforce settlement restrictions.

A History of International Aid Spent Without Reform

After the catastrophic 2010 floods — which displaced 20 million people and caused billions in damage — Pakistan received massive international support. The World Bank extended $1 billion in assistance. The Asian Development Bank contributed a further $2 billion. International NGOs deployed across the country. The express purpose of this funding was not merely relief but reconstruction and resilience: to break the cycle of disaster and repeat disaster. It did not work. Floods of comparable or greater severity struck in 2011, 2012, 2020, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025.

This is not a peripheral issue — it is the central one. The money has come. The technical guidance has been provided. The international frameworks, such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, exist, and Pakistan is a signatory. Yet the institutional response to the 2022 floods was, according to a peer-reviewed analysis published in 2025, characterised by delayed mobilisation, fragmented governance, and weak coordination between federal, provincial, and district-level authorities. Resource allocation was inequitable, leaving women, children, and the elderly consistently underserved in relief operations. These are not new diagnoses. They are the same diagnoses repeated across every major post-disaster review since 2010.

Academic research published on SSRN in September 2025 put it bluntly: the 2025 floods exposed “deep structural vulnerabilities” rooted in “outdated flood defences, poor urban planning, governance failures across provinces, and increasing climate pressures". A ResearchGate paper from February 2026 concluded that floods in Pakistan are “not just a climatic hazard but deeply rooted in structural, political, and institutional limitations.” The pattern — recurring crisis, international aid, inadequate reform, recurring crisis — is not a tragedy. It is a policy choice, sustained year after year by a state that has not been held accountable for the consequences.

Political Failure as a Force Multiplier

The governance failures around flooding are not incidental to Pakistan’s broader political dysfunction. They are an expression of it. Flood infrastructure projects have been subject to corruption scandals. Encroachment laws — which prohibit settlement on floodplains — are routinely ignored, partly because enforcing them is politically costly and partly because local governments lack the capacity or will to act. The disconnect between disaster warnings issued by technical agencies and the preventive actions that those warnings should trigger reflects a state apparatus where accountability runs in one direction: upward and inward, not toward citizens in harm’s way.

The 2025 season made this visible at the highest levels. Pakistan’s Supreme Court Justice Mansoor Ali Shah declared in a landmark speech that government delays in implementing climate and disaster reforms amounted to a violation of citizens’ fundamental rights. Parliament passed a constitutional amendment introducing Article 9A, establishing the right to a clean and sustainable environment as a fundamental right. These are meaningful signals — but they come after 15 years of failed post-disaster reform cycles and a death toll that continues to rise.

A further complicating factor is the geopolitics of the Indus river system. In 2025, intensified rainfall in Indian Punjab caused the Ravi, Chenab, and Sutlej rivers to swell, leading India to release excess water into Pakistani Punjab. Pakistan’s authorities blamed this for exacerbating downstream flooding. India disputes the framing. What is not in dispute is that the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty — the framework governing water-sharing between the two countries — was designed without factoring in climate change, glacial melt, or the kind of extreme rainfall events that are now routine. The treaty is under structural stress, and neither country has a credible joint mechanism for managing the new hydrological reality.

Agriculture: The Slow-Motion Collapse

Pakistan’s economy is built on agriculture. The sector employs the majority of the rural population and is the primary livelihood of millions living across the Indus Plain. The floods are dismantling it systematically. A study published in Nature documented 19 major flood disasters in the Indus Plain between 1950 and 2012, affecting nearly 600,000 square kilometres and causing over 11,000 deaths. The pace has accelerated markedly since 2010, and the agricultural losses now compound year upon year.

In 2024, major crops, including wheat and cotton, contracted by 13.5 per cent, restricting overall GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points, according to Pakistan’s own Economic Survey. In Sindh, the 2022 floods caused the country’s largest freshwater lake, Lake Manchar, to overflow across a vast area of cropland. In Balochistan, a farmer named Muhammad Hashim — interviewed by Al Jazeera in 2025 — described his existence as “gambling with nature", having migrated multiple times after successive floods and droughts destroyed everything he had built. His story is not exceptional. It is representative of millions.

The longer-term prognosis is more alarming still. As glaciers continue to melt, the Indus river system will eventually face reduced flows during the dry season — the water that currently arrives year-round from slow glacial melt will no longer be available. Pakistan faces the paradox of being simultaneously inundated by floods and approaching a long-term freshwater deficit. The World Bank has warned of significant internal migration driven by climate disasters. That migration has already begun, quietly and without fanfare, in the form of farmers abandoning land that floods too frequently to be worth planting.

What Needs to Happen — and Why It Probably Will Not

The technical requirements for improving Pakistan’s flood resilience are well understood and extensively documented. High-resolution floodplain mapping needs to be completed and enforced. Expanded networks of river gauges and satellite rainfall monitoring need to be deployed, particularly in the upper Indus tributaries and GLOF-prone Himalayan valleys. The NDMA’s 2025 Monsoon Infrastructure Guidelines already outline this direction. Nature-based solutions – reforestation of catchment areas and restoration of wetlands that act as natural buffers – need to be funded and maintained rather than announced and abandoned. Drainage infrastructure in cities needs to be redesigned for rainfall intensities that reflect the current climate, not the one that existed in 1970.

None of these interventions is technically complex. All of them require sustained political will, institutional coherence, and a willingness to enforce regulations against powerful local interests that benefit from the status quo. These are exactly the conditions that Pakistan’s governance has consistently failed to produce. The country ranks 144th on the Global Peace Index 2025. Corruption and political disputes over projects like the Cholistan Canal — which critics argue violates the 1991 Indus Water Accord- continue to fracture the institutional trust required to coordinate a national response to a national emergency.

Meanwhile, Pakistan emits less than one per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The physics driving the intensification of monsoons and the acceleration of glacial melt are overwhelmingly produced by the industrialised world. That climate injustice is real and well-documented — but it cannot be used as a reason to defer the domestic governance reforms that would reduce the scale of the damage. Climate change is turning Pakistan’s floods into something unmanageable. Pakistan’s own failures are turning the unmanageable into the catastrophic.

The Indus Plain has always flooded. But civilisations built along it because floods could be managed, survived, and even used. The question facing Pakistan now is whether it will act with the seriousness the situation demands, or whether it will wait for a crisis large enough that the state can no longer pretend, cycle after cycle, that the next disaster is simply the last one’s bad luck.

A trillion-dollar plan to remake a kingdom. Workers are dying for it. Tribes are being killed to clear land for it. Activists are imprisoned for criticising it. And now, parts of it are being quietly abandoned.

The pitch is impossible to ignore. A 170-kilometre city with no roads, no cars, and no carbon emissions, slicing through the Saudi desert like a mirror shard dropped from outer space. An entertainment metropolis. A Red Sea tourism paradise. A kingdom finally free from oil. When Mohammed bin Salman unveiled Vision 2030 in April 2016, he promised his country — and the watching world — nothing less than a complete reinvention of one of the most closed, oil-saturated economies on earth.

Nearly a decade later, the question is no longer whether Saudi Arabia is changing. It clearly is. The question – far more uncomfortable and deliberately left unanswered by the Kingdom’s army of marketing consultants – is: who exactly is this transformation for?

Because beneath the glossy renderings and the Formula One circuits, another story has been accumulating. Workers buried in unmarked graves. A tribal community was shot, jailed, and sentenced to death for refusing to leave ancestral land. Dissidents imprisoned for tweets. A flagship project was quietly shelved after spending $50 billion while achieving less than three kilometres of foundation. And a sovereign wealth fund now worth nearly a trillion dollars, entirely controlled by one man.

Vision 2030 is real. But it has two faces — and the world has mostly been shown only one of them.

I. The Architecture of a Brand

Vision 2030’s public face is a masterpiece of modern statecraft. It speaks the language of Davos: economic diversification, youth empowerment, the knowledge economy, and sustainability. The Kingdom’s three “pillars” — a vibrant society, a thriving economy, and an ambitious nation — are worded with the careful blandness of a corporate strategy document. They say everything and commit to nothing.

The flagship projects did the emotional heavy lifting. NEOM — a $500 billion megacity in the Tabuk desert — was to be the centrepiece. Within it, The Line: twin mirrored towers stretching 170 kilometres, standing 500 metres tall, housing nine million people, powered entirely by renewable energy, with no road traffic, no carbon, and a claimed travel time of 20 minutes end-to-end. It was architecture as publicity material — designed to be photographed from a render, not built from concrete.

“Over the last few years, Saudi state agents have glutted foreign media with artists’ impressions of gleaming, horizontal gigaprojects snaking through the desert. This press campaign is the eye-candy for Vision 2030.” — Centuro Global, Vision 2030 Analysis, 2025

Sport was weaponised with similar precision. The Kingdom managed its investments through the Public Investment Fund (PIF) — the world’s fifth-largest sovereign wealth fund — purchasing Newcastle United, backing LIV Golf, and recruiting global football stars to the Saudi league with contracts of extraordinary generosity. The word “sportswashing” quickly entered the global conversation – the practice of using high-profile events and purchases to launder a country’s international reputation.

MBS was unbothered. In a September 2023 interview, he said he does not care about sportswashing criticism so long as his strategy yields results he wants, such as GDP growth. That is, at minimum, an honest answer.

Vision 2030 — Key Numbers (2024–2026)

PIF assets reached $941.3 billion in 2024; revised 2030 target is $2.67 trillion

• Female workforce participation rose from 23.2% in 2016 to 35.8% by 2025
• The Line construction suspended in September 2025 after just 2.4km of foundation
• Internal NEOM audit (March 2025) projected full cost at $8.8 trillion, completion by 2080
• Saudi construction contracts fell 72% year-on-year in Q2 2025
• NEOM not mentioned in Saudi Arabia’s 2026 national budget

II. The Dead Who Built the Dream

In October 2024, the ITV documentary Kingdom Uncovered: Inside Saudi Arabia aired in Britain. Its findings were not new to the researchers and human rights organisations that had been tracking them for years — but they were, for the first time, assembled in one place and put in front of a mass audience.

According to the ITV exposé, more than 21,000 Indian, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese workers have died in Saudi Arabia since 2017 — the year construction on Vision 2030 projects accelerated — and more than 100,000 people are reported to have “disappeared” during NEOM’s construction alone. Workers described themselves as “trapped slaves” and “beggars.”

Workers report working up to 16 hours a day, with weekly hours regularly surpassing legal limits. There are reports of multiple workplace accidents caused by exhaustion and the absence of adequate safety precautions. NEOM sites alone reportedly experienced up to five road accidents a month linked to worker fatigue.

Many workers face precarious legal status, limited labour protections, excessive working hours, exposure to extreme summer heat, delayed or withheld wages, and restricted access to remedies. These conditions are not fringe occurrences—they are systemic features of a labour system designed to keep construction cheap.

Saudi Arabia relies on the kafala system, which ties a migrant worker’s legal status directly to their employer. To leave a job without the employer’s permission is to become an illegal immigrant overnight. This structural dependency creates conditions in which abuse is both easy and unpunishable. Human Rights Watch has documented the repeated abuse of migrant workers on Saudi megaprojects, including workers who have had their phones destroyed and their immigration documents confiscated.

“Vision 2030 claims to strive for a ‘strong, thriving, and stable Saudi Arabia that provides opportunity for all’ — yet the plan makes no mention of human rights or democratic reform.”

The Saudi government’s response to these allegations has followed a consistent pattern: deny, delay, and deflect. Some architecture firms — Mecanoo, Morphosis, Coop Himmelb(l)au, and Adjaye Associates — withdrew from NEOM after the abuses came to light. But most have not: BIG, Zaha Hadid Architects, and OMA remained on the project as of late 2024. The lure of a $500 billion commission has a powerful capacity to suppress discomfort.

III. The Tribe That Stood in the Way

Of all the stories embedded within Vision 2030, the treatment of the al-Huwaitat tribe is perhaps the most clarifying. It strips the rhetoric of modernisation down to its foundations and reveals what lies beneath: raw, unchecked state power exercised against those who cannot fight back.

NEOM is the flagship project of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030. But the land on which it is being built has been home to the al-Huwaitat tribe for centuries. Despite NEOM’s early marketing materials describing the site as “virgin land", this was not an empty desert.

Since 2020, approximately 20,000 tribe members have faced forced evictions without adequate consultation or compensation. Those who resist face severe consequences, ranging from intimidation and house raids to arbitrary detention and death.

In April 2020, Saudi security forces shot and killed Abdul Rahim Al-Huwaiti after he posted a video online criticising the NEOM project and refusing to vacate his home. He had also exposed areas where his neighbours had been forcibly evicted and accused the kingdom of “state terrorism". According to state media, he was killed after opening fire on security forces. His supporters dispute this account.

A former Saudi intelligence officer, Colonel Rabih Alenezi, told the BBC that security forces were authorised to use lethal force against villagers resisting eviction to make way for The Line. The UN took note.

In May 2023, UN experts expressed alarm at the imminent risk of execution of three members of the Howeitat tribe — Shadli, Ibrahim, and Ataullah al-Huwaiti — who had been charged with terrorism despite being arrested, in the UN’s own words, “for resisting forced evictions in the name of the NEOM project".

At least 47 members of the al-Huwaitat tribe have been arrested or detained and sentenced to terms ranging from five to fifty years, some facing the death penalty, simply for exercising their right to free expression in protest of NEOM.

“Mohammed Bin Salman has decided to place this project in the northwest corner of Saudi Arabia — the mainstay of the al-Huwaitat tribe.” — Professor Dawn Chatty, Anthropology of Forced Migration, Oxford University

The Specialised Criminal Court — originally established to try terrorism cases — has been the judicial instrument of choice for prosecuting tribal members. In Saudi Arabia, objecting to a royal project has been legally reframed as a national security threat. That reframing should disturb anyone who takes the concept of the rule of law seriously.

IV. Women’s Rights: Liberation or Leverage?

The reforms extended to Saudi women under Vision 2030 are the aspect most frequently cited by the Kingdom’s defenders and the most frequently misunderstood by both its critics and its admirers.

The changes are real and significant. The driving ban was lifted in 2018. The male guardianship system has been substantially — though not completely — dismantled. Female workforce participation surged from 23.2 per cent in 2016 to 34.4 per cent by 2022, surpassing Vision 2030’s initial target of 30 per cent, while women now own 45 per cent of small and medium-sized enterprises.

But the more searching question is: why now, and for whom?

A deeper evaluation reveals that women’s empowerment under Vision 2030 is closely associated with economic strategy rather than social justice. The consolidation of women in the workforce is consistently presented not just as a matter of rights but as a roadmap to boost productivity and the country’s GDP. Women are viewed not just as citizens but as economic assets essential to the success of Vision 2030.

This is not a cynical observation — it is a structural one. When a state empowers women specifically to solve a labour shortage and hit GDP targets, the empowerment is real, but its foundation is transactional. The women who benefit are genuine beneficiaries. But the political framework that delivered those benefits is an autocracy that simultaneously imprisons women who speak out of turn.

In February 2025, Salma al-Shehab — a Saudi PhD student who had been living in the UK — was released after serving four years of a 27-year prison sentence handed down for publishing tweets in support of women’s rights. Also released that month was teacher Asaad bin Nasser al-Ghamdi, initially sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment for social media posts criticising the Vision 2030 programme itself.

Social and cultural attitudes, particularly outside of major cities, continue to limit women’s options through family pressure and the informal enforcement of conservative norms. While the guardianship system has been diminished, it has not been completely abolished in practice, with some women still pressured to seek male consent for life decisions despite their legal rights.

According to the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law 2024 report, Saudi Arabia’s legal framework score stands at 50 out of 100, against a global average of 64.2. Progress, yes. Equality, no.

V. Power Concentrated in One Hand

The structure of Vision 2030 is not a national development plan in the conventional sense. It is the personal project of one man , and understanding this is essential to understanding why so many of its contradictions exist.

The Public Investment Fund — the economic engine of Vision 2030 — has grown to hold almost $1 trillion in assets. MBS is the chairman. His close associate, Yasser al-Rumayyan, serves as governor. The PIF invests hundreds of billions of dollars in domestic enterprises, but it has also bought high-profile international assets, including sports teams, stakes in Uber, and Electronic Arts.

In November 2024, the Crown Prince personally chaired the Cabinet session to approve Saudi Arabia’s 2025 budget — revenues estimated at $316 billion and expenditures at $343 billion, producing a $27 billion deficit. MBS proposed the budget, approved it, and will oversee its implementation, a governance model entirely devoid of transparency or accountability.

This is not a technicality. When one individual controls the sovereign wealth fund, the national oil company, the military, the judiciary, and the budget approval process simultaneously, “Vision 2030” becomes less a national strategy and more a personal empire-building exercise conducted at a country’s expense.

Vision 2030 claims to strive for a “strong, thriving, and stable Saudi Arabia that provides opportunity for all", yet the plan makes no mention of human rights or democratic reform. That omission is not an oversight. It is a design feature.

VI. The Collapse of The Line

If there is one image that captures the gap between Vision 2030’s promise and its reality, it is The Line’s current state: a 2.4-kilometre trench in the Saudi desert, halted, surrounded by silence.

Construction on The Line was suspended by PIF in September 2025 after only 2.4 kilometres of foundation work had been completed. The population target for 2030 was slashed from 1.5 million to fewer than 300,000. Cost estimates, initially pegged at $1.6 trillion, ballooned to an internal figure of $8.8 trillion, making the original scope financially unfeasible even by Saudi standards.

A leaked NEOM internal audit reported by the Wall Street Journal in March 2025 projected a completion date of 2080 for the full original Line vision — moving the project from “ambitious” to “arithmetically impossible under any realistic budget".

The value of construction contracts awarded by Saudi authorities plunged by 72 per cent year-on-year in the second quarter of 2025. NEOM was not mentioned in the 2026 national budget. The project that was supposed to define the twenty-first-century city had become a liability too expensive to mention in public.

Saudi Arabia has now announced a major shift, reducing government funding for large-scale tourism projects, including NEOM and the Red Sea Destination, pivoting instead toward AI infrastructure. The Vision 2030 programme, announced in 2016 with NEOM as a core pillar, is being substantially rewritten.

“People died to build a city that will not be built. They were imprisoned to clear land that will now sit largely empty. The marketing continued long after the engineers knew the numbers did not work.”

This is not merely a story of fiscal overreach. It is a story of what happens when an autocrat’s personal vanity project is treated as national policy, insulated from scrutiny, dissent, or market reality. The architects who stayed on. The governments who provided diplomatic cover. The financial institutions who queued for a share of the PIF. All of them were invested in the fiction.

VII. The Beneficiaries

So — to return to the question — who is Vision 2030 actually for?

It is, without question, for Mohammed bin Salman. The plan has consolidated his grip over every major institution in the Kingdom, transferred wealth under his personal control, and provided international legitimacy through sports deals, tourism glamour, and diplomatic engagement. When MBS says he doesn’t care about sportswashing so long as GDP grows, he means it — because GDP growth validates his rule.

It is, partially, for the young Saudi middle class — the 63 per cent of the population under 30 that MBS himself identifies as the constituency he must satisfy or face instability. Entertainment venues, cinemas, concerts, and expanded economic opportunities are real and genuinely popular. These are nothing.

It is, in selective ways, for Saudi women who have gained real freedoms — to drive, to work, to exist in public spaces — even as those freedoms remain conditional, incomplete, and reversible at the state’s discretion.

It is, demonstrably, for the global financial system and the foreign firms that have gorged on the PIF’s capital allocations – banks, consultancies, architects, sports leagues, and technology companies – all of whom have found it more profitable to ask no questions than to ask the right ones.

And it is emphatically not for the Bangladeshi labourer who died in the summer heat for $400 a month. Not for Abdul Rahim Al-Huwaiti, shot in his home. Not for the al-Huwaitat tribespeople who will spend the next fifty years in prison for a social media post. Not for the Saudi teacher who was imprisoned for criticising the very plan he was supposed to believe in.

Conclusion: Modernisation Without Accountability Is Just Authoritarian Management

Saudi Arabia is changing. That is not a contested fact. Some of those changes, more economic opportunity, greater freedom of movement for women, and a domestic entertainment culture that did not exist before , are genuine improvements in the lives of real people.

But a transformation that requires no accountability, tolerates no dissent, displaces the powerless for the benefit of the powerful, and conceals its failures behind marketing budgets is not modernisation in any meaningful sense. It is the rebranding of authoritarian control.

Vision 2030’s most successful export has not been tourism or technology. It has been the idea that economic reform can be cleanly separated from political freedom. That a country can build gleaming cities with no rights of assembly inside them. That a sovereign wealth fund can buy global legitimacy without paying for global accountability.

The world has been largely willing to accept this trade, or at least to look away from its cost. The banks took the fees. The architects took the commissions. The sports leagues took the television deals. And the men who built it all — the ones who are still alive — took home wages they may never fully receive.

Vision 2030 is a vision. But whose vision, built on whose sacrifice, and serving whose interests – these are questions the Kingdom has answered, quietly and without remorse, through its actions rather than its marketing.

The answer was always in the fine print. We were just looking at the renders.

I. The Numbers Behind the Narrative

Between 2000 and 2023, Ethiopia borrowed a total of $13.7 billion from China to build roads, railroads, water systems, and telecommunications infrastructure. Most of those loans came from the Export-Import Bank of China or the China Development Bank and carry higher interest rates than loans from lenders such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. By mid-2024, Ethiopia’s total public sector debt — including guaranteed and non-guaranteed debt — stood at $68.9 billion, with Chinese lending constituting roughly half of the country’s $28 billion in foreign debt accumulated over the past 25 years.

The Boston University Global Development Policy Centre, which maintains the most comprehensive open database of Chinese loans to Africa, confirms that between 2000 and 2023, Ethiopia ranked as the second-largest African borrower from China, after Angola. China’s top five loan recipients on the continent over this period were Angola, Ethiopia, Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya. By the end of 2019, Ethiopia already owed China approximately $6.5 billion in outstanding debt, making it one of the five most indebted nations to Beijing in the entire Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) ecosystem.

“Chinese loans constitute about half of Ethiopia’s $28 billion in foreign debt over the past 25 years.” — Africa Defence Forum, January 2024

II. The Signature Project: A Railway Built on Borrowed Time

The Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway is the centrepiece of China’s infrastructure push in Ethiopia. The railway is a 753-kilometre electrified single-track standard gauge line running from Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, to the Port of Djibouti, with 45 stations in total. As a landlocked country, the line serves as the main transport corridor for Ethiopia to the port that handles over 90 per cent of its international trade.

China’s Exim Bank financed the construction through a series of buyer’s credit loans. The three primary tranches for the Ethiopian portion alone totalled approximately $2.49 billion: a $1.289 billion loan for the 329-kilometre Sebeta-Adama-Meiso section, contracted in 2011 with the China Railway Engineering Corporation (CREC); a $981 million loan for the 339-kilometre Meiso-Dewanle section, contracted with China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC); and a $220 million loan for rolling stock supply, contracted with China North Industries Corporation (NORINCO). Each of these loans carried borrowing terms of a 15-year maturity, a 6-year grace period, and an interest rate of LIBOR plus a 3 per cent margin — commercial rates, not the deeply concessional terms usually associated with development aid.

The structural problem was baked into the deal from the start. The project’s debt was denominated in US dollars, while construction and operational costs, as well as revenues, were generated in Ethiopian Birr. This currency mismatch created an inherent repayment risk that was predictable at the time of signing. According to a case study by the Global Infrastructure Hub, in response to repayment risks arising from lower-than-predicted traffic volumes and currency fluctuations, the Chinese banks later restructured the Ethiopian debt and extended the repayment period from 15 to 30 years.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed confirmed this restructuring publicly in 2018, upon returning from the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit in Beijing. In his remarks, he stated that the railway loan, originally to be repaid over 10 years, had been extended to 30 years. Reporting from The Diplomat confirmed that repayment negotiations continued: the Ethiopian government had renegotiated debt payments in 2019, extended the repayment period from 10 to 30 years, and then requested suspension of repayments for 2023 and 2024.

The financial return on the railway has been poor. The railway does not connect directly to the port in Djibouti or to industrial parks in Ethiopia, hampering its usefulness as a freight corridor. Analysis by AidData noted that ‘last mile links were not prioritised during the construction of the new line.’ The project was designed to be catalytic — promoting further economic activity — rather than financially viable on its own. Whether it has fulfilled that catalytic role remains contested.

III. The Light Rail: A Feasibility Study That Did Not Hold

A second Chinese-financed flagship project, the Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit (AA-LRT), tells a similar story. China’s Exim Bank provided a $439 million buyer’s credit loan for the project and contracted with the China Railway Group Limited (CREC) in 2009. The loan carried terms consistent with the railway: a 15-year maturity, a 6-year grace period, and a LIBOR-plus-3-per centinterest rate, backed by credit insurance from China Export and Credit Insurance Corporation (Sinosure).

The financial performance of the light rail has been significantly below projections. In 2021, Ethiopia’s own Office of the Auditor General found that during the system’s first four years in operation, the Addis Ababa light rail generated $11.1 million in revenue but cost $154 million to operate. The Auditor General concluded that the feasibility study had been inadequate, conducted without gathering sufficient data. The report noted that the study had originally projected the system would pay for its own construction costs within 10 years through ticket sales, advertising, and station rentals — a projection that proved entirely unrealistic.

Additionally, Ethiopia’s Office of the Auditor General found that the Ethiopian Railways Corporation (ERC) had fallen into arrears and paid $2.8 million in fines to China’s Exim Bank for overdue loan repayments specifically related to the Addis Ababa Light Rail Project. These fines are significant: they reveal that loan penalties were being enforced even as the underlying project was failing to generate the revenue needed to service the debt.

IV. Where the Money Goes: The China-Builds Model

A central and underexamined feature of Chinese infrastructure financing in Ethiopia is the structure of how loan proceeds are actually spent. In the case of the Addis-Djibouti Railway, 85 per cent of the Ethiopian portion was financed through commercial loans from China’s Exim Bank. Both primary contractors — CREC and CCECC — were Chinese state-owned enterprises. The rolling stock was procured from NORINCO, also a Chinese state firm.

As the Brookings Institution analysis noted, this arrangement means that China wins twice: once through the loan interest and again through the construction contracts. In the case of the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway in Kenya, for which comparable data is more available, only 40 per cent of the financing went to land reimbursement, local employee salaries, and materials. The remainder flowed back to Chinese firms through profit, management fees, and equipment costs. While equivalent breakdowns for Ethiopia’s railway are not publicly disclosed, the contractual structure suggests a similar pattern.

The loan terms enforce this arrangement. Buyer’s credit loans — the primary instrument used by China’s Exim Bank in these deals — require the borrower to purchase goods and services from Chinese suppliers. This is not a hidden provision: it is a standard feature of the instrument. The result is that Ethiopian public debt was incurred to pay Chinese companies to build infrastructure in Ethiopia, with the Birr-dollar currency risk borne entirely by Ethiopia.

The transparency deficit compounds this problem. According to Africa Defence Forum’s analysis, citing multiple financial experts, the terms of China’s loans to Ethiopia are confidential, making it difficult for financial analysts and international lenders to assess the true status of the loans or evaluate default conditions. This opacity was a direct obstacle to the G20 debt restructuring process, as creditors could not fully assess the burden-sharing required when debt terms were not disclosed.

V. Industrial Parks: A More Complex Picture

Not all Chinese money flows exclusively back to China. The industrial park model, which has been a parallel track of Chinese engagement in Ethiopia alongside infrastructure loans, presents a more mixed picture on employment and local economic integration.

As of late 2023, China had 1,844 investment projects in Ethiopia — four to five times the number of American or Indian projects. Chinese firms reportedly created 560,000 Ethiopian job opportunities, mainly in clothing and textiles, building materials, plastics, metals, and engineering. Chinese firms in 2021 accounted for 60 per cent of Ethiopia’s approved new foreign direct investment projects, almost all in manufacturing and services.

Eleven of Ethiopia’s 13 public industrial parks were Chinese-built. The Eastern Industrial Park near Addis Ababa, the oldest, had 26,000 workers in 2023, of whom 5 per cent were Chinese, and 70 to 80 per cent were women. Hawassa Industrial Park, 275 kilometres south of Addis Ababa, was even larger: 97 per cent of its 35,000 workers in 2021 were local Ethiopians.

However, a 2024 UNDP report on industry parks in Ethiopia identified persistent structural weaknesses. Industrial parks showed low linkage to the wider economy, unfocused clustering, and dependence on imported raw materials. The parks remained spatially discrete — failing to generate the supply-chain integration with local small and medium enterprises that would be necessary for broader economic transformation. Industrial park contribution to Ethiopia’s export base remained modest: manufactured exports in 2023 were one-fifth of all Ethiopia’s exports, reflecting a narrow industrial base relative to the scale of investment.

VI. Default, Downgrade, and the Debt Restructuring Ordeal

By 2023, Ethiopia’s debt position had become acute. The country defaulted on a $33 million Eurobond payment — a relatively small sum that nevertheless triggered significant consequences. Fitch Ratings downgraded Ethiopia’s debt further into junk territory to CC, a level described as reflecting a probable risk of a default event. Analysts attributed Ethiopia’s financial deterioration to a combination of factors: the two-year war in Tigray, the COVID-19 pandemic, drained foreign currency reserves, rising inflation, and the continued weight of Chinese loan repayments.

Ethiopia formally applied for debt restructuring under the G20 Common Framework in February 2021. The G20’s Official Creditor Committee (OCC), co-chaired by France and China, convened in September 2021. However, progress was severely delayed. According to analysis by Addis Standard, despite being one of the first countries to request treatment, Ethiopia only reached a staff-level agreement with the IMF in March 2024 — nearly three years after its initial application. The IMF had insisted on formal assurances from all creditor groups, including China, before approving a new programme.

In November 2023, the OCC agreed to suspend all of Ethiopia’s bilateral debt service payments for obligations maturing between January 1, 2023, and December 31, 2024. The Paris Club confirmed that the agreement included China and was co-ordinated through the Common Framework. In July 2024, the IMF Executive Board approved a $3.4 billion blended Extended Credit Facility (ECF) and Extended Fund Facility (EFF) arrangement. The IMF’s Debt Sustainability Analysis, released alongside the programme approval, concluded that Ethiopia’s debt was unsustainable and required a treatment to close a $3.5 billion financing gap over the programme period from 2024 to 2028.

A final bilateral debt-treatment resolution with China under the G20 Common Framework was reached on April 3, 2026, according to Reuters. Separately, in late 2023, Ethiopia secured an agreement with China to restructure approximately $1.5 billion of debt, including payments related to the Addis Ababa-Djibouti railway. Details remain limited, but the deal reportedly included extended grace periods and term extensions.

“Ethiopia’s debt remains ‘unsustainable and in distress’ while showing ‘better-than-anticipated macroeconomic outcomes'." — IMF, January 2026 Fourth Review

VII. Is It a Debt Trap? What the Evidence Shows

The phrase ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ — coined by Indian academic Brahma Chellaney in 2017 — describes a strategy in which excessive loans to heavily indebted developing nations are extended with the intent of compelling those countries to cede strategic assets or offer political concessions. It is a serious claim, and the evidence for Ethiopia does not straightforwardly support it.

Deborah Brautigam’s 2019 research, widely cited in the academic literature, critiques the debt-trap narrative as applied to BRI countries, while acknowledging the transparency and governance risks that Chinese loans do carry. A 2020 Chatham House paper by Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri found limited evidence to support debt-trap diplomacy as a deliberate Chinese strategy in Africa.

A 2024–2025 comparative case study by Logan O’Keefe at Claremont McKenna College, examining Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya, found that Ethiopia demonstrated agency through debt renegotiations, diversified financing, and strategic alignment of projects with national goals. The study concluded that the risks associated with Chinese financing could be managed through transparency and governance and that the evidence of deliberate entrapment was limited.

However, the absence of deliberate entrapment does not mean the outcome has been benign. Several structural features of China’s lending to Ethiopia are objectively problematic, regardless of intent. Commercial interest rates on development-stage infrastructure with long payback horizons created an inherent repayment challenge. Confidential loan terms prevented early identification of debt distress by multilateral institutions. Currency mismatches transferred exchange rate risk entirely to the Ethiopian state. And the buyer’s credit model ensured that a large portion of borrowed funds flowed back to Chinese contractors, limiting the net capital transfer to Ethiopia.

Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Zambia have all undergone debt restructuring under the G20 Common Framework. Ethiopia’s restructuring, five years in the making, is among the most protracted. An Ethiopian government analysis by the Institute for Finance and Administration (IFA) characterised Ethiopia’s approach as tactical — using the restructuring process to extract not only debt relief but also future financing commitments and strategic partnerships. That framing may be accurate as a description of Ethiopian agency. It does not erase the structural costs of the debt burden on the Ethiopian population in the intervening years.

VIII. Conclusion: Structure Over Conspiracy

The question ‘where does the Chinese money go?’ does not have a single answer. Some of it built a railway that carries passengers and some freight across a landlocked country to its only major port. Some of it built industrial parks that employ hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian workers, most of them women. Some of it paid Chinese state companies that designed, built, and operated the projects under contracts that directed the majority of loan proceeds back to China. Some of it accumulated as debt service and penalties on loans that projects could not repay because traffic volumes fell short, exchange rates moved against Ethiopia, and feasibility studies were inadequate.

The IMF has repeatedly classified Ethiopia’s debt as unsustainable. Successive Fitch downgrades pushed the country to junk status. A default on a Eurobond triggered a three-year restructuring ordeal. These are not marginal events. They are the consequences of a financing model that priced infrastructure lending at commercial rates in a low-income country without the export earnings to service dollar-denominated debt — and did so with loan terms that were not publicly disclosed.

The debt-trap framing may be too simple. But the conclusion that the structure of Chinese lending to Ethiopia created no systemic risk is contradicted by the evidence. The G20 Common Framework exists precisely because the debt levels created — in Ethiopia and across Africa — became unmanageable. Understanding why requires looking not at conspiracy, but at contract terms, interest rates, procurement requirements, and the gap between feasibility projections and actual infrastructure performance.

Those details are now partially in the public record. They deserve more attention than the geopolitical headline.

On longing for a place that does not want you back — and what you build in the space between.

There is a particular grief that has no clean name. It is not exile, exactly, because exile implies you were once inside. It is not estrangement, because that presumes a relationship that broke. It is the grief of the South Asian queer diaspora: the grief of longing for a homeland that has never fully recognised your existence while living in a country that sees you as a guest who borrowed its politics.

This is the condition I want to examine — not with sentimentality, but with the precision it demands.

Two Exiles, One Body

A recurring theme in scholarship on queer South Asian life is the struggle over and production of “home” as a physical space, an affective landscape, and a shared embodiment – a dislocation rendered by the pushes and pulls from multiple nations and multiple communities simultaneously.

That formulation – pushes and pulls – is too mild for what it describes. What the queer South Asian in the diaspora navigates is a double exclusion. In the West, they are racialised. In the homeland, they are pathologised. The first exclusion tells them they are too brown. The second tells them they are too queer. Neither country offers them an unconditional address.

Scholars have described this as a state of “in-betweenness”, a queer liminality in which the experience of being neither there nor here is not merely geographical but existential. For queer South Asians in the diaspora, this liminality is not a temporary condition to be resolved. It is the permanent architecture of daily life.

And yet, within mainstream discourse, both activist and academic, this experience is still frequently flattened into a linear narrative: an oppressive homeland and a liberating West. That narrative is not just incomplete. It is, in important ways, a lie.

The Myth of the Liberating West

The most pervasive and intellectually lazy story told about queer South Asians in the diaspora is one of rescue. Queer liberation in the West is posited as the saviour of young queer immigrants, and being queer as a member of a non-white diaspora is erroneously propagated as a privilege of white progressiveness — something unattainable in the homeland.

This framing does several damaging things at once. It positions South Asian culture as inherently primitive, incapable of producing its own vocabulary for desire. It severs the queer person from their cultural inheritance, insisting they choose between identity and ancestry. And it conveniently erases the West’s own role in producing the very homophobia it now claims to cure.

Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code — which criminalised consensual same-sex intimacy for 158 years — cannot be separated from the orientalism that created it. At the time, Britain imagined the Indian subcontinent as “stuck in the past", using that framing to discount the direct responsibility of colonial law in manufacturing queerphobic attitudes across South Asia.

As colonialism spread and the British Raj asserted more power over Indian culture, Western frameworks that mandated heteronormativity led to the outlawing of homosexuality under Section 377 in 1861. The homophobia that the diaspora is now fleeing is, in no small part, a British export. The West did not rescue South Asian queers. It first authored the law that persecuted them, then offered asylum as proof of its own enlightenment.

This is not a rhetorical point. It is a historical fact that reframes the entire conversation.

Before the Law: What Was Erased

The insistence that queerness is a Western import into South Asia is not merely wrong — it requires active historical amnesia to sustain.

Before British colonisation, Indian society — while not uniformly accepting — engaged with sexuality in ways that acknowledged far more diversity than modern discourse allows. The Khajuraho temple sculptures, built by the Chandela dynasty between 950 and 1050 CE, depict men in intimate contact with one another and women erotically embracing one another. The Kamasutra, composed between the 3rd and 5th centuries CE, discusses diverse sexual practices and classifies non-binary individuals under the category of Tritiya-Prakriti — meaning “third nature".

There are various Hindu devotional traditions in which male disciples would effeminise themselves to worship deities such as Krishna and Vishnu. In the court of Awadh, Nawabs would dress as women on the day of their pirs. The British were horrified by this, just as they disapproved of the thriving traditions of Hijras and Aravanis, transgender women who for centuries had organised themselves into formal communities with recognised social roles.

The colonial state passed a law in 1871 criminalising Hijras with the explicit aim of their “extermination” — effectively declaring war on the gender diversity that had existed in South Asia for centuries.

When a queer South Asian in London or Toronto is told by their family that queerness is not part of their culture, that person is being asked to remember a history that was deliberately overwritten. The tragedy is that many families passing on this “tradition” do not know they are transmitting a colonial inheritance. They believe they are protecting something ancient when they are, in fact, enforcing something Victorian.

The Diaspora’s Particular Burden

If the homeland carries a falsified past, the diaspora carries a distorted present.

Beyond the pressure to marry traditionally, queer South Asians in diaspora communities have had to deal with the characterisation of their identities as abnormal and shameful — as well as emotional blackmail and, in some cases, violence. One 24-year-old described the experience of navigating their sexual identity within a South Asian family as a version of “queer survival".

The Indian-American community, for instance, largely considers being LGBTQ+ a matter of shame — to the degree that one parent described having a queer or trans child as “a matter of grief". Support resources that exist in the wider American context often fail diaspora families, who find themselves invisible and uncomfortable in those spaces.

This invisibility operates at multiple levels. Queer South Asians are marginalised within mainstream Western LGBTQ+ spaces, which have been shaped predominantly by white experience and politics. They are simultaneously marginalised within their own diaspora communities, where queerness is treated as a betrayal of cultural belonging.

The perception of mutual exclusivity between being queer and being South Asian — held by many families — means that the adoption of such “Western ideals” is seen as taking away from traditional culture. When South Asian immigrant parents say, “We’re not American in that way,” they are declaring that queerness is contradictory to heritage. Yet precolonial history teaches us that they are, in fact, inherently South Asian in that way.

This is the cruellest irony of the homeland pull: the queer South Asian is told that the culture they love does not include them when the evidence suggests it once did — and that the erasure was external, not internal.

What Scholarship Has Gotten Right — and What It Still Gets Wrong

Gayatri Gopinath’s foundational work, Impossible Desires, remains the most rigorous framework for thinking about this experience. Gopinath argues that sexuality is inextricable from prior and continuing histories of colonialism, nationalism, racism, and migration – and that queer critique must recast both the homeland and the new homeplace as sites for heterosexism, racism, and gender subordination, embracing marginality and displacement as part of imagining diaspora anew.

Building on this, scholars have shown how queer South Asians in the diaspora build hybrid identities — not only through the mixing between “colonised” and “coloniser” but also through the relationships that grow between communities in the diaspora themselves and through the process of building home, culture, and politics in exile and resistance.

What this scholarship sometimes understates, however, is the visceral cost of that construction. Building “alternative homes” sounds generative. In practice, it often means building community from scratch, without the structural support of family, without the cultural vocabulary to explain your existence, and while simultaneously managing the grief of a homeland that feels both intimately yours and categorically closed to you.

A 2014 Pew Study found that 85 per cent of Pakistanis and 67 per cent of Indians considered homosexuality to be morally unacceptable. Decriminalisation of Section 377 in India in 2018 was a legal milestone — but legal progress and social acceptance are not the same thing. The queer South Asian in the diaspora who watches the news from India does not only see progress. They see the distance, in real numbers, between the law and the living.

The Chosen Family as Radical Act

What do people build when the structures meant to hold them refuse to?

For many queer South Asians in the diaspora, the answer has been a handpicked chosen family — assembled from disparate sources, across unexpected lines. As one gender non-conforming participant in research on queer South Asian mental health put it, "There's nothing in the diaspora that really speaks to me on everything. I have to cobble it together from disparate sources. Some of the most supportive people have been the most different — you can’t predict this, really.”

Queer South Asian activists have increasingly articulated community care itself as a political act — one that is a necessary counterpart to organising and a form of solidarity practised in Black and Brown feminist spaces across the diaspora.

This is not a consolation prize. It is a distinct political and ethical achievement. The chosen family forged by queer South Asians in the diaspora is not a substitute for what was lost. It is something new — a kinship structure that refuses both the exclusivity of biological family and the assimilation demands of Western queer politics.

Gopinath describes this as a queer diasporic feminism that rejects heteronormative and patriarchal structures of kinship, building a hybrid identity not through erasure of origin but through transformation – a home built together in exile and resistance.

The Homeland Pull: What It Actually Is

I want to be precise about what the “homeland pull” means for the queer South Asian, because it is often misread.

It is not a desire to return to a place that will accept you as you are. Many of these people know, with clarity, that the homeland will not. It is not nostalgia for a golden age of tolerance; the precolonial record is more complex than that, and selective retrieval of ancient texts can become its own form of wishful thinking.

The homeland pull is something more structurally complex: it is the longing for cultural continuity that is not contingent on self-erasure. It is the desire to love a language, a cuisine, a seasonal ritual, or a particular quality of light in a particular city without that love being used as leverage to demand your silence.

What LGBTQ South Asians precisely comprehend are the queer possibilities within South Asian life itself, the homosociality of domestic life, and the fluidity in filmic and ritual traditions as alternatives to white and Western gay habitus. The homeland pull is, in part, the pull toward that queer possibility, the evidence of which exists in the culture even as the culture officially denies it.

This is what makes the position of the queer South Asian diaspora so structurally unresolvable and so intellectually rich. They are not simply caught between two places. They are custodians of a history that the homeland has disowned and that the West has no interest in acknowledging. They hold the contradiction that queerness is both indigenous to South Asia and persecuted there, and they hold it without a clean political resolution available to them.

Conclusion: Living the Question

There is no neat ending to write here, and I am suspicious of any analysis that offers one.

The queer South Asian diaspora does not need its grief aestheticised or its resilience turned into a redemption arc. What it needs, and what serious intellectual engagement demands, is a refusal to simplify the problem.

The homeland pull is real. So is the danger of the homeland. The West offers legal protection and often social acceptance. It also offers a form of queer belonging that erases race, class, and cultural specificity. The chosen family is a genuine achievement. It is also built on the rubble of what was refused.

When India struck down Section 377 in 2018, some Western commentators congratulated India for “finally” arriving at modernity. Rightfully, a backlash emerged, pointing to the colonial histories of the very law being overturned. India, commentators insisted, was not “Westernising” but decolonising. Yet even that binary — Westernisation versus decolonisation, is partial and risks obscuring the systemic violence that persists well beyond any single legal ruling.

That is the position I find most honest: every available framework for understanding the queer South Asian in the diaspora is partial. The colonial history is essential but not sufficient. The precolonial archive is relevant but cannot be romanticised. The diaspora community offers solidarity but is not immune to its own caste hierarchies, anti-Blackness, and Islamophobia.

What the queer South Asian diaspora lives, in other words, is not a problem to be solved. It is a condition to be understood — in its full density, without the relief of resolution.

The homeland will keep pulling. The question is what you build with that tension, and whether the building is honest about what it costs.

How unmanned weapons became the region’s most traded commodity — and why no one is being held accountable

The Market Is Open

There is a number that should stop you cold.

The Middle East military drone market was valued at $2.1 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $6.1 billion by 2030 — a growth rate of 11.21% annually. That is not the pace of a region arming itself for defence. That is the pace of a region hooked on a product, and the suppliers know it.

We are inside the most active drone proliferation period in human history. The Middle East is not merely a theatre of drone warfare — it is its primary laboratory, its most lucrative showroom, and its least accountable graveyard.

This article is not about the technology. It is about what the technology enables: a new global bazaar where sovereign states, proxy militias, and defence companies transact in death — at scale, at speed, and almost entirely without legal consequence.

Part I: The Sellers

Turkey — The Disruptor

The modern drone arms trade did not begin in Washington or Tel Aviv. It was turbocharged in Istanbul, in a factory run by a man who married the Turkish president’s daughter.

The Bayraktar TB2, manufactured by Baykar Technologies, is arguably the most consequential weapons platform of the past decade. It is medium-altitude, long-endurance, carries laser-guided precision munitions, can hover for over 24 hours at 18,000 feet, and costs somewhere between $1 million and $2 million per unit — a fraction of the $20 million the United Kingdom paid per unit for American-built Protector drones.

The TB2 was born out of humiliation. The United States refused to sell armed drones to Turkey, citing concerns about their use against Kurdish PKK fighters. Selçuk Bayraktar, an MIT-educated engineer, took that refusal and built a $1.8-billion-a-year export empire from it. By 2024, Baykar earned approximately 90% of its turnover from foreign sales, and Turkey had allegedly captured about 65% of the world’s export market for medium-altitude weapons drones.

The drone has been combat-proven in Syria, Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh, Ukraine, and Ethiopia. In Libya in 2019–2020, TB2s deployed on behalf of the UN-recognised Government of National Accord destroyed Khalifa Haftar’s Pantsir-S1 air defence systems, earning the TB2 the battlefield nickname "Pantsir-hunter". In Azerbaijan in 2020, it eviscerated Armenian armour so comprehensively that political scientist Francis Fukuyama called it the initiator of a new method of war.

Its appeal is structurally simple. As Dr Can Kasapoglu of the Turkish Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy observed, the TB2 offers “an almost perfect price and combat efficiency balance” and comes with “fewer bureaucratic and political hurdles for procurement” than Western competitors. Translation: Turkey asks fewer questions. The drone is combat-tested and comparatively cheap, and the seller is pragmatic about end-users.

Kuwait signed a $370 million contract with Baykar in January 2023. Saudi Arabia inked what Baykar’s CEO called the “biggest defence deal” in Turkey’s history during President Erdoğan’s Gulf visit in 2022. Contracts with Qatar and the UAE have also been signed. Twenty-nine countries now operate Turkish drones, with four more in negotiation.

But there is a problem — one that the industry’s cheerleaders consistently sidestep.

A bipartisan group of 27 U.S. members of Congress wrote to the Biden administration in August 2021, warning that Turkey was “using U.S. technology to fuel drone proliferation around the globe" and that the potential for these drones to “further destabilise flashpoints in the Caucasus, South Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and North Africa is too great.” Their concern was specific: investigations by ProPublica found that components recovered from downed TB2 drones — from antennas to fuel pumps — were manufactured in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Baykar publicly claims the TB2 is almost entirely Turkish-made. The wreckage tells a different story.

This is drone diplomacy with a blind eye built in. Turkey supplies weapons to fragile states while embedding its own geopolitical preferences, framed through what researchers at the Middle East Forum describe as an alignment with “neo-Ottomanism and Islamist solidarity”, into the sale. The buyer gets firepower. Ankara gets leverage. Everyone calls it a transaction.

Iran — The Shadow Supplier

Iran does not sell drones the way Turkey does. Iran proliferates them.

There is a critical distinction. Turkey trades on platforms. Iran trades in ecosystems, drones, components, know-how, training, and assembly factories – delivered through a network of proxies across at least four continents. By early 2024, Tehran had exported drones or drone technology to at least five countries on four continents and to at least seven proxy militias in the Middle East alone.

The U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency reported in 2022 that Iran fielded the largest arsenal of drones and missiles in the Middle East. Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, the DIA director, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that drones are “inexpensive, versatile, and Iran probably believes they sometimes allow for plausible deniability".

That phrase, 'plausible deniability , is the entire business model.

The Shahed-136 is the signature product: an 11-foot-long, delta-wing kamikaze drone sometimes called the “poor man’s cruise missile", carrying a 40-kilogram warhead and capable of flying over 1,000 miles. It is assembled from commercially available components — many sourced from Western countries — making sanctions evasion built into the supply chain. Iran fired 170 of them at Israel in a single night in April 2024. Russia used thousands in Ukraine. The Houthis in Yemen deploy Shahed lookalikes dubbed “Waid” against Red Sea shipping.

The Houthis’ drone campaign represents the clearest illustration of what Iranian proliferation actually produces. According to data from GTTAC, the Houthis conducted 388 drone attacks between 2018 and 2024, targeting the Yemeni government, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, US military forces, and international commercial shipping. The DIA assessed that Houthi activities reduced maritime traffic in the Red Sea by over 90 per cent at peak disruption — affecting 15% of global shipping, with alternate routes adding roughly $1 million in fuel per voyage.

A recent investigation by Conflict Armament Research (CAR) documented over 800 weapons components seized from Houthi-bound shipments, revealing anti-ship missiles, surface-to-air missiles, and underwater weapons. The report’s findings were damning in their specificity: missiles bore Iranian names, arrived as “DIY kits” with coded component identifiers, and only 5% of the 800 documented components actually originated from Iran – the rest came from 16 other countries and territories. Iran orchestrates the supply chain but launders its origin through global commercial networks.

As one analyst quoted by C4ISRNET put it bluntly: “Iran is gearing up to go from arms proliferator to arms seller… ready to share battle-proven but lesser-quality alternatives to current-day military technology at half the price and with no regulatory hang-ups.” The IRGC’s Department 8,000 develops UAVs and provides training to outside forces — a kind of standing franchise operation for asymmetric warfare.

The strategic outcome is that Iran has built itself an ad-hoc air force distributed across six countries — one that can credibly threaten oil infrastructure, naval vessels, and civilian populations, while Tehran retains sufficient distance to deflect direct accountability.

Israel — The Pioneer Who Sells the Method

Israel invented the military drone industry. The IAI Scout, developed in 1981, was used in Lebanon in 1982. By 1992, an Israeli drone had helped pinpoint the location of Hezbollah leader Sheikh Abbas al-Musawi for a targeted killing. By 2024, Israel’s defence export industry was breaking records for the third consecutive year.

The Israel story is more complicated than Turkey’s or Iran’s, because Israel sells both the hardware and the logic of how to use it. Researchers from the World Peace Foundation describe Israeli drones as “combat-proven" and “battle-hardened” — the industry’s own language — but add that what gets exported alongside them is “the logic of violence". Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon: these are not merely conflict zones. They are testing environments whose lessons are then packaged, marketed, and sold to buyers worldwide.

During the 2014 assault on Gaza, Israel rushed to “battle-test” Elbit Systems’ Hermes 900 model, facilitating its subsequent international sales. Israeli defence officials have acknowledged openly that exports soar after military operations – because buyers want weapons that have been used on real targets in real wars. By 2022, drone sales comprised a quarter of all Israeli defence exports, which peaked at $12.5 billion.

The Gaza war that began in October 2023 has accelerated this further. At a December 2025 Israeli defence expo — attended by officials from more than 20 countries — Israeli Colonel Yishai Kohn stated directly that “Israel’s export has been breaking its record for the past three years, each year in a row.” One company, eyesAtop, supplies handheld screens that let soldiers coordinate multiple drone types. Another, Ottopia, produces ground robots that navigate enemy territory using AI. Rafael’s Fire Factory software selects targets algorithmically — a system described by an investigation at +972 Magazine as a “black box” where “whoever approves the attack cannot know what information led to the target’s criminalisation".

South Lebanon has become what Carnegie Endowment researchers describe as a “testing ground for new drone system capabilities". Since the November 2024 ceasefire with Hezbollah, Israel has used drones to carry out what some scholars call a “digital occupation” — daily surveillance, loudspeaker warnings, bag searches of civilians, and targeted killings — without boots on the ground. The extensive drone presence has killed around 300 people since the ceasefire, including over 100 civilians, according to the same Carnegie analysis.

Israel’s position in the drone market is structurally distinct from its competitors. It sells to states, not proxies. It imposes more conditions than Iran and fewer than some Western suppliers. And it continuously updates its inventory in active combat — ensuring its products are always and verifiably the most recently tested on the market.

Part II: The Buyers, and What They’re Actually Buying

Saudi Arabia and the UAE lead Middle Eastern procurement, described in market reports as investing in “ISR, surveillance, and precision strike UAVs to address geopolitical conflicts". That is the sanitised version. The unsanitised version: they are buying the ability to project lethal force without risking the domestic political cost of deploying soldiers.

This is what drones sell, beyond the hardware. They sell distance. They sell what one scholar calls “risk transfer” — the ability to wage war while insulating the governing class from its consequences. When the Saudis used drones in Yemen, the killing happened far from Riyadh. When Iran arms the Houthis, the dying happens in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, not in Tehran. When Israel conducts a drone strike in Lebanon, the pilot might be drinking coffee in a control room in the Negev.

The TB2, dubbed by some the “Kalashnikov of the 21st century", has lowered what the U.S. Army’s Mad Scientist Laboratory called the “entrance fee” to combined arms operations — granting even non-state actors the ability to procure air domain capabilities. That democratisation of lethal air power is not an accident. It is the product.

Part III: The Accountability Vacuum

Here is where the article has to get uncomfortable.

On December 2, 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems — passed with 166 states in favour. The CCW Group of Experts produced a “rolling text” in November 2024 outlining potential regulatory measures. These include maintaining human oversight in targeting decisions, restricting deployment in civilian-dense areas, and incorporating self-deactivation mechanisms.

None of this is binding. None of this has stopped a single strike.

Approximately 60 states — notably excluding Russia and China — endorsed the U.S. State Department’s 2023 “Political Declaration on Responsible Military Use of AI and Autonomy". The Arms Control Association has been direct: the regulatory process “continues to be hindered by geopolitical tensions", and “the longer regulatory efforts are delayed, the more difficult it will be to reverse course once these systems proliferate globally.”

The structural problem is that the countries that are most actively proliferating drones — the United States, Turkey, Israel, Iran, and China — are the same countries with the most to lose from genuine regulation. They are also the countries with the most influence over whether such regulation ever materialises.

Meanwhile, the market absorbs the human cost as an externality. When a Houthi drone attacked Tower 22, a U.S. outpost in Jordan, on January 28, 2024, it killed three American soldiers and wounded more than 40. When Iranian drones hit the Abqaiq oil facility in 2019, they temporarily crippled nearly half of Saudi Arabia’s petroleum output. When Israeli drones kill civilians in Lebanon — and the Carnegie Endowment has documented this happening repeatedly since the ceasefire — Lebanon files cases with the UN, which produces no enforcement.

Existing international humanitarian law applies, in principle, to drone warfare. The gaps, as legal scholars at the American Society of International Law have noted, lie in “specificity and enforcement". Translating the laws of war into code — deciding in an algorithm when a human is “directly participating in hostilities” — is not a technical problem waiting for a better engineer. It is a moral and legal problem that the industry has deliberately framed as technical to avoid answering it.

Part IV: What the Bazaar Has Produced

Step back and look at what 15 years of drone proliferation in the Middle East has actually delivered.

• Yemen is in ruins, with the Houthis — armed through Iranian supply chains — having conducted nearly 400 drone attacks since 2018, paralysing Red Sea shipping and killing civilians across multiple countries.
• Lebanon is under what researchers describe as a remote occupation — daily drone surveillance, targeted killings, and psychological intimidation — conducted without a single Israeli soldier entering population centers.
• Iran has built what the DIA called the largest drone and missile arsenal in the Middle East, distributed across seven proxy militias, and has graduated from being an arms customer to an arms proliferator moving toward open commercial sales.
• Turkey has used drone sales to expand its geopolitical footprint across three continents, selling to states that face Western embargoes, and in doing so has embedded unstable bilateral dependencies across North Africa, the Gulf, and Central Asia.
• Israel has transformed its military operations into a continuous product demonstration — Gaza and Lebanon as live-fire R&D — and is breaking its own export records every year.

The Drone Warfare Market is valued at approximately $29.2 billion globally in 2025 and is projected to reach $75.8 billion by 2035. These are not projections of stability. They are projections of demand driven by ongoing and anticipated conflict.

The Argument No One Is Making

The standard defences of drone proliferation run as follows: drones reduce soldier casualties; precision weapons minimise collateral damage; states have a right to self-defence; technology cannot be uninvented.

Each of these has partial validity. And each of them is being used to avoid a more honest accounting.

Drones do reduce the risk to the operators. They transfer the risk entirely to the populations being surveilled and targeted — with no equivalent reduction in their vulnerability and no increase in their recourse. The argument that precision reduces collateral damage depends entirely on accurate targeting, and the AI targeting systems currently in use — including Israel’s “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy” programmes reported by +972 Magazine — are not transparent to the humans nominally approving them. The right to self-defence does not extend to arming proxy militias across four continents and calling it foreign policy. And “technology cannot be uninvented” is not a regulatory position. It is a surrender.

What is actually operating in the Middle East is a market without an ombudsman. The sellers are motivated by profit and geopolitical ambition. The buyers are motivated by security concerns, regime survival, and the irresistible appeal of projecting lethal force at low cost and low risk. The civilians on the ground are not parties to any of these transactions.

The bazaar is open. The prices are dropping. The accountability gap is widening. And the only people who seem to have no seat at the table are the ones taking the strikes.