We commonly hear that when OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google trained their frontier AI models, they “scraped the Internet.” But this euphemistic framing strategically obscures the more pernicious reality that what these companies actually did was furtively extract cultural knowledge from across the globe, including Korean traditional painting techniques, Arabic calligraphy styles, Indigenous ceremonial imagery, African textile patterns, and much more. All of that human art and knowledge, now stored in Silicon Valley, was “lifted” (stolen) without permission, compensation, or acknowledgment in order to build privatized, large language model (LLM) systems for profit. Today, the databases powering American AI systems contain billions of images, texts, and audio recordings that represent centuries of non-Western cultural production, and while it is easy to point to the issue of copyright infringement here, what we are arguably faced with is a new form of cultural imperialism in which American technological dominance enables the mass appropriation of cultural heritage under the guise of “training data.”

Consider the LAION-5B dataset, which trained Stable Diffusion, one of the most widely used generative AI models. Researchers analyzing its contents found a massive overrepresentation of Western imagery alongside the systematic extraction of non-Western cultural materials which include, among other things, museum collections from Seoul and Cairo digitized for public access, now training commercial AI; sacred Indigenous imagery from communities that never consented to digital reproduction; and contemporary artists from the Global South whose Instagram posts became training data for systems that could replicate (and devalue) their labor.1 Unsurprisingly, the economics of this situation are scandalously lopsided because American AI companies like OpenAI (valued at over $80 billion) and Anthropic (valued at $18 billion) basically capture all the value while international communities whose knowledge trained these systems receive nothing whatsoever. When Korean artists organized protests in Seoul last year after discovering their work in various AI training datasets, OpenAI’s response was as ridiculous as it was telling—the company claimed that training on publicly available data is “transformative use” protected under American law. But why should American legal frameworks govern the appropriation of Korean cultural production? This absurd premise was simply taken for granted.2

There is a comparison to be observed here with British courts that validated the appropriation of colonized lands and resources through doctrines like terra nullius. At present, American tech companies like OpenAI are content to invoke their alleged right to “fair use” and “data scraping” in order to legitimize cultural appropriation at a mass scale. It is hard to see how this is fundamentally different from the structures of colonial metropolitan law, which expediently justified resource extraction from the peripheries according to its own dictates (and, certainly, with no concern for those directly affected or harmed). Perhaps the only difference is speed and scope; extraction and theft by gunboats and a complex administrative machinery is a lot harder than by server farms and web crawlers.3

What makes this extractivism distinctly American is not just that most AI companies are U.S.-based (they are), but how deeply it reflects American ideologies about information, property, and cultural production. Silicon Valley’s “information wants to be free” ethos, which stems from California counterculture and libertarian economics, treats cultural knowledge like a natural resource waiting to be captured and optimized. That different societies might have alternative frameworks for governing cultural materials is simply dismissed as backwards protectionism.4 So the troubling implications extend beyond the discrete economics of AI extraction; there is also a moral dimension to be considered in the question of cultural sovereignty, or the right of communities to control their own knowledge and determine how it circulates. When Stability AI trained models on images from the Smithsonian’s collections of Native American ceremonial objects, for example, they violated not just copyright but Indigenous protocols governing sacred knowledge transmission. Items usually restricted from photography in physical museums are now freely reproducible through AI, and there is no mechanism for communities to enforce traditional governance as a preventative measure.5

Through my own work at South Korea’s National Assembly, and in organizing international AI-governance forums, I have similarly observed how Korean artists working with traditional minhwa (folk painting) are despairing that they can do nothing about the fact that their techniques (which are passed down through generations and refined over decades of practice) are being reproduced by AI systems that anyone is able to access for $20 a month. Across Asia, artists and creators are realizing they are in a similar bind, including Chinese calligraphers and Japanese ukiyo-e artists who are finding that their distinctive styles are being replicated instantly through basic text prompts. There is some resistance emerging, but it is incomplete. South Korea’s 2024 Act on the Promotion of the Arts, which I helped research during my time at the National Assembly, establishes legal infrastructure for collective cultural data governance. The law mandates authentication systems, creates resale rights requiring royalty payments, and establishes a national art database, thus establishing the foundations for what we call “cultural data trusts.”6

Data trusts enable communities to pool their data rights and exercise them collectively by creating bargaining power against tech giants. This simply means that instead of individual artists negotiating separately with OpenAI or Anthropic—David versus Goliath at a global scale—cultural data trusts negotiate on behalf of entire communities in order to secure fair compensation, attribution requirements, prohibited uses, and ongoing monitoring. They represent a fundamentally different model from American platforms’ “terms of service” approach where users either accept extraction or are ignored and excluded.7

Outside of South Korea and Asia, Indigenous communities worldwide are also helping to lead this resistance. The Local Contexts initiative developed by Māori and First Nations communities, fo example, creates Traditional Knowledge Labels and Biocultural Labels that assert community governance over digital cultural materials. These labels explicitly challenge Western intellectual property frameworks embedded in American AI development by insisting that cultural knowledge belongs to communities and not corporations or “the commons.”8 Canada’s approach represents yet another path that emphasizes rebalancing power and recognizes that when individual creators negotiate with American platform monopolies, structural inequality makes genuine consent impossible. Their proposed framework would require AI companies operating in Canada to license training data through registered cultural data trusts or face significant penalties. These are just some ways impacted communities are trying to assert national sovereignty over their cultural governance against American tech dominance.

All of this is to say that the struggle over AI training data should be seen in the broader context of American power in the twenty-first century if it is to be properly understood. If military and financial institutions largely underpinned and defined U.S. dominance in the twentieth century, there is a case to be made that, today, that power increasingly operates through data extraction and infrastructure. Consider the fact that the Pentagon’s global base network is mirrored by Amazon Web Services’ data centers, or that the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment programs find a parallel in “terms of service” that frame and define creative labor worldwide. All of this creates serious challenges for the prospect of resistance, for how exactly do you pursue the nebulous undertaking of “resisting” structures you depend on daily? For example, Korean artists need Instagram to reach global audiences, but Instagram’s parent company, Meta, uses their posts to train AI. And many museums the world over must digitize collections for preservation and access, but as the above examples show, digitization clearly makes them vulnerable to extractive scraping.

Some recent, preliminary governmental responses to this problem include the EU AI Act, which demonstrates how regulatory power can constrain American tech companies by requiring transparency about training data and establishing accountability for AI harms. Similarly, China’s approach (though problematic in other dimensions) shows how states can build alternative AI ecosystems not dominated by Silicon Valley. Additionally, grassroots movements worldwide are creating peer governance structures that bypass American platforms entirely.9 These are all positive efforts, but the question remains as to whether these forms of resistance can coalesce into systematic alternatives or if they are destined to remain fragmented and therefore easily absorbed by platform capitalism. American AI companies have proven adept at co-opting critique (think “ethical AI” initiatives, “responsible innovation” rhetoric, and diversity programs) while maintaining extractive structures, and breaking this pattern will require more than “better regulation,” as it were, but entirely different imaginaries about how technology, culture, and power should relate.

From Seoul, I restlessly watch how American AI development is reshaping global cultural production. The generative models trained on scraped data are morphing things rapidly. When AI can generate passable Korean traditional painting, Indonesian batik patterns, and Persian miniatures instantly and cheaply, what happens to artists who spent decades mastering these traditions? How do non-Western artistic traditions survive? These are questions of civilizational import that cannot be ignored because if American companies control the infrastructure determining how cultural knowledge is stored, accessed, and reproduced, they effectively control the conditions of cultural possibility globally. Resisting this requires asserting cultural sovereignty in digital contexts. This includes the right of communities to govern their own cultural knowledge, to determine acceptable and prohibited uses, and to participate in technological development as partners rather than data sources. The cultural data trusts emerging in South Korea, Canada, and Indigenous communities worldwide represent one model for this sovereignty, but they remain imperfect, experimental, and face ongoing challenges. Still, they demonstrate that American AI companies’ extractive model is not inevitable, and that with institutional innovation and political will, alternative futures remain possible.

The story of America in the twenty-first century is inseparable from the story of American technology companies reshaping global culture. Tackling the new American extractivism head-on has to happen if we are going to imagine and create more equitable digital futures. What we should be chiefly and collectively thinking about is less whether AI will transform cultural production (it will), and more whether that transformation will serve diverse global communities or continue to concentrate power and profit in Silicon Valley. Cultural data trusts offer one path toward the former. Whether we take it is a political choice we have to make now.

A writer commenting on “slop” in 2026 is akin to a comedian opining on Donald Trump in 2016. The absurdity of the moment is self-evident, the punchlines practically write themselves, and people can’t get enough of it. Be it essays on “LLM-speak” or furious opinion pieces about AI winning prizes for fiction writing, we seem to be inundated both by slop and increasingly predictable responses from its detractors. Making sense of our tenuous cultural moment may require stepping back and situating the “slop” phenomenon within a broader context of American production.

Slop is often defined as low-quality digital content that is completely or partly generated by an artificial intelligence tool like Grok or ChatGPT. The tools are numerous, but the function—producing quick, automated output, often to turn a quick buck—is all the same. To understand the prevalence and significance of slop requires an assessment of where it comes from. If we look at slop as an approach to production, as opposed to the specific digital output of some AI tool, we can start to understand it with greater clarity, approach it soberly, curb it, and—as is necessary or possible—remove it.

Slop is what it is because it has been produced by a tool that, by design, attempts to flatten, homogenize and create simulacra of what humans may create. Yet these processes are not unique to AI and LLM tools. They exist in various other forms, and the examples are everywhere. Consider McDonald’s, fast-food’s poster child. It may be likened to AI slop in that it flattens, homogenizes, and produces a simulacrum of wholesome food. Be it fast fashion, fast food, or fast content, the urge to produce quickly, produce more, and produce at a lower cost is as American as apple pie. Perhaps we should have anticipated the prevalence of AI slop.

Put simply, slop is a product of American empire. America is where the technologies that produce slop originate—where the “hard science” happens, as it were. Yet even as the infrastructure of slop is American (for now, at least), its presence and effects are certainly global. In the cultural sphere, the same empire that pioneered formulaic cinema (a type of pre-AI slop) and was responsible for the Disneyfication phenomenon (a type of slop-city) was copied the world over. Is it any surprise that “slop content” has similarly exceeded its American locale into all corners of the globe? These are not minor developments; Disneyfication, for example, represents the soft power of American empire. It is therefore worth considering how slop might be more than an anodyne inconvenience.

If slop was not effective, it would not exist. Coco Krumme’s Optimal Illusions: The False Promise of Optimization may give us some clues as to where slop as a way of producing originates. Though written and published just before the slop explosion, Krumme’s central thesis is that the concept of “optimization”—which has its roots in mathematics and engineering—now plays an outsized role in society writ large. This fact is arguably much more visible now than when she first published her book; our algorithms are full of advice on how to optimize our bodies, our schedules, and our work. Through a case study on optimization in agriculture, Krumme argues that efficiency has been “deified” and that the specialization of food production that allowed forlower prices also made fast food possible. Analogously, cheaper, quicker methods of producing research, writing, and entertainment have made slop not only possible, but allowed it to proliferate. The problem here is not that a particular technology has made certain processes easier or more affordable. It is, rather, that the effects of AI are not isolated to the technology’s undeniably useful processes—they are totalizing. There is no life-saving AI-assisted medical diagnosis without disturbing AI cartoons aimed at children running endlessly on YouTube Shorts; these are of a piece.

An interesting distinction Krumme makes between optimization and capitalism is that the former is “top down” while the latter is “bottom up.” With optimization, we start off with the answer to which all processes, guardrails, and variables must combine to produce a singular optimized output. Contrastingly, in capitalism, the market is allowed to “decide” the allocation of resources such that the “answer” arrives at the end of the process. The parallels here to an AI prompt are almost perfect and prescient. Based on the constraints built into a prompt, an AI tool can give you a plethora of results—we start with the answer before the path is traced.

Krumme says that “the wrangling of the world into mathematical models required a set of conceptual shifts that settled into our mathematics over the past centuries.”1 The first of these shifts pertains to the atomization of reality, in which the world becomes something “divided, conquered, measured, and mined.”2 It is hard to ignore the Enlightenment roots of this way of seeing the world. Be it in a novel or a motion picture, many of us increasingly approach a great story less as the messy product of a flawed, unique, and visionary mind, but more as the sum of tiny parts for which we can optimize. Each scene transition—indeed, each word—can be optimized by AI. If the prompt we start with functions to “optimize”—to entertain, to win a literary prize, or to amass ticket sales—then the art itself is secondary. The entire culture becomes beholden to the prompts being written by those with the existing resources to distribute the outputs. As Krumme puts it, “optimization is agnostic to its context. Whether we want productivity or emotional connection, sweet lemonade or sour, the mathematics is the same.”3

The bifurcation of part and whole driven by the culture of optimization makes us lose sight of the hazy mystery of artistic production. In Krumme’s words, it casts aside “things that weren’t readily divisible.”4 So much of slop sits in this gray mean of easily divisible, digestible matter—ingredients just real enough to fend off starvation, but by no means a nourishing diet. Are we forever trapped in this false purgatory?

Given how increasingly health-conscious the public has seemed to become over the last two decades, and with the prevalence of food-critical documentaries like Supersize Me and Cowspiracy, one might be forgiven for believing that the end of fast food was near. In reality, McDonald’s still stands tall as among the most recognizable American brand names globally, and fast food remains a lucrative industry in most major economies. As public sentiment coalesced around the value and importance of healthy food, the market quickly responded with renewed advertising campaigns and met the pressure of documentaries like Cowspiracy, for example, by introducing an explosion of new dairy alternative products. But market adjustments arising from people reacting negatively to the ills of slop are arguably harder to achieve, in part because AI functions to metabolize and utilize all dissent; it will use our well-argued, angry writing about slop to produce refined slop that limits our understanding at best, or manipulates it at worst.

Limiting our consumption of slop is easier said than done, but perhaps one way in which the excesses of our AI-induced culture may be resisted is through the unglamorous halls of policymaking. Producers of fast food are in a seemingly endless tussle with domestic and international regulators regarding additives and ingredients. The pressure these legislative bodies put on producers to ensure better health outcomes, and the results that pressure creates, can often be taken for granted. Public discussions on ultra-processed food, sugar consumption, or specific additives find their way into policy or policy-adjacent arenas the world over. In this way, rigorous research, academic work, and public forums that expose the ills of AI can ensure some level of pushback against the gargantuan tech companies who make slop possible in the first place.

It is likely that we will soon see more research funded by Big Tech that conveniently argues that its own excesses and dangers are overstated, and that these slop-producing technologies possess “scientifically proven” benefits that will usher in an era of unheralded abundance for us all. Academics, activists, and researchers must therefore aim to leverage a well-funded counterattack (or perhaps a preemptive strike) that the main agents of slop may not be prepared for.

Aside from public criticism and struggling with regulators, fast food has also been a victim of the flattening it champions in its own kitchens. The slop cities and towns that produce gray blocks to house fast food restaurants and shops are becoming far less appealing than the colorful restaurants of the 1990s. The soullessness of the retail park mirrors the emptiness of LLM writing filling a gray book sleeve. Even without pushback or policy changes, the blandness of slop itself could be part of its undoing.

It may be that as the human spirit is increasingly tainted by slop, we will come to know that the technologies which produce it are gratuitous at best and ruinous at worst. This may be wishful thinking, and the damage of a numbed audience may already be done, but one can hope that there are enough people who remember a time before the reign of optimized culture took hold.

Sana Saeed joins Protean View to discuss what it means to be a journalist and how journalists of various political stripes have responded to the genocide in Gaza.

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Readings

Why Bari Weiss Wins

Don’t Let Tucker Carlson Set the Narrative

“We the People,” as the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution declares, are simultaneously sovereigns and subjects, a multitude of individuals that govern as a unified collective. Of course, despite its inescapable centrality to the American national project, social and political access to the category of personhood has never been a straightforward or settled matter. The question of who counted as a legal person, and especially the question of how one’s legal personhood could be rendered as legible and actionable, had been vigorously contested long before 1776—and both questions remain deeply fraught 250 years later.

Personhood was overtly bounded in the Constitution in 1788 by the delineation of slaves (“those bound to Service for a Term of Years”) as “three fifths of all other Persons,” in order to preserve Southern political privilege without extending the full privileges of citizenship to Black slaves. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 54: “We must deny the fact, that slaves are considered merely as property, and in no respect whatever as persons. The true state of the case is, that they partake of both these qualities: being considered by our laws, in some respects, as persons, and in other respects as property … The federal Constitution, therefore, decides with great propriety on the case of our slaves, when it views them in the mixed character of persons and of property. This is in fact their true character.” Such exclusion-based definitions of personhood, and the long fight to expand them across multiple categories including race and gender, are prominent features in mainstream U.S. political and historical discourse.

Yet here, I want to highlight a particular category of personhood that has evolved in a stealthier yet no less foundational form in American history: corporate personhood. Though the legal notion of corporations as juridical persons has deep roots in early modern European law, I trace two features of corporate personhood in the U.S. context: 1) the legal empowerment by the Supreme Court of business corporations as political actors with political rights, and 2) the emergence of defense contractors as a distinct class of corporate actors that have actively remade the practice of state sovereignty through insulation from liability. Corporations do not simply confound the well-known binary categories of governmental vs. corporate power, political vs. economic power, public vs. private spheres, and domestic vs. foreign spheres. Instead, corporations have functioned as the hinges operationalizing these distinctions. Further, through their pursuit of legal and political privileges to conduct business, I suggest that corporations continue to powerfully shape access to what I call the right to political corporeality—namely, the ability of non-corporate collectives to meaningfully challenge the corporate prerogatives of liability, profit-seeking, and resource extraction.

The Body Politic, Incorporated

The word “corporation” in our contemporary moment tends to evoke a particular assemblage of political imagery: large multinational companies, economic globalization, neoliberal capitalism, labor unions, and union-busting organizations. Corporations now are almost exclusively thought of as publicly-traded, privately-profiting entities that operate at an industrial and global scale. However, corporations have existed in varying configurations since the Roman Empire, as trading companies, monarchical charters, and sovereign grants. Especially in their medieval and early-modern European iterations, corporations represented what political theorist Joshua Barkan calls a “specifically liberal and decentralized” mode of sovereignty. “Corporations are fictions, created by states, but given such social power that they threaten to undermine the political sovereignty that created them,” argues Barkan. Corporations are one means by which states “attempt to marshal the collective power of individuals toward public ends by granting them a special legal status.” Therefore, as Barkan puts it, “corporate power should be rethought as a mode of political sovereignty.” Corporations and states have historically modeled each other’s defining features: nation-states have taken on corporate management techniques and embraced values such as market efficiency, while corporations have mobilized to build infrastructure, provide municipal services such as schools and hospitals, and conducted international diplomacy. Political and corporate governance can thus be thought of as co-constitutive rather than separate or adversarial modalities of power.

Indeed, though the U.S. Constitution is usually considered a social contract, political scientist David Ciepley argues that it is better understood as a “popularly issued corporate charter—an innovative but logical step in the tradition of sovereigns delegating governing authority by corporate charter.” The three components Ciepley identifies as essential to American constitutionalism—popular sovereignty, a written constitution, and judicial review—were in fact derived from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century corporate precedents. After all, as Ciepley points out, the two most politically significant and influential American colonies, Virginia and Massachusetts, “began as literal corporations,” as the Virginia Company and the Massachusetts Bay Company: “To catalyze modern, American-style constitutional government, only their chartering sovereign had to be changed (although more was changed than this).”

Reframing the Constitution in terms of a corporate charter is useful in locating the definitional character of corporations as a genre of political collectivity. To incorporate is to be given a body, a corporeal form—as indeed the Constitution does, incorporating “We the People” as both sides of the contract, the promisers as well as the promises of “Justice,” “Tranquility,” “the common defense,” “general Welfare,” and the “Blessings of Liberty.” This framing also illuminates the political stakes of corporate power: corporations, as collectives, have gained legal recognition of rights in the United States that empower their juridical persons in ways that violently supersede and suppress the rights of non-corporate individual and collective human persons. Four Supreme Court cases—from 1809, 1886, 2010, and 2014—together offer a glimpse into the broad arc of how American corporate personhood has evolved from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

Bank of the United States v. Deveaux (1809) was the first time the Court was asked to explicitly determine whether business corporations had access to constitutional protections—in this instance, to the right to sue in federal court on the grounds of diversity under Article III. As legal historian Adam Winkler shows, Chief Justice John Marshall’s majority opinion did not affirm corporate personhood outright; but the ruling’s conception of a corporation as an association of people “would prove far more influential” in “justifying the expansion of individual rights to corporations over the next two centuries.” Business corporations are fictional entities, not flesh-and-blood humans; but the corporation, under Bank of the United States, could have rights derived from those of its constituent members.

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. (1886) most significantly addressed (or, rather, declined to address) whether corporations were included in the Fourteenth Amendment right of citizenship and equal protection under the law. The case’s scope encompassed several interlocking developments in the immediate wake of the Civil War, as legal historian Evelyn Atkinson explicates: heated debates about the role of government in regulating profitable, federally-subsidized railroad monopolies, the social responsibilities of private companies, new general incorporation statutes that offered broader individual access to incorporation status, and of course, the scope and limits of the post-war Constitutional amendments enshrining the expanded legal personhood of former slaves. The Court’s unanimous decision in favor of the railroads did not substantively engage the question of Fourteenth Amendment protections. Instead, a headnote written by the Reporter of Decisions and approved by Chief Justice Morrison Waite explicitly declined to hear arguments on whether the Amendment applied, because “all of the Judges were of the opinion that it does.” This backdoor precedent, amending one of the most robust articulations of legal personhood in American history, was then cited wholesale in future Court decisions—enshrining the right to equal legal protection for business corporations without meaningful debate. Writes Atkinson: “Corporate lawyers quickly realized that an expansive interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment would benefit their corporate clients as well.”

These nineteenth century decisions were more or less upheld in their conceptual assumptions throughout the twentieth century, albeit to a complex multitude of ends. For example, Atkinson points out the role of corporate rights litigation in combating racial discrimination. But more often, modern business corporations have leveraged access to constitutional protections to strike down progressive economic reforms that benefited workers and organized labor. As a result, by the early twenty-first century, corporations have come to weaponize First Amendment rights to free speech and religious freedom in ways that curb individual and non-corporate collective exercises of those same rights.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), decided in a controversial 5-4 ruling, affirmed a conservative nonprofit organization’s right to spend its money on political fundraising, contrary to century-long precedents restricting corporate and union lobbying on behalf of political campaigns. By rendering political spending limits as First Amendment violations, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion equated capital to speech—which has empowered super PACs and “dark money” to flood the American electoral system. Four years later, the Court’s similarly contentious 5-4 ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014) exempted privately-held, for-profit companies from federal regulations to which owners object on religious grounds. This case, which concerned mandated contraception coverage under the Affordable Care Act, did not only extend First Amendment rights to corporate persons. It also indirectly lent legal cover to the politico-legal movement for fetal personhood, which contends that life begins at conception and, in its most extreme interpretation, criminalizes reproductive health care.

Both Citizens United and Hobby Lobby were widely criticized for, in the words of a 2014 statement by the Brennan Center for Justice, “once again [advancing] the personhood rights of some corporations to the detriment of actual human beings.” But corporate “persons” in the United States have access to more than expanding individual constitutional rights. As I demonstrate in the following section, corporations—more than individual citizens or any other kind of non-corporate collective—are able to make unique claims to sovereign status, which can shield them from accountability, transparency, and ultimately, responsibility for the consequences of their “personal” actions. Nowhere is this relation more vividly exemplified than in the case of U.S. defense contractors.

Sovereign Immunity, Incorporated

Modern U.S. defense contracting developed as a bureaucratic mechanism for industrial-scale military procurement of aircraft, weaponry, and raw materials during the Second World War. Throughout the Cold War, the “military-industrial complex” (as it was termed by President Eisenhower in 1961) continued to develop and produce increasingly sophisticated military technology of critical strategic value, while functioning as domestic engines of local and regional economic growth. Preceding and then dovetailing with the broader “neoliberal turn” of the 1970s and 1980s, outsourcing of governmental services across sectors through privatization became common practice. The twenty-first century, however, brought a sea change in the scale of defense contracting and public spending. The Bush administration’s Global War on Terror triggered a military sector bonanza that marshaled so many private contractors across infrastructure construction, research and development, technology and communications services, and military logistics that not even the Secretary of Defense could keep an accurate count of them. The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars were the most privatized in U.S. history, with a contractor-to-soldier ratio on the ground in both countries reaching and sometimes exceeding 1:1. Contemporary “Big Tech” giants such as Google and Palantir also benefited handsomely from this massive investment of public resources into national security.

Though precise numbers can be difficult to come by, the Costs of War Project estimates that from 2001 through 2022, U.S. post-9/11 war spending amounts to about $8 trillion total. Between 2020 and 2024—a period during which the U.S. was not formally declared to be at war with any nation—policy analysts William Hartung and Stephen Semler calculate that 54% of the Pentagon’s discretionary spending budget of $4.4 trillion went to military contractors, with $771 billion going to just five firms (Lockheed Martin, RTX/Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman).

Defense contractors seem ostensibly to occupy a niche among corporations for this institutional proximity to the military and the outsized U.S. defense budget. Private security contractors in particular gained notorious reputations as modern mercenaries, war profiteers, and obstacles to diplomacy during the Iraq War. Yet, that seemingly exceptional positionality of defense contractors is what makes them useful in mapping the outer limits and thus capacious possibilities of corporate power. As profit-driven businesses that often depend on government financing outright, or as a result of large government purchases, defense contractors can function as hybrid public-private entities capable of raising enough capital to invest in complex technological research and development. As government contractors, they can undertake functions of governance as delegates on the state’s behalf without being subject to the same regulations or standards of public disclosure. And, as important players in the national security sphere, the U.S. government and military have an especially vested interest in helping defense contractors succeed—an interest that defense contractors have leveraged to pioneer novel forms of liability protection.

One form of liability protection came through legislative means that quickly congealed into political and legal precedent. In 1971, Lockheed was the first private corporation to receive a federal bail-out through the Emergency Loan Guarantee Act to rescue it from bankruptcy with $250 million in bank loans. In heated Congressional debates, Lockheed’s skeptics accused it of poor management and argued that it should declare bankruptcy like any other failing company. Yet Lockheed’s supporters, such as Sen. Alan Cranston (D-CA), argued that the U.S. government had “considerable responsibility” for helping a company that answered “a call to arms to help equip the national for national defense.” The controversial 49-48 Senate vote to bail out Lockheed was championed by President Nixon as a measure “in the best interests of all the people,” on the grounds that it would save thousands of jobs and preserve a key strategic supplier. The bail-out was arguably a landmark progenitor for the “too big to fail” doctrine that later helped justify the 2008 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, which bailed out auto industry corporations along with banks and credit institutions. The precedent set by Lockheed as a defense contractor allowed corporations of large-enough size to be able to claim that their financial well-being was so essential to the health of the nation that they deserved infusions of public capital to continue existing in their current form.

A second, possibly even more consequential form of corporate liability protection has been the legal doctrine of derivative sovereign immunity. The Supreme Court established precedent in Yearsley v. W. A. Ross Construction Co. (1940), a case in which petitioners sought damages for land erosion as a result of a government-contracted construction company building dikes in the Missouri River. The Court ruled that contractors carrying out work “authorized and directed by governmental officers” could not be held liable for “executing [the Government’s] will.” In other words, as long as contractors were acting on governmental authority within the scope of a Congressionally-valid contract, they were legally shielded by sovereign immunity, i.e., the common law doctrine under which the U.S. federal and state governments cannot be sued except under specific circumstances.

The Yearsley case’s understanding of derivative sovereign immunity mostly held over the course of the twentieth century. A 1988 Supreme Court case, Boyle v. United Technologies Corp., complemented Yearsley, ruling that wherever state law conflicted significantly with federal policy in “an area of uniquely federal interest,” the federal contractor could not be held liable under state law. But in the twenty-first century—arguably due to the dramatically increased role and visibility of federal contracting in contemporary American governance—several high-profile court cases tested the legal bounds of sovereign immunity for corporations under government contracts.

Recent decisions in Al Shimari v. CACI (2026), Hencely v. Fluor Corp. (2026), and GEO Group, Inc. v. Menocal (2026) denied blanket, preemptive immunity claims from major U.S. government contractors. Corporations cannot entirely preempt torts liability, even in a war zone, nor can they immediately appeal a district court’s denials of derivative sovereign immunity. However, a decade of protracted litigation against the Army logistics contractor KBR for exposing thousands of U.S. veterans and civilian contractors to toxic smoke from burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan set another precedent in 2019. In that case, the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that because KBR operated its burn pits under U.S. military direction, the company was shielded by both derivative sovereign immunity and the political question doctrine. On the whole, even with nuancing restrictions, corporate persons retain the right to functionally act as federal sovereigns in order to avoid legal challenges from individual persons, and even from state governments and lower courts.

The expansive nature of the “sovereign shield” presents serious normative ramifications for what legal scholars Kate Sablosky Elengold and Jonathan Glater call the “delicate balance among the executive branch, the legislative branch, states, corporations, and consumers.” Private contractors and the federal executive branch, Elengold and Glater argue, symbiotically empower each other to circumvent torts exposure, legislative oversight, and regulatory regimes. Both parties benefit from outsourcing labor and dodging public transparency imperatives; and “these sly, sideways moves reduce the powers of individuals and states out of sight of public scrutiny or democratic accountability.” Put another way: derivative sovereign immunity allows corporations to fundamentally reorient the practice of political sovereignty in the United States, thus further granting corporate persons with legal technologies of governance beyond what individuals and non-corporate collectivities have been able to access.

The Right to Political Corporeality

The long legal and historical arc of corporate personhood in the United States is of course more textured and complex than this brief essay can address. Similarly, the myriad implications of corporate personhood on the present and future of American politics is beyond my current scope. By way of conclusion, however, I posit that corporate personhood is in part so potent as legal doctrine because it successfully establishes a right to political corporeality—a prerogative to imbue its collective body with rights of action (and sometimes inaction) that exceed the sum of its constituent parts. Corporations are not and have never been the only kind of associational vehicle available to human persons. Yet, as the rights of technology companies to build profitable data centers threatens to supersede the rights of low-income communities’ to clean water, and as the rights of the U.S. defense industry to export profitable weapons technology to Israel continues to supersede the rights of Palestinians to exist—the imperative to organize effective, life-affirming counter-collectives becomes that much more urgent.

Dear Readers,

America is in the news again—it always is. Headlines celebrating the 2026 World Cup and the nation’s semiquincentennial run alongside grimmer ones about Iran, Gaza, ICE, and other issues in which U.S. action and policy are continuously, and often violently, implicated. Americans are celebrating and grieving in the same breath, and they’re still debating what America means, where it ends, and what its future holds.

This issue is our small contribution to that debate. The essays here look at American militarism, foreign policy, technology, capitalism, and exceptionalism through the lens of a word we’re hearing with increasing frequency: multipolarity. And we’ve tried not to let the conversation stay inside America’s borders. Several pieces come from international writers whose lives are directly shaped by decisions made in America but felt everywhere else.

As always, we’re releasing these essays gradually over the course of the month. The first two are up now.

We’re ad-free and independent, which means we depend entirely on you, dear reader. If this issue is worth something to you, consider subscribing or donating to keep us going, and share these essays with others to help us grow. For more America beyond the America issue, you can also check out our podcast episodes on the U.S. border, the Christian Right, and the fabled fascism debate.

With gratitude,

The Muftah Team

Where Does America End?

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

Mali and Syria: Similarities, Differences, and the War on Terror

Alex Thurston

Corporate Personhood and the Right to Political Corporeality

Zaynab Quadri

American Slop and the Empire of Optimization

Jamal Mehmood

How American AI Companies Are Colonizing Global Cultural Heritage

Mika (Jaeyun) Noh

For Syria’s Ahmad al-Sharaa and Mali’s Iyad ag Ghali, 2017 was a pivotal year. As skilled strategists and remarkable survivors, both men took leadership of new coalitions which led to profound change in the civil wars plaguing their respective countries. Al-Sharaa’s Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, or literally “Syria Liberation Organization”), freshly decoupled from al-Qaeda, embarked on a “mainstreamization” effort by shedding its most radical commitments and embracing pragmatism and technocracy. It was this coalition that eventually toppled longtime Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024. Today, al-Sharaa is Syria’s head of state.

Similar to al-Sharaa, in 2017 Ag Ghali supervised the formation of a coalition called Jama‘at Nusrat al-Islam wa-l-Muslimin (JNIM, or literally “the Group for Supporting Islam and Muslims”) which focused its energies on attacking Malian and Burkinabè security forces, contesting the presence of French troops in the Sahel, and participating in brutal intercommunal wars. On April 25 of this year, JNIM unleashed an astonishing series of attacks across more than 1,500 kilometers of Malian territory, from the capital Bamako in the south to the storied town of Kidal deep in the Sahara. The attacks underscored the ruling junta’s weakness, killed the defense minister, and returned Kidal—whose 2023 conquest was the Malian military’s greatest accomplishment in recent years—to rebel hands.

Analysts and journalists have accordingly debated whether JNIM will soon follow the “Syria model.” Yet the discussion is strikingly narrow. What, after all, is the “Syria model”? Much of the recent debate has focused on whether JNIM would break with al-Qaeda, reduce its attacks on civilians, and seek to rule Mali in a way that neighboring states and Western powers might tolerate. While these features certainly defined HTS leading up to its overthrow of Assad, the “Syria model” is not just about ideological deradicalization; it is also about neoliberalism and the containment of revolution.

HTS: Coalition-Building, Technocracy, and Pragmatism

Al-Sharaa’s personal arc is fairly well established: the son of a doctorate-holding economist who worked for the petroleum ministries of Syria and Saudi Arabia, he fought in Iraq as part of the loose al-Qaeda affiliate there in the 2000s and led the expeditionary jihadist force Jabhat al-Nusra (“Support Front”) in Syria amid the early stages of the revolution. When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Ayman al-Zawahiri clashed over control of the insurgency in Iraq and Syria, al-Sharaa sided with al-Zawahiri and al-Qaeda against what became the Islamic State (ISIS). Eclipsed by ISIS in infamy and brutality, Jabhat al-Nusra nevertheless committed numerous war crimes in the early 2010s, including executions of civilians.

In 2015, Jabhat al-Nusra participated in capturing Idlib, a provincial capital in northwest Syria. In 2016, in a display of pragmatism meant to attract partners among Syria’s armed groups, Jabhat al-Nusra became Jabhat Fath al-Sham (“Syria Conquest Front”) and dropped all external affiliations, including any formal ties to al-Qaeda. In early 2017, the group renamed itself once again, to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, and announced the formation of its “Salvation Government” later that year.

The Salvation Government had a self-consciously technocratic character. Senior officials, including both HTS members and non-members, often had university degrees, technical expertise, and a polished approach toward journalists, foreign researchers, and diplomats. These senior technocrats included figures such as Mohammed al-Bashir and Asaad al-Shaibani, who went on to serve in ministerial posts (currently, Energy and Foreign Affairs) after HTS’ overthrow of Bashar al-Assad.

HTS’ technocratic posture in Idlib foreshadowed some of the pragmatic choices that al-Sharaa would make as Syria’s transitional head of state. Technocracy, despite its promises of rule by and through apolitical expertise, often has a markedly neoliberal character. While al-Sharaa reshaped Syria’s political topography, he remains in many ways a conventional head of state: conciliatory toward Israel, the United States, the European Union, and the Gulf; friendly with Assad-era businessmen; courting foreign investors to finance and profit from reconstruction; and committed to slashing the public sector while privatizing state-owned enterprises.

As Riad Alarian and Mohammed El-Sayed Bushra wrote for Muftah last year, al-Sharaa faced tremendous pressure to make “a statement of allegiance to the free market” as one of many “incentivized rituals of compliance pursued in exchange for access to the material conditions that permit state-building.” Richard Solomon has similarly argued for Phenomenal World that there is substantial continuity with the era of Bashar al-Assad, who spent a quarter-century privatizing firms, cutting pensions, and empowering cronies. The fall of the Assad dynasty gave hope to millions of Syrians and altered many lives for the better, allowing people to return home, reunite with family and friends, and pursue long-deferred dreams and goals. Yet the new authorities offer a stability predicated on deference to the geopolitical status quo.

JNIM: Rejecting Foreign Intervention, Dominating Civilians, and Hammering Bamako

JNIM has constituted the central military and political challenge for both the civilian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta (who was in office from 2013 until 2020) and the military rulers, headed by Colonel-turned-President Assimi Goïta (who took power in a 2020 coup). JNIM and its antecedents have outlasted French counterterrorism operations (2013–2022) and pro-government deployments by the Kremlin-backed Wagner Group/Africa Corps (2021–present), all while JNIM veers between coexistence and conflict with the regional “province” of the Islamic State. JNIM is nothing if not tenacious.

JNIM has pursued a multi-faceted and even ambiguous project. On the one hand, JNIM exhibits a clear will to power. In central Mali and northern Burkina Faso—two sites of intensive jihadist operations—JNIM’s approach to rule has manifested clearly: the group’s field commanders impose “survival pacts” on local communities, dictating what can be taught in schools, what women can wear, who can carry weapons, and how economies will operate. Communities that resist can face economic blockades, one of JNIM’s favored weapons of war.

On the other hand, JNIM has appeared reluctant to bid for full control of Mali. JNIM can certainly capture major towns, and has done so temporarily on various occasions. But they have not planted their flag in any administrative capital, let alone a national capital. Is that because JNIM still heeds the lessons of 2012–2013, when some of its forerunners seized northern Malian towns and declared an Islamic Emirate, only to see French troops smash their positions and kill various top leaders just a few months later? Is it because JNIM’s fighting strength is enough to haunt a zone extending over 2,000 kilometers, but does not suffice to wield durable control? Or is it rather because JNIM does not want the responsibilities and liabilities that direct rule would bring? According to one frequently cited but perhaps unreliable estimate, JNIM may have as few as 5,000–6,000 fighters, hardly enough to run Bamako, let alone all of Mali.

In its statement claiming the April 25 attacks, JNIM said that they wanted to “bring about a genuine transition serving the interests of the religion, the country, and the faithful.” Such phrasing carries an implicit critique of the junta, which is managing an open-ended “transition.” But this phrasing does not necessarily mean that JNIM wants to rule Mali itself. As Jean-Hervé Jezequel of the International Crisis Group has commented, “In Mali, the jihadists’ goal is not to take power, but to change the people in power.” If that is accurate, then JNIM is not refashioning itself into a palatable governing entity but is rather leaving its options open. After all, JNIM can be both clinical and brutal: JNIM’s precision attacks on April 25 in Bamako and beyond were followed within days by massacres of civilians, particularly from the Dogon ethnic group, in central Mali.

Could the “Syria Model” Unfold in Mali?

There are serious reasons to think that JNIM might borrow elements of HTS’ approach. The journalist and analyst Wassim Nasr, who has interviewed both al-Sharaa and the senior leadership of JNIM, sees the “pragmatic Islamism” of al-Sharaa as a potential “blueprint for other jihadi groups, including in the Sahel.” The human rights activist and analyst Corinne Dufka concludes based on her interviews with Malians that “[m]uch like HTS, JNIM is trying to shed the terrorist label, distance itself from al-Qaida and evolve into a religious insurgency against Mali’s junta.” The analyst Héni Nsaibia adds that Syria is a major topic of discussion for JNIM fighters and sympathizers. A Syria “model” could appeal to JNIM as a path out of a successful but interminable insurgency and into a more robust and sustainable political future. Other analysts, such as Jason Warner, suggest that the “Syria model” is neither replicable nor desirable for JNIM, which may even see HTS’ compromises as too sweeping. These are not just diagnostic debates but also prescriptive ones, bearing on the question of whether big-picture negotiations with JNIM would be feasible and beneficial.

Many of the participants in this discussion acknowledge that the political conditions are very different in the Sahel than they were in Syria as of 2024; above all, JNIM lacks a powerful state ally akin to HTS’ reported (although widely debated) relationship with Turkey. Mali’s neighbor to the north, Algeria, is often accused in Bamako of supporting the northern rebels and JNIM itself, but hard evidence for such accusations is thin. Further, Algeria is more often accused of wanting to use northern Mali as a zone of strategic influence, rather than of abetting a national-level jihadist takeover. There is also no Malian equivalent of Ahrar al-Sham (“Freemen of the Levant”), a massive armed Islamist group that became a key coalition partner for HTS in Syria.

Another difference between HTS and JNIM is their different forms of political acumen. JNIM has not invested in the technocratic governance that HTS elaborated in Idlib, and has very little to say or indeed offer on questions of economic management, service delivery, or international diplomacy. In Idlib, HTS staged a dress rehearsal for how it would rule Syria. But in the areas where JNIM has ruled or exercised sway, its model has been more one-dimensional. Who would be JNIM’s finance minister, after all?

It is not that JNIM has no sophisticated minds in its orbit. There is wide debate about ag Ghali’s aims, but there is no debate about his intelligence. The upper echelons of the northern Malian political establishment, including JNIM’s old-turned-new allies in the Azawad Liberation Front, include numerous savvy and experienced strategists. Sitting down to interview the northern politician Ahmada ag Bibi on two occasions, for example, I had the sense of someone who was in subtle control of our conversations, emphasizing one core talking point each time. Yet these keen minds—whether on the battlefield or in Mali’s National Assembly, where ag Bibi and others served as elected deputies on and off—have dedicated their careers primarily to securing northern Mali’s autonomy and protecting their own positions within a complex and shifting social hierarchy in the north. There could even be a kind of inversion at work: whereas Idlib was the staging ground for HTS’ conquest of Syria, for some of JNIM’s leaders and allies, Mali and the Sahel are the broad theater in and through which the independence of Kidal (the home region of ag Ghali, ag Bibi, and others) is to be claimed.

The War on Terror: Permutations in Damascus, Bamako, and Ouagadougou

The contrasts between Syria and Mali underscore the latest permutations of the long-running, ambiguous “War on Terror.” Originating in anti-Palestinian policies and legislation and exploding into policy and public consciousness after the 9/11 attacks, the War on Terror has structured much of twenty-first-century life and politics. From unleashing devastation on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and other theaters, to the “imperial boomerang” that brings hardline counterterrorism techniques and power grabs back to the Western countries that first deployed them against the Global South, the War on Terror has suffused twenty-first-century life with surveillance and violence.

The case of HTS raises troubling questions about why Washington proclaimed al-Qaeda, ISIS, and all “terrorists” to be absolute moral enemies under every administration from George W. Bush through the second term of Donald Trump, yet so frequently makes exceptions of expediency. It is not merely that HTS and al-Sharaa were rehabilitated so quickly beginning in 2024; indeed, the option of pragmatic alignment with al-Qaeda-adjacent factions was on the table in American policy circles by 2015 (if not earlier), as David Petraeus championed working with elements of Jabhat al-Nusra against ISIS, Bashar al-Assad, or both. Other elements of the War on Terror were also flexible, including the many bilateral “partnerships” that Washington maintained with regimes suspected of playing “double games” on counterterrorism.

Watching the rehabilitation of al-Sharaa has made elements of the Western Left extremely jaded. Their critique is worth taking seriously, especially because very similar debates are playing out regarding the Sahel. Is al-Sharaa less the culminating figure of the revolutionary struggle against Assad, and more a Western-backed puppet turning Syria into a neoliberal playground and a pliant neighbor for Israel? When such skeptics on the Left argue that Assad’s Syria played a positive and decisive role in sustaining an effective anti-Zionism, I part company with them; Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez al-Assad were both highly repressive and self-interested rulers guilty of sweeping crimes against the Syrian people, and their commitment to Palestinian liberation was ultimately cynical and symbolic. But the charge that al-Sharaa wittingly or unwittingly serves the interests of global capitalism and imperialism, and of Israel, has real bite.

In the Sahel, Burkina Faso’s military ruler Ibrahim Traoré and (to a lesser extent) Mali’s Goïta and Niger’s Abdourahmane Tiani have also garnered significant enthusiasm from some Western Leftists and pan-Africanists from New York to Johannesburg and beyond. In their view, Traoré and his colleagues in the Alliance of Sahel States, a new confederation of the three countries, are standing up to Western imperialism and neo-colonialism while fighting a war of survival against shadowy terrorists. Here, too, there is a mix of convincing and unconvincing arguments. Traoré, Goïta, and Tiani have indeed expelled French troops and have renegotiated more favorable terms for their countries vis-à-vis multinational firms in extractive industries. They are indeed wartime presidents making difficult decisions.

Yet the Sahelian juntas are also highly authoritarian and repressive. They have imprisoned, disappeared, forcibly conscripted, and intimidated swaths of politicians, journalists, and activists. The juntas also have meager military accomplishments even after years in power. Tellingly, Traoré in particular has built an image as a Marxist, sovereigntist, anti-imperialist leader in the mold of Thomas Sankara (a widely admired military ruler of Burkina Faso between 1983–1987) by relying not just on his own performance, but also on a wide campaign of disinformation, including substantial AI content. In their support of Traoré, the same Leftists and pan-Africanists whom one might expect to criticize the War on Terror have become some of its most vociferous heirs.

There are different paths available to the Left, however, or for anyone who laments the trajectory of the world and its many conflict zones. One starting point involves asking why the rehabilitation of jihadists is considered anathema at some times and normal at others. Why were senior French officials, including President Emmanuel Macron, so hostile to the idea of dialogue with ag Ghali when Malian civil society voices first seriously floated the proposal in 2017? Why does Trump meet al-Sharaa but gloat about the assassination of a little-known provincial “terrorist” in a remote corner of Nigeria? It is noteworthy which interests lead to a compartmentalization of the War on Terror—interests such as migration control, for Europe, or investment, for the United States—and which political imperatives elevate it. The Left can stay consistent, in my view, by denouncing any leader who claims sweeping and abnormal powers in the name of counterterrorism, and by interrogating what interests allow for sudden accommodation with the “terrorists” of yesterday.

Another question is which forms of revolution the current world order will tolerate, and which it will not. In the current order, al-Sharaa can rule Syria, but only if he accommodates Israeli interests and deepens Syria’s longstanding neoliberal turn. Protesters can overthrow heads of state in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, or Sudan, but they are brutally repressed when they seek to overthrow systems. Moments of extraordinary political opening and effervescence end up confirming the severe limitations on solidarity, freedom, and imagination in our time.

One of the grimmest tragedies of the Sahel is that the 2014 popular revolution in Burkina Faso, which overthrew Sankara’s comrade-turned-murderer Blaise Compaoré, was so quickly stifled, first through a superficial democratic episode that empowered one of Compaoré’s former civilian proteges, and then in the faux-revolutionary dictatorship of Traoré. The juxtaposition of Syria and the Sahel merits reflection: for the world’s conflict and post-conflict societies, surely there are options beyond normalcy at the price of geopolitical conformity, or interminable conflict between brittle states and rebellions whose existence becomes a pretext for coopting—and ultimately silencing—revolutionary aspirations.

While on the one hand the United States recognizes the continuance of the ultimate sovereignty of the Republic of Cuba over the above described areas of land and water, on the other hand the Republic of Cuba consents that during the period of the occupation by the United States of said areas under the terms of this agreement the United States shall exercise complete jurisdiction and control over and within said areas with the right to acquire (under conditions to be hereafter agreed upon by the two Governments) for the public purposes of the United States any land or other property therein by purchase or by exercise of eminent domain with full compensation to the owners thereof.

-Agreement Between the United States and Cuba for the Lease of Lands for Coaling and Naval stations, February 23, 1903

Several years ago, my colleague Robert Orsi and I organized a campus reading of Guantánamo Diary, Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s autobiographical account of his fourteen-year imprisonment by the U.S. military at Guantánamo Bay. Community members signed up for fifteen-minute time slots. The Defense Department had heavily redacted the only version of the book that was available at the time, and censored lines appeared with a thick black line through them. When readers encountered redacted lines, they would ring a tabletop service bell, once for each line censored. The bell rang at regular intervals, and at times, continued repeatedly, denoting redacted paragraphs or pages. We started at 8:00 a.m. and it took nine hours to get through the book. A handful of people came in and out, listening quietly, scattered around the room in small groups. Some were visibly upset; a few were crying. People comforted one another. My turn to read aloud came over lunch, and at one point, I found myself alone, ringing the service bell and reading Slahi’s words to an empty room with high ceilings and an ornate balcony.

Slahi was released on October 17, 2016, and returned to his native Mauritania. The United States never filed charges. Was he inside or outside the United States during his detention from 2002 to 2016? Is there a U.S. border surrounding Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, or is the naval station part of Cuba? Where is Naval Station Guantánamo Bay? Where does the United States of America begin? Where does it end?

As the Cuban people’s suffering intensifies under an American-sponsored blockade, and storm clouds gather at the prospect of U.S. military operations in Cuba, the long shadow of more than a century of U.S. occupation of southeastern Cuba hovers quietly in the background, shaping political imaginations in both countries and making some options more thinkable than others.

Naval Station Guantánamo Bay (or GTMO, as the military refers to it) is a forty-five-square-mile American base located on the coast of Guantánamo Bay on the island of Cuba. GTMO is the oldest overseas American Navy base in the world and the only one in a country with which the United States does not maintain diplomatic relations. In 2022, the navy unveiled a $3 million modern postal facility to serve a community that has sent and received mail out of a converted horse stable since 1952, noting that “mail service is vital to this unique island community, where military transport a few times a week is the only means of travel to the United States.” So according to the navy the base is outside the United States. But is it?

With its rugged terrain and “dry, sun-blasted hills, where cactus and scrub clung to outcroppings of barren rock,” historian Paul Kramer explains, Spanish conquistadores left this corner of the Caribbean largely alone for centuries. Guantánamo sat suspended in the colonial margins, a “no state’s domain, a haven for pirates and slaves escaping both Cuba and Haiti, only a hundred miles across the Windward Passage at its nearest point. For them, Guantánamo had meant something like freedom.”

In the summer of 1898, U.S. warships sailed into Guantánamo Bay under the command of Bowman H. McCalla to fight alongside Cuban rebels against the Spanish fleet in a nine-day battle of the Spanish-American War, which ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in December 1898. Although Spain lost what remained of its overseas empire and the United States inherited most of Spain’s possessions, Congress had no intention of relinquishing control of Cuban affairs. When the Cuban Constitutional Convention began deliberations in July 1900, Congress notified the Cubans that the United States intended to attach an amendment to the Cuban Constitution. In 1901, U.S. secretary of war Elihu Root drafted a set of articles as guidelines for future United States–Cuba relations that became known as the Platt Amendment, after its sponsor, Senator Orville Platt of Connecticut. The Cubans, reluctantly and in the face of strong protest, included the Platt Amendment in the constitution. Cuba became a virtual U.S. protectorate. In 1903, the Platt Amendment was incorporated into a permanent treaty between the two countries that, according to the National Archives, “permitted extensive U.S. involvement in Cuban international and domestic affairs for the enforcement of Cuban independence.” Two articles from the treaty stand out:

III. That the government of Cuba consents that the United States may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty, and for discharging the obligations with respect to Cuba imposed by the treaty of Paris on the United States, now to be assumed and undertaken by the government of Cuba.

VII. That to enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba, and to protect the people thereof, as well as for its own defense, the government of Cuba will sell or lease to the United States lands necessary for coaling or naval stations at certain specified points to be agreed upon with the President of the United States.

The United States conditioned Cuban independence on constitutional provisions that would allow the U.S. Navy to occupy the area “for the time required.” The Cubans themselves “opposed the Platt Amendment in speech, pamphlet, and mass protest; Juan Gualberto Gómez, a delegate and a former general, charged that it would transform Cubans into a ‘vassal people.’” Nevertheless, under pressure, a divided convention adopted it.

Article VII of the Platt Amendment authorized the United States to lease or buy lands for naval bases and coaling stations in Cuba. Rent on the U.S. lease of Guantánamo as a coaling station and naval base was set at $2,000 per year beginning in 1903, paid in gold. In 1934, Cuba extended the lease and doubled the rent, with payment set at $4,085 to match the value in gold in dollars, an amount that remains unchanged to this day. The Platt Amendment was used repeatedly to legitimize U.S. interventions in Cuban affairs in 1906, 1912, 1917, and 1920. By 1934, however, widespread public criticism led to its repeal as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy. But the United States retained its lease on Guantánamo Bay and continues to pay rent to Cuba via the Swiss embassy. After 1959, Fidel Castro refused to cash the checks.

And yet, under the terms of the lease, the United States retained complete jurisdiction and control over the southern portion of the bay, even as Cuba retained ultimate sovereignty. The only way to end this arrangement would be through U.S. withdrawal or bilateral agreement; the Cubans are not permitted to withdraw unilaterally.

The base has proven useful to the U.S. military. The United States launched invasions and occupations of Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1916 from Guantánamo. In World War II, the base became a major U.S. strategic asset, and by the mid-1940s Guantánamo was the second-busiest port in the Western Hemisphere, after New York, and was used by the navy to repel Nazi U-boats. According to the navy’s official history, “the base’s activities have at times included fleet training, ship repair, refueling and resupply, migrant operations, regional humanitarian relief and disaster assistance, search and rescue support, and detention operations. Today it remains the forward, ready, and irreplaceable US sea power platform in the Caribbean, giving decision makers unique options across the range of military and interagency operations.”

Although the United States does not claim sovereignty over Guantánamo, it does maintain “complete jurisdiction and total control” over the base. What does that mean? Where is the U.S.-Cuban border?

It is difficult to say. Kramer, the historian, describes the boundaries of the base as “indefinite.” Since 1950 the Cubans have been adamantly opposed to the U.S. presence at Guantánamo. Wary of infiltrators, in 1958 the navy put up a perimeter fence enclosing the base that still stands today. By late 1960, as relations deteriorated, a minefield containing over fifty thousand mines and spread over seven hundred acres divided the two parts of the island; at the time, it was the largest in the world. Following the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle—a failed military attack organized by Cuban exiles working with the CIA to oust Fidel Castro—the Cubans added another barrier of uncrossable Maya cacti known as the “Cactus Curtain.” In 1964, Cuban foreign minister Raúl Roa shut off water and electricity to the base after the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted four Cuban fishing boats in American waters in the Florida Keys and imprisoned the thirty-six crewmen in a Florida jail. The water supply was never restored, and GTMO has had its own supply ever since. Land mines, concertina wire, and thickets of cacti divide the base and the rest of the island. There is no access to the base from within Cuba.

And yet, as of 2021, nineteen elderly Cubans were living on the base. Known as special category residents (SCRs), they are considered U.S. citizens. In 2021, CNN profiled retired clerk Noel West, then eighty-nine. West began working on the base in 1955 ordering fuel for planes and vehicles, commuting daily to his home in the Cuban town of Guaro. An avid baseball fan and umpire, in February 1964 he chose to stay late for a game and spent the night at the Cuban barracks on the base. The next day, his next-door neighbor from Guaro called to warn him that Cuban soldiers had been searching for him. He had mentioned to a friend that he was not a fan of the Castro regime. After fifty-five years of service, West stayed on the base after retiring in 2011 and never returned to Cuba.

Beginning in 1991, and for the next decade, GTMO served as a detention camp and processing center for Haitian refugees fleeing the aftermath of the 1991 coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide. By July 1991, nearly 37,000 people were confined in tent cities surrounded by barbed wire. The U.S. authorities determined that 26,000 of these refugees had failed to qualify for political asylum (they were not “screened in”). Another 267 received asylum but were denied entry under a 1987 law excluding immigrants who were HIV positive that was in effect until 2010. At GTMO, the Haitians testing HIV positive who had been “screened in” were held in a separate detention area, Camp Bulkeley, where, as Kramer describes, detainees burned tents, hurled rocks at their captors, and engaged in a hunger strike to protest their mistreatment.

In 1993, a team of students and professors from Yale Law School’s Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic filed suit on behalf of the detainees on the grounds that they should enjoy constitutional protections because the base is legally under the “complete jurisdiction and control of the United States.” The government countered that the base was “a military base in a foreign country” and “not United States territory.” Detainees being held at the base, the government argued, were “outside the United States and therefore they have no judicially cognizable rights in United States courts.” Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. responded: “You’re saying, if I hear you correctly, that assuming that they [government officials] are arbitrary and capricious and even cruel, that the courts would have no jurisdiction because the conduct did not occur on U.S. soil? That’s what you’re saying?” The government concurred.

The government lost the case, shut down the camp, and transferred the remaining detainees to the United States. Judge Johnson ruled that due process guarantees under the Constitution did extend to the base, including the right to a lawyer, to proper medical care, and to not be held indefinitely without charge. Aside from those protections, however, and according to Kramer, Johnson also told an INS attorney that the state possessed unchecked authority “to take, kidnap, or abscond, whatever you want to call it, take a group and put them into a compound, whether you call it a humanitarian camp or a prison, keep them there indefinitely while there has been no charge leveled against them and there is no light at the end of the tunnel.”

Johnson’s ruling granting even limited rights to the detainees made the Clinton administration uneasy. According to Kramer, “The Clinton Justice Department…pursued a deal with the Haitians’ legal team: the Administration would comply with Johnson’s orders and drop an appeal; in return, Johnson’s decision would be vacated from the record. The advocates agreed, fearing that an appeal would prolong their clients’ detention and might, ultimately, succeed. According to one official, the Clinton Administration wanted to preserve ‘maximum flexibility.’”

The camps were back up a year later, and by 1994, they were sheltering 16,800 Haitians and 22,000 Cubans in tent cities on the runway. When the Cuban American Bar Association, Cuban refugee associations, and the Haitian Refugee Center sued on behalf of the refugees, they were initially granted injunctive relief by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. On appeal, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision and, using another nickname for the base, “firmly situated Gitmo outside the United States and constitutional limits on state power.” The appeals court rejected the argument that leased military bases abroad “which continue under the sovereignty of foreign nations” were functionally equivalent to land borders or ports of entry, noting that laws mandating asylum hearings “bind the government only when the refugees are at or within the borders of the United States.” As Kramer concluded, “apparently, Gitmo was not at or within these borders.” The Cubans were released into the United States the next year, and the Haitians involuntarily returned to Haiti.

In 2002, GTMO opened its doors to its latest ignominious chapter as a U.S. prison camp for unlawful combatants who, according to then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, “do not have any rights under the Geneva Conventions.” In December 2001, Justice Department deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo prepared the legal ground for indefinite detentions at GTMO with a memo to Pentagon general counsel William Haynes by making the case that Guantánamo is “foreign territory, not subject to U.S. sovereignty,” as part of an effort to make it less likely that U.S. courts would grant GTMO detainees habeas corpus rights. Yoo contrasted Guantánamo with the Philippines cases arising out of World War II, describing the latter as an “insular possession” until 1946 “and not a mere U.S. leasehold interest.”

On January 11, 2002, the first twenty captives arrived, and since then a total of 779 men have been detained at the base. The youngest was thirteen years old and the oldest was eighty-nine. Twenty-one were children. 86 percent of detainees were reportedly turned over to Coalition Forces in response to a bounty offer. As of January 2026, fifteen detainees remained imprisoned at the base.

Darryl Li describes GTMO as “one node in a global network of carceral circulation,” explaining that although new transfers had slowed by 2003 (and stopped entirely by 2008), “it was the older pattern of arms-length detention through local clients that has endured and continued to sustain GWOT [global war on terror].” When it comes to U.S. carceral practices in sovereign gray zones, Li suggests that GTMO stands in for a vast array of long-standing U.S. practices involving the use of client states and partners to carry out the U.S. government’s dirty work. Sites run in and by the United Arab Emirates and by Kurds in eastern Syria “enabled the US to warehouse, interrogate, and dispose of thousands of more people with far greater flexibility and far less scrutiny than at GTMO.”

Borders around black sites are purposefully ambiguous. Where America begins and ends is intentionally fuzzy. Detainees are held in limbo. The OED defines limbo as referring not only to prison or confinement but to “any unfavourable place or condition, likened to Limbo; esp. a condition of neglect or oblivion to which persons or things are consigned when regarded as outworn, useless, or absurd.”

Some have pushed back. One legal strategy is to actively draw the U.S. border around detainees to try to encompass them within U.S. constitutional protections. An example is the case of Lakdhar Boumediene, an Algerian-born citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina who was the subject of a 2008 Supreme Court decision, Boumediene v. Bush, ruling that detainees were not barred from seeking habeas corpus or invoking the suspension clause merely because they had been designated as enemy combatants or held at Guantánamo. Boumediene’s detention began in 2002, when he and five other Algerians were seized by Bosnian police because U.S. intelligence officers suspected their involvement in a plot to attack the U.S. embassy in Bosnia. The United States classified the men as enemy combatants in the war on terror and imprisoned them at GTMO. Boumediene filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus (lit: “that you have a body,” a form of legal recourse against unlawful detention), alleging violations of the Constitution’s due process clause, various statutes and treaties, the common law, and international law. The district court granted the government’s motion to have his claims dismissed on the ground that Boumediene, as an alien detained at an overseas military base, had no right to a habeas petition. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit affirmed the dismissal. But the Supreme Court reversed in Rasul v. Bush, holding that the habeas statute extends to noncitizen detainees at Guantánamo. Foreign nationals held at GTMO could petition federal courts for writs of habeas corpus to review the legality of their detention.

Two years later, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA), which eliminated federal courts’ jurisdiction to hear habeas applications from detainees who had been designated as enemy combatants according to procedures established in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. When Boumediene’s case was appealed to the DC Circuit for the second time, he and the other detainees argued that the MCA did not apply to their petitions and that even if it did, it was unconstitutional under the suspension clause. (The latter reads: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”) The DC Circuit ruled in favor of the government on both points, citing language in the MCA applying the law to “all cases, without exception” that pertain to aspects of detention. One of the purposes of the MCA, according to this court’s interpretation, was to overrule the Supreme Court’s opinion in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which had allowed petitions like Boumediene’s to go forward. The circuit court thus held that the suspension clause only protects the writ of habeas corpus as it existed in 1789 and that the writ would not have been understood in 1789 to apply to an overseas military base leased from a foreign government. The court held further that constitutional rights do not apply to aliens outside of the United States and that the leased military base in Cuba does not qualify as inside the geographic borders of the United States.

The Supreme Court then ruled that if the 2006 MCA were considered valid, its legislative history would require that the detainees’ cases be dismissed. However, they also found that because the procedures laid out in the Detainee Treatment Act are not adequate substitutes for the habeas writ, the MCA operates as an unconstitutional suspension of that writ. The detainees therefore were not barred from seeking habeas or from invoking the suspension clause merely because they had been designated as enemy combatants or were being held at Guantánamo.

With the court’s reversal of the DC Circuit’s ruling, the border began to come into focus, a faint dotted line provisionally encircling the detainees at Guantánamo and, perhaps, other black sites.

The “abject,” notes J. Kameron Carter, “is neither friend (subject) nor enemy (object). The abject exists in the zone between life (full citizenship) and death (the enemy as one who must be killed).” The category of abject, or homo sacer (sacred man, in Roman law), includes detainees at Guantánamo and others in border limbo. It includes Jews in mid-twentieth-century Europe and the figure of the slave, “modernity’s abject par excellence,” all of whom have been forced outside the bounds of humanity. It includes Palestinians in Gaza. Today it includes the Cuban people.

Borders are brokers of abjection. They can be hard to see because the abject exists in a border zone between life and death. Neither in nor out. Neither domestic nor foreign. Neither wholly part of the body nor wholly apart from it. She sits with other liminal subjects in the margins of global order.

In Downes v. Bidwell, one of the Insular Cases, the majority found that “Porto Rico belongs to the United States, but nevertheless, and notwithstanding the act of Congress, is not a part of the United States subject to the provisions of the Constitution in respect of the levy of taxes, duties, imposts, and excises.” Dissenting Justice Melville Weston Fuller interpreted this to mean that, “if an organized and settled province of another sovereignty is acquired by the United States,” Congress would retain the power “to keep it, like a disembodied shade.”

Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau are liminal jurisdictions that are kept by the United States “like a disembodied shade, in an intermediate state of ambiguous existence for an indefinite period.” They live in the shadows of sovereignty, belonging to the United States but not part of it.

Speaking at the Future Investment Initiative summit in Miami in March of this year, Trump boasted, “We have been very, very successful. You know, when I went into Venezuela … I built this great military, I said, you’ll never have to use it, but sometimes you have to use it,” adding, “and Cuba’s next, by the way.” In threatening to “stop by Cuba after we’re finished” with Iran, Trump reaffirms Cuba’s inferior position as a subject of the long-standing American prerogative to “exercise complete jurisdiction and control over and within said areas.” Neither in nor out, neither domestic nor foreign. Neither wholly part of the body nor wholly apart from it. In the logic of American empire, Cuba subsists indefinitely in the shadows, and America never ends.

This essay is adapted and reprinted with permission from Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2025 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Adnan Husain joins Protean View to discuss the crisis in academia, the responsibility of intellectuals, the genocide in Gaza, and much more.

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Readings

Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences

Empire’s Critic

Representations of the Intellectual

The Wretched of the Earth

Benjamin Schonthal joins Protean View to discuss his book Courts, Constitutions and Karma: Buddhism, Law and the Practices of Legal Pluralism in Sri Lanka (Cambridge 2026) in addition to related topics on Islam, Sharia, and secularism.

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Alexander Thurston joins Protean View to discuss the recent developments in Mali, the politics of the Sahel, and the War on Terror.

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Thomas Pierret joins Protean View again, this time to discuss the debate on Syria among the Left. This episode is a follow-up to Syria and the Future of Islamism.

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Part 1

Syria and the Future of Islamism with Thomas Pierret

Readings

Is the New Syrian State Revolutionary?

We Must Understand Syria as a Popular Struggle Despite its Complications

Yassin al-Haj Saleh: On Syria and the Three Impossibilities

The Green Party and Syria

U.S. Coalition Strikes Killed Hundreds of Syrians in May and the Antiwar Left Has Hardly Responded

The United States and Russia Are Coordinating Strikes in Syria. Why Are Antiwar Coalitions Silent?

Olivier Jutel joins Protean View to discuss the crisis of over-accumulation, accelerationism, and the utopian delusions of our tech overlords.

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Daniel Bessner and Ajay Singh Chaudhary join Protean View to help us understand the fascism debate in America and beyond.

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Readings

Cold War Liberalism: Power in a Time of Emergency (discount code BESSNER26)

This is America

Does American Fascism Exist?

The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World

Neofascism After Trump

The Supermanagerial Reich

We live in an increasingly turbulent and unpredictable world.1 Central to our way of life is the socio-economic system in which we find ourselves, increasingly referred to as “late capitalism.” It was first described in 1975 by the late Belgian Marxist economist Ernest Mandel as “a new epoch marked by expansion and acceleration in production and exchange.”2 Fifty years on, we are experiencing the effects of Mandel’s conclusion that wealth inequality, overconsumption, corporate dominance, financialization, and endless commodification are magnifying the unsustainable costs for human and non-human life alike.

Rather than weigh in on the causes or cures for this expanding order, I intend to give a personal snapshot of a period in my life that helped me make sense of our situation. My story begins in Britain in the 1990s and ends in the Czech Republic in the 2020s. My aim is to ask how the Czech experience of transitioning from totalitarian communism to free-market capitalism can inform us about our current trajectory. After having lived in the country’s capital Prague for nearly twenty years, I hope my experiences and takeaways can provide a useful perspective.3

I was born in London in 1984 but grew up in a small town south of Manchester through the 1990s until I left the United Kingdom in 2006. It was a comfortable suburban middle-class upbringing; safe, white, conservative, and, though only a twenty-minute train ride from downtown Manchester, largely isolated from urban Britain and those less fortunate.

It was the era of Tony Blair’s New Labour, coming in the wake of Conservative leadership and the Thatcherite privatization and deregulation of the 1980s. Leftist policies that had been the cornerstone of post-war Britain were now to be hollowed out for the sake of financialization and vast economic growth. Arguably, the dismal state of Britain in the 1970s helped rationalize this increasing economic liberalism. But over time, it felt as if Britain was pivoting towards the United States, where commercialization, commodification, and consolidation had become the new norms. And as costs rose, the culture changed. The death of the pub and the decline of the high street were visible symptoms of what I had come to believe was a larger problem—that capitalism kills culture, and culture sustains community.4

Like most adolescent millennials (or, as we were known at the time, Gen Y) growing up in the United Kingdom, I was raised on a diet of British and American music and film that taught me the virtues of progressive individualism, personal enlightenment, and—like most youth culture—rejectionism. Hip hop, grunge, and rave music all spoke to me in a relatable language that advocated for peripheral adherence and mainstream rejection. Meanwhile, films like Falling Down (1993), Fight Club (1999), and The Matrix (1999) tapped into what I saw as a sense of collective frustration about the encroachment of corporatization in society.

Having grown accustomed to being reminded that my generation would be the first to expect less financial security than their parents (unless you aimed for a career in finance, banking, or the IT sector), the demands of British work-life seemed antithetical to the future I wanted. I decided, therefore, to pursue a degree at Loughborough University’s Marxist-leaning politics department, where classes such as “Anti-Capitalism and Anti-Globalization” provided me a crash-course in Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, the 1994 Zapatista Uprising,5 and the 1999 Seattle riots or “Battle of Seattle.”6

As a graduate of this latest iteration of the global anti-capitalist movement, I decided to leave the United Kingdom for the Central European country of the Czech Republic, where a combination of intriguing socio-political realities made it an appealing choice.

Prague in the mid-2000s was a place where cost of living met quality of life in ways one may expect from a post-communist state. Though it never experienced the same intensity of communist-totalitarianism as in the Soviet Union,7 Czechoslovakia’s brand of Soviet-style Marxist-Leninism (from 1948 to 1989) had numerous reverberations on Czech society. Encouragingly, I discovered the Czechs had retained free education (until twenty-six years old), universal healthcare, and a distinct lack of consumerism. Not immediately noticeable, however, was the extensive scarring caused by the regime, including: endemic governmental corruption, public suspicion of the state, a large shadow-economy, and a lack of trust between citizens.8 The last point I found particularly unnerving. To cite a popular Czech saying of the time on systemic governmental corruption, “the fish rots from the head.”

The Czech priority, therefore, was to progressively remedy the ills of the past with democratic political institutions, a market economy, the rule of law, and the growth of a civil society.9 Though the Pražák (Praguers) were proud of their historic urban center with its gothic and baroque architecture, they were tired of living in a poorly run museum. Modernity promised them a chance to feel a sense of normalcy.

For Western leftists like myself, we felt as though we had traveled through time, back to when the world was less complicated, less demanding, and much freer. Prague was a dirty, beautiful city, buzzing with culture and cosmopolitanism. Something new always seemed to be happening and the affordability of the city only made it more accessible. Rent was low (around £200-300), food was cheap, and beer (the national export) was even cheaper. In 2005, one Pound Sterling bought 43 Czech Koruna, and one beer cost around 17 Koruna. Working as an English teacher provided me an above average salary. And within a short space of time, I had found a community of like-minded seekers.

Unsurprisingly, some Czechs viewed us much like the American GIs in Europe in World War II: overpaid, oversexed, over here. Yet most seemed to like us, never fully comprehending why we had chosen to make their small republic our home. “Why are you here?” was a common question in those early days. “Why not London? Why not New York?” they would ask, fondly sharing stories of their time in the United Kingdom in the 1990s when they studied English working as an au pair. “I guess I love how free it is here,” I would respond. They struggled to understand. We each wanted what the other had; mutually exoticizing the other’s world prevented us from seeing each other clearly. Though there was nothing inherently different about the Czechs from the British, the contrast came from the influences of our respective socio-economic histories.

Time spent outside of Prague typically revealed a slower pace of life, with close communities and active traditions. Many still grew their own fruits and vegetables or had a variety of poultry in the backyard. Pickling or preserving their harvest for the winter season was common. And come fall, the whole nation would engage in the delicate art of mushroom picking—I would often receive a large jar of dried fungi from a Czech friend insisting they would provide numerous culinary possibilities. Early Friday afternoons would see a mass exodus of the population as they travelled to visit their parents and grandparents in other towns. Or, perhaps, to take a trip to the family chata (country cottage)—a place previously used to escape the regime—where songs around the fire and shots of homemade slivovice (Czech schnaps) would last long into the night.

The urban-rural rift I was used to in the United Kingdom was less obvious here; instead a greater continuity between both worlds existed. I attributed this to the influence of the regime. The arrival of communist rule in 1948 had stalled the post-war modernization of the 1950s and 1960s seen in Western societies. While fifty years of centralized state-rule had stifled economic growth and development, it inadvertently enabled the Czechs to keep stronger ties to traditional culture, something I felt was lost in Britain.10

Though I admired the Czech way of life, as a foreigner, the closest connections I was able to build were with my expat community (or bubble). In hindsight, our bohemian lifestyles were sustained not by our own convictions but by the unstable nature of the transition period, coupled with the unimposing attitude of the Czechs. We encountered few obstacles and often remained ignorant of the difficulties the locals faced. I soon realized there was something contradictory about a bunch of Western idealists (with financial backing) using a post-communist state for their anti-capitalist fantasies.

The irony was not lost on me that I had fled the capitalist West only to find myself in a country that was keen to emulate it. As we taught English to sustain our alternative lifestyles, the Czechs were learning a language that would give them access to the global economy. Fifty years of communism had left them tired and deeply cynical of leftist politics, and they rolled their eyes at people like me who arrogantly attempted to convince them otherwise. I soon learned there was a huge difference between “armchair socialism” and the reality of living under totalitarian communism. Arguing, as we often did, over the extent to which Soviet communism had been true to Marx was not the point; to most Czechs it was a failed experiment never worth repeating.11

In essence, Czechs wanted the same thing everybody else wanted: clean lines and modern living. And in time, subtle changes in consumptive habits shifted them away from the frugality I once found so admirable. But who was I to discourage them from the promise and affordability of an IKEA-lifestyle? My own apartment was filled with Swedish-flatpack!

It was almost preordained that Prague’s gradual gentrification would coincide with my own maturation of tastes and lifestyle. Where once we ate at menza (very cheap canteens), went on shoe-string road-trips, and clubbed in underground medieval cellars, we now sip overpriced wine and flat-whites, stare at laptops, and regurgitate the daily news cycle. The pendulum of post-communist modernity has swung further than expected, creating an unusually polished result. On recent trips to Vienna and Brussels, I was surprised to find a scruffiness and political antagonism that is largely vacant in the Czech capital these days. Prague continues to have a good amount of alternative vibrancy for the twenty-somethings, but the past energies of transitory turbulence are long gone.

Prague has come a long way from the days of my first encounter. The impact of foreign money and multi-billion Euro investments has become hard to miss, with cost of living and real estate prices skyrocketing beyond affordability. Though this is a worldwide problem, it has been felt more acutely in post-communist Europe as salaries remain comparably low to their Western neighbors. Post-COVID-19 inflation, increasing energy costs caused by the Russo-Ukrainian war, and falling real wages have also taken their toll. Meanwhile, economic wealth disparity between Prague and less affluent regions has also worsened. Despite this, post-communist living standards have doubled since 1989, and a boom in entrepreneurship has transformed the business landscape.

The Czechs have arrived late to free market thinking. But to give them credit, they are yet to contract many of the most irritating syndromes suffered by its Western adherents, namely: rat race competitiveness, an addiction to data-driven decision-making, a multitude of mental health issues, and ordering things that are not on the menu! My Czech colleagues assure me the financialization and corporate dominance of the West is a long way off. The aforementioned “simple life” has changed little since 2006, with many young Czechs concluding that mass consumerism and career living is not necessarily the way to go. If the Czechs have taught me anything, it is moderation. Extremes will always exclude and bring out the worst in us. If they can secure the gains they have made without losing sight of what makes their culture unique, there may still be hope for this seasoned Central European nation.

Thomas Pierret joins Protean View to discuss the new Syrian state, the future of Islamism, and more.

If you enjoyed this episode and want more from Protean View, please subscribe to our newsletter and become a paid supporter. You can also support us on ⁠Patreon⁠.

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Melani McAlister joins Protean View to discuss the history of the Christian Right in the United States, its recent split on the question of Israel, the future of U.S.-Israel relations, and the evangelical discourse on Christian persecution by Muslims.

If you enjoyed this episode and want more from Protean View, please subscribe to our newsletter and become a paid supporter. You can also support us on ⁠Patreon⁠.

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In early 2024, my wife and I joined the Columbia University protests against the genocide in Gaza. Around that time, I was in the process of finalizing my doctoral dissertation on Egyptian education and came to realize a connection between my work and the events taking place on campus. A peculiar moment during Passover prompted this realization—specifically, when a Jewish prayer circle formed and began praying for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea.” I wondered what drove them to stand up for Palestinians in this way and why, from their privileged standpoints, they would risk being shamed, doxed, or shunned.

I have long grappled with the question of what conditions or relational dynamics enable someone in a position of power to confront their privilege and become willing to relinquish aspects of it. However, in the context of my own research on Egypt, it was not primarily from a religious or ethnic perspective, but a class-based one. I tried to explore how privileged higher-class students who benefit from capitalist structural inequalities can be taught to genuinely empathize with, and act in the interests of, the exploited.

In the case of Egypt, fostering constructive inter-class solidarity can be achieved by encouraging students and teachers in international school classrooms to recognize the neoliberal and neocolonial forces that shape them. To my surprise, entering the field with a secular framework that assumed a clean separation between class and religion was quickly challenged. I found that this work not only required a critical examination of the inner structure of the international school itself but also revealed how deeply religious conceptualizations of class shape students’ understandings of social hierarchy and their place within it.

The Reality of International Schools in Egypt

While scholars debate when Egyptian public schooling began to decline, there is broad consensus that its deterioration has driven more affluent families toward private international schools over the past fifty years. Tristan Bunnell defines international schools as institutions “with a global outlook located mainly outside an English-speaking country delivering a non-national curriculum at least partly in English.”1 In Egypt, these schools offer British, American, French, German, and other curricula with annual fees ranging from $2,000 to $20,000. Often established as business ventures, they cater to the rising demands of the affluent by offering both social distinction and academic quality. Naturally, higher costs entail more elaborate selling points: Western teachers, luxurious amenities, swimming pools, sporting facilities, and high-tech classrooms.

Having attended, worked at, and studied at these schools myself, I have found that families don’t just enroll their children there in pursuit of academic quality, but to assimilate them into certain ways of being and knowing. This is evident through their curricula, which privilege Euro-American histories and effectively silence local ones. Students do not learn about Egypt’s involvement in the First and Second World Wars or the experiences of Jews in the Arab world, for example, but rather study the history of Europe’s Holocaust. This privileging of all things Euro-American manifests in the schools’ administrative structures as well. In particular, foreign teachers—seen as superior by parents who often conflate “Western” and “quality” education—are generally better compensated than their local counterparts.2 Paid in foreign currencies, foreign teacher-hires raise international schools’ administrative costs, which in turn gives them license to raise tuition. Perhaps more importantly, these schools fuel palpable class distinctions since they are often located in Cairo’s affluent, isolated outskirts. Students thus experience physical insulation alongside intellectual alienation.

But insulation and alienation are small prices to pay for parents, who are chiefly motivated by a desire to provide their children with access to international universities and the global economy. Shuning Liu terms this process the formation of the neoliberal subject, where class reproduction becomes vital for local and, critically, international mobility.3 In other words, parents are strategizing to ensure their children have a place among the global elite. Yet the position these students and their parents find themselves in, as “elites” in a country like Egypt, represents a paradox. Because international schools isolate students from their local contexts and interests while strengthening ties to Western ideals and global futures,4 they effectively produce a Fanonian postcolonial “national bourgeoisie.” By mediating the colonized-colonizer relationship, international schools translate Egyptian students’ local realities into languages and concepts palatable to their former colonizers.5 The students then become the “transmission line” between their nation and a “camouflaged” neocolonial capitalism.6

Considering the above, how can we cultivate inter-class solidarity in an international schooling system that propagates class differences within Global South communities? Is complete renunciation of privilege an ideologically reasonable and practical way to achieve genuine solidarity? The philosophy of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire can assist us here.7 Writing on the liberation of the mind, Freire focused primarily on the oppressed, emphasizing that “oppressors cannot be liberators” because only the oppressed are best placed to understand the significance of an oppressive society.8 Yet he also offered a path toward solidarity for oppressors, clearly distinguishing between “liberating someone” and “struggling with them for liberation” by “entering the situation of those with whom one is in solidarity.”9

In Freirian terms, “true solidarity” demands that affluent Egyptian students fully relinquish their status and privilege to join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation. However, their youth and limited societal power make such a sacrifice unrealistic, and it is furthermore difficult to ignore the pragmatic constraints of fully relinquishing one’s privilege. Still, I believe that, at the very least, meaningful exposure to the lived realities of those they may unintentionally oppress is essential. I wondered: Could this goal be achieved through changes to the curriculum?

Problematizing the International School

Previously, I had the opportunity to collaborate in developing a curriculum for the children of privileged elites at two Cairene international schools. The goal was to create a learning experience where high school students could reflect on their social positions in order to explore avenues of inter-class solidarity. Students investigated their own schools and contemplated not only their social standing, but also the broader status of Egyptian education.

The students offered raw insights into embedded ideologies that adults typically hide. Most began with blame. Unlike Freire’s oppressed, however, their blame was not self-directed but rather directed at the oppressed majority. This was a blame rooted in misplaced narratives of merit, in which the majority “did not work hard enough” to deserve these students’ schooling rights—something they believed they earned through their parents’ hard work. Moreover, when asked how they would engage with poverty, most of these young people felt that charity was enough to counter inequalities. This perspective was heavily influenced by their upbringing and even carried certain “religious” connotations. This reliance on charity as a response to inequality is tied to what Freire calls false generosity—acts that appear generous but in fact sustain uneven power dynamics by maintaining the dependency of the oppressed on those who hold power. By contrast, Freire argues, “true generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity.”10

Despite their shortsightedness, the students also proved to be relatively malleable. Conducting structured interviews with working-class laborers like matrons and drivers on school grounds helped humanize them and allowed them to view everyday realities (which they would otherwise pass over) in a new light. Similarly, simulating variant household incomes helped them foster a rare understanding of decision-making under a more restricted budget. Accordingly, their notions of blame and charity began to shift. As they asked questions about their schools, they became more conscious of inequalities and moved toward a more empathetic understanding of the other. Many ended up acknowledging that much of their good fortune was not exclusively the result of their parents’ efforts—they began to recognize luck as a factor.

While the students did not fully appreciate the structural dynamics at play in their lives, these shifts in perception significantly influenced how they began to propose responses to poverty. When explaining how they would engage with class injustice, their answers revealed a more nuanced and deliberate form of action in pursuit of solutions, taking account of their abilities, privileges, and the problems at hand. Rather than simply throwing money at people to fulfill basic needs—as nearly all had initially suggested—students began to explore more targeted interventions in education. Some proposed buying internet subscriptions, while others suggested laptops. One student even expressed a willingness to personally teach someone English. These proposed actions did not call for macro-structural change through collective organizing, but they nonetheless reflected a subtle shift toward engaging with systemic issues. Still, they remained constrained within a neoliberal imaginary, incapable of envisioning alternatives beyond what already exists.

Notwithstanding the genuineness and intentionality behind their proposed actions, a sense of superiority persisted among the students. They not only felt entitled to decide what others’ needs were but also held an unquestioned distrust toward the people they sought to help. Despite showing some structural understanding of education’s role in social mobility, many assumed that the poor would still rely on begging if simply “handed” money. In other words, they presumed that poor individuals would not invest in their own education and thus could not be trusted to make sound financial decisions. This aligns with what Susan Benigni Cipolle describes as the ethics-of-charity mindset—an approach motivated by deficit thinking in which “doing for” the poor replaces their ability to do for themselves.11 These paternalistic attitudes, even among the youngest members of the privileged classes, remain a true obstacle to solidarity. Unless we begin from a standpoint of equality, any form of structural awareness risks becoming nothing more than a performative exercise.

Religion: The Missing Link?

Another significant challenge posed by Egyptian international schools is that they operate within a secular framework that enforces a dichotomous division between the social sciences and religious worldviews, despite the unwavering presence of the latter in students’ lives.

I noticed a huge discrepancy between what students said in our interviews and what they said in class during implementation. Many students—both Muslim and Christian—referenced religion when explaining poverty, with some even claiming that God had created social classes for a reason (and thus poverty was inescapable). For others, charity was mainly driven by religious notions such as zakat and sadaqa. Deeper dives revealed that students viewed wealth as a responsibility and a debt—not a privilege—to be repaid via charity. Interestingly, their sense of agency in resisting unfair structures was diminished by seeing God as an overwhelming force controlling their reality. Consequently, the students did not distinguish between profit and profiteering,12 where the latter is forbidden as exploitation, and in this regard their views demonstrated how religion and neoliberalism can quickly become enmeshed. Mona Atia defines this as “pious neoliberalism,” a phenomenon that blurs the lines between faith, economy, and governance.13

Despite their strong religious commitments, however, students and teachers agreed that religion’s place should be restricted to religious classes alone. Everyone seemed to agree that religion cannot be considered a “real” source of knowledge. How then can we truly foster solidarity with the other if we cannot even integrate epistemological splits within the self? How can we counter the negative view of the other that informs our actions if we cannot create learning experiences that interrogate our own beliefs?

Jack Mezirow, the godfather of Transformative Learning Theory, argues that any radical shift in one’s worldview is driven by a “disorienting dilemma.”14 This disorienting dilemma is usually an event that forces one to re-evaluate their beliefs. In the case of many young Jewish people today, the Gaza genocide might have been their disorienting dilemma, placing them on the path of becoming anti-war, anti-apartheid, and even anti-Zionist. But what do we do when the conditions for a disorienting dilemma are not present? What do we do in the case of young people—specifically, in Egypt—who are destined for positions of power and belong to an educational setting that fully isolates them from the realities outside of it?

The curriculum experiment I led attempted to trigger such reassessments, though it did not amount to a disorienting dilemma for the students since it only engaged them intellectually and cognitively, not experientially. Our instinct as educators is to protect our students from experiencing real discomfort because they are young. Yet, as the educational scholar Michael Zembylas says, without accepting the value of discomfort, teaching and learning miss important productive openings for transformation.15 Both teachers and students need opportunities to experience discomfort, without which cultivating true solidarity remains unviable.16

Our hope lies in problematizing the international school itself and making it a site of productive discomfort. It ought to be a place where students learn how such schools preserve the advantages of the elite while limiting others’ ability to access them; where patterns of exploitation are examined, whether in the roles of matrons, drivers, or teachers; and where the school’s profit-oriented philosophy is critically questioned for the part it plays in reproducing social class divisions. As Sean Fitzsimmons notes, many students in international schools are intellectually colonized because they “do not question the school’s use of ‘international’ terminology and instead believe that the Anglo-Western perspective promoted by the school is the globally accepted perspective.”17

The question then becomes, which schools would welcome such critical inquiries into their practices? And, if they do, how will they navigate and value the discomfort created by these inquiries? More importantly, would the same parents who yearn for their kids to integrate into the global establishment accept them? Would a critical inquiry of this sort be seen as anything other than undermining?

Creating inter-class solidarity is not just about accepting and normalizing discomfort as a pedagogical tool. It is also about allowing “non-objective” worldviews, like religion, to enter the conversation in order to challenge master narratives on inequality. Simply put, the false distinction between the religious and the secular must be challenged. By abandoning a paradigm that isolates religion as an exclusively private matter, we accept religion as an embodied, lived practice. This in turn will allow sharper debates around poverty, exploitation, and structural inequality to surface from Egyptian teachers and students alike.

The Jewish prayer circle with which I started this essay represents a moment of reconciliation between religious belief and political ideology. It was a moment of reclaiming religion and declaring: “this is mine, this is what it is for.” Similarly, international school classrooms can carve out room to critically engage with salient religious interpretations of socioeconomic class that tend to legitimize and re-produce capitalistic ways of seeing the world. By tying these to religious histories and social thought, we can challenge neoliberal views that obstruct solidarity. The idea that religion only belongs in “religion class” can be confronted by contesting the monopoly over who gets to speak about religion, broadening the range of perspectives students are exposed to, and ultimately challenging prevailing narratives that have normalized capitalism in religious thought.

The social reformer and intellectual Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) was an unconventional evangelist for his religious tradition. In 1897, Abduh remembered giving a lecture in Beirut in the 1880s, where he said: “Islam removed all racial distinctions and affirmed the dignity of all in connection to God in their creation,” adding that all of humanity shared in “the dignity of attaining the highest achievements that God set out.” By “achievements,” Abduh meant knowledge, and the context of his remarks was a school known for its controversial aspiration to educate children of all backgrounds together. Though Abduh’s remarks about mixed schooling are particular to his own time and context, the confrontation between the idealism of diversity and its opposition is familiar to ours.

Abduh was a leader of a cosmopolitan progressive reformist movement that aimed to reject prejudice and chauvinism to realize a new human community united through a love of knowledge. His late-nineteenth century vision is an early example of the progressive ecumenical humanism that has become the ideology widely shared by the educated classes around the world today. It is this ideology that now seems so threatened by an equally-global trend of national populism. Scholars and observers have analyzed “educational polarization” in terms of factors that are specific to the Global North in the twenty-first century, but here I argue that educational reform and the love of a very narrow form of diversity are linked at a historically deeper level. Like Abduh in the nineteenth century, liberals today have not considered how their broad ideals of diversity and inclusion depend on the much narrower range of experiences they possess as members of the educated classes. Simply put, the diversity with which educated professionals are most comfortable is the diversity of people who have shared this same experience.

Education and Belonging

Pundits, political scientists, and casual observers have commented extensively on educational polarization in Euro-American politics. Most important here is the trend of left-liberal political parties increasingly relying on the votes of educated professionals as much of their traditional working-class base has embraced the right and far-right. Thomas Piketty among others illustrate that though this trend is pronounced, it is not as simple as the left going upscale and the right representing the downtrodden uniformly. It is rather that parties like the Democrats and Republicans have become idiosyncratic cross-class coalitions organized around cultural issues. Though every country’s culture wars are different, voters across the Global North have grown more opposed to immigration from poorer countries as educated professionals have embraced diversity as a core value.

This preference among educated liberals has significantly shifted politics as a whole. Beginning in the 2010s, long-term intramural academic debates about the humanities canon and the social bases of prejudice spilled over from college campuses to major metropolitan media in the United States. The New York Times and Atlantic were debating the definitions and salience of terms like “intersectionality” and “systemic racism,” with professors as likely to appear on their podcasts as politicians. Whether or not metropolitan liberals have undergone a genuine moral transformation in recent decades, anti-xenophobic and pro-diversity rhetoric has certainly prevailed in their spaces.

The media also fractured such that in the early twenty-first century, it was possible for people to only consume print, audio, and video that reinforced their political views and cultural tastes. With their hegemony over the media, metropolitan left-liberals were especially able to surround themselves with images of people of all backgrounds and identities sharing an urbane and convivial lifestyle. This tendency in culture and politics both enabled educated people’s low-stakes love of apparent difference and masked a major driver of their uniformity.

As universities in the United States and Europe increasingly relied on the tuition of international students and faculty with global expertise, diversification was visibly realized across college campuses and among educated professionals. However, where doctors and professors may differ by ancestry, religion, or family structure, they have one very deep similarity, which is the experience of succeeding in educational institutions and an identification with their mission. The professional-managerial class (PMC), with its reliance on academic, technical, and professional credentials, favors people with not only intellectual gifts but the social adroitness to manage their professions’ political economies, which interconnect collaboration and competition. To add to this mix, PMC culture’s defining ideal, namely “the pursuit of knowledge,” is strongly individualistic and competitive as well as simultaneously collectivist and high-minded. People who succeed in and identify with school education learn to judge themselves and their peers by how well they achieve goals they believe to confer both personal honor and social good. So while such people are indeed part of a community with diverse backgrounds, it is also true that the mission-oriented identities they acquire in graduate school or professional offices can override the salience of the differences with which they originally came.

Historically, this sensibility took root among the educated classes when nineteenth-century progressive reformers all over the world sought greater harmony in diversity through common schooling. Benedict Anderson has canonized the idea that in the nineteenth century, people all over the world shrank their imaginations of community down from expansive kingdoms of gods into narrow nation-states. Classical historians like Albert Hourani and George Antonius have shown us how the accommodating Ottoman Islamic vision gave way to a partisan politics that pitted Arab against non-Arab, neighbor against neighbor. However, the late nineteenth century was also a time of a reinvigorated imaginary of cosmopolitanism and inclusion as people and media traversed the globe and connected with each other in new ways. This is apparent, for example, in the way ulama, intellectuals, and Ottoman leaders sought to secure Muslim self-rule and cohabitation by speaking of many different ideals to different audiences. It is equally apparent in Abduh and his interlocutors, who made their appeals for unity in the great nineteenth-century idioms of nation, empire, language, race, science, religion, tradition, and progress.

Abduh’s Vision of Unity

Scholars, critics, and even Abduh’s own friends have disagreed about how successfully the reformer and activist kept his ideas consistent and focused. However, Abduh’s vision of inclusive knowledge-seeking becomes very clear when his life as an educator is in view. Few of Abduh’s views about politics, theology, or Islamic law found much assent in his lifetime or since. Yet a generation of social reformers all came to believe that universal education could simultaneously instill a love of learning and respect of differences just as Abduh imagined.

Where Abduh, the ulama, and politicians worried about how Muslims could adapt new technology and organizations to secure their fortunes and autonomy, ordinary parents also wanted their children to get ahead in a changing world. In Beirut, Christian missionary schools drew students across confessional lines even as they made evangelism a central part of the curriculum. In the 1880s, Abduh joined other Muslim educators in al-Madrasah al-Sultaniyyah (the Sultanic School), a private institution established to respond to the missionary challenge with ecumenical outreach and progressive pedagogy supported by the Islamic Benevolent Society. At the prompting of his brother, Abduh wrote up his lectures at the Sultaniyyah as risalat al-tawhid (Treatise on Unity).

Abduh’s treatise on tawhid has long received attention for its unique attempt to bridge medieval and nineteenth-century cosmologies. In theology, the term tawhid refers to the strict monotheism elaborated by Muslim theologians, but the word also evokes unity more broadly. In his famous essay, Abduh describes an Islamic political unity that requires more than a passive respect for diversity in religion. In an argument that foreign imperialism threatens all native people together, he sees that Muslims have a duty to protect others with all the force with which they protect themselves.

Abduh sees this kind of polity as directed to and cemented by intellectual conviviality. For him, “there is a spirit with which God imbues all his divine laws for rectifying of the intellect and the guide of reflection.” Abduh is saying that though the Quran distinguishes religious communities by different legal instructions from God, its words of guidance all point to the same kind of activity. This for him is the activity of “approaching every question in its right way and inquiring after every object by its causes.” Abduh argues that God enjoins mutuality, even fraternity, among different religious communities and “commands that debates always be undertaken in kindness.” He saw religious debate as a vital part of shared civic life.

Abduh further argues that a contending pluralistic society would best favor the Islamic religion’s universal appeal to reason. It is on this basis that he made his famous statement that Islam is “the first religion to address the rational mind.” In his time and since, scholars and critics have taken interest in how Abduh links nineteenth-century developments in natural sciences to the truth of the Islamic theology of tawhid. However, what stands out to me is not so much how he links science and theology as abstracted conceptual fields, but rather the human activities of learning about them. Simply put, Abduh imagines that people will both evangelize for their own religions and get along with people of others by engaging in the intellectual activities of studying, debating, and inquiring. His vision of a multifaith, intercommunal polity under Ottoman Islamic rule is principally an intellectual one. In explaining this view, he not only generalizes his own experiences as a cosmopolitan scholar, but also imagines that everyone else in society would organize their own lives and relate to others in this way.

It is this aspect that united many ulama and lay people to oppose Abduh in Beirut and beyond. As I have discussed elsewhere, many Muslim ulama who opposed mixed-confession education were not generally concerned with intermixing as such but about how students might develop similar ways of talking, dressing, and thinking that could make it difficult to distinguish Muslims from others. These ulama did not generally share Abduh’s experiences of collaborating with and debating against non-Muslims in such a way where they could share space and purpose, and they did not share his confidence that ordinary believers could do the same without concern about their religious commitments.

As Youshaa Patel has recently elaborated, ulama have long exhorted Muslims to distinguish themselves from others by dress and deportment. Abduh thought no less of this imperative, but in such writings as his infamous Transvaal fatwa, he reconciled this idea along curiously intellectual lines. He rather thought believers’ own minds and hearts sufficed to distinguish them from others. Though I have seen no evidence that Abduh dressed in European fashions, violated halal dietary norms, or socialized with women immodestly, rumor-mongers were able to spread these scandals by drawing on the fact that he was comfortable in others’ spaces. What makes Abduh’s idea of diversity historically distinct is not only that he imagines study and work as multi-faith activities but also that he imagines everyone partaking in them as formative experiences of individual and collective life.

In his famous tawhid treatise and many other works, Abduh generalizes the habits and ethics of scholarship to define a good human life in a multi-faith world. He thus transforms what traditional ulama had seen as a rare virtue into a universal requirement for the good life for all people. Abduh further conceives of this educational exercise as the habituated love of diversity just as liberals today do. However, both visions of inclusion rely on coercion.

Writings by Sultaniyyah students in the early twentieth century reveal a strict and censorious institution defined as much by the military ethic of Ottoman elites as by Abduh’s vision of multicultural inquiry. However, Taha Hussein’s (1889-1973) memoir of more traditional Islamic education reveals a parallel experience of drudgery and anxiety. These kinds of accounts are not unique to their time and place but suggest an experience shared by people in disciplinary institutions. The relatively few students who thrive in these institutions often identify much more closely with those institutions’ rules and attitudes than the majority of others. Similarly, today, the students who grow up and get knowledge-centered professional-managerial jobs (especially if they become educators themselves) have diverse backgrounds, religious commitments, and family structures. However, these diversities mask the commonality of their experience: they thrived in comprehensive conscriptionist schools and, succeeding so well in them, internalized their mission.

Integration and the Educational Divide

Though universal education as a desirable idea took rapid hold in the late nineteenth century, it took considerably longer to realize as an institutional practice. In other words, the classes of people who already experienced and identified with education nearly all assented to universalizing their vision of the good, but the creation and maintenance of inclusive education was considerably more complicated than agreeing with an idea in principle. In a popular critical work on education, Freddie deBoer states that it was not until 1970s that the United States achieved universal elementary schooling. According to him, this is just the moment when talk of a “crisis” of declining standards in academics and discipline became widespread. I would here extend deBoer’s analysis to say that by the late-twentieth century, the reality of public education was finally reaching the people who were the most socioeconomically distant from the classes who conceived the ideal.

Yet for left-liberals, the struggle against segregation overshadows all other parts of the story of educational expansion and its relationship to class and the state. The liberal account claims that white Southerners resisted integrated schooling with a unique pathology, and this account tends to ignore the fact that integration was promoted through coercive federal (and even military) force that left Black students especially vulnerable. When in the late-twentieth century federal authorities ordered busing to desegregate schools in cities like Boston, opposition to institutions that enforced intimacy with strangers was also forceful. Not only were Northern whites as susceptible to racist ideologies as those in the South, they also resisted losing what little local control they had and came to see education and the economic changes it facilitated as leaving them behind.

Although inequality increased dramatically in the late-twentieth century, the results of educational change were not uniformly disempowering. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, higher education consistently expanded, and while the most prestigious and powerful employment sectors like tech and finance have remained the most exclusive, the professions of law, medicine, and academia have become considerably more diverse. It is from this vantage point that I stress that Atlantic liberals are not merely kidding themselves about diversity. College towns and PMC enclaves in cities really are diverse. We who have family, friends, and colleagues who come from all over the world really do structure our lives through genteel, rule-bound competition and collaboration for shared career goals. When populists claim that immigrants threaten our way of life and our future, they are simply not talking to our culture or lived experience.

However, that culture and way of life was shaped through an extremely partial experience, which is flourishing in school. Opinion polls show that few people enjoy or look forward to school. As the perception that people need school to find good jobs has diminished, so has trust in a system that forces people into uncomfortable situations. The people who experience school as a place for peace and growth have more diverse backgrounds than they have ever had, but they are united by support for and comfort in modern educational institutions that are strikingly different from most other people. This cultural gulf is so wide that opposition to educational-reformist ideas of diversity and meritocracy has proven a durable political link between rich reactionaries and precarious majorities of voters.

Two Thoughts on Abduh’s Failures

Instead of looking to Abduh’s failures at promoting mixed education merely to criticize the idea of public schools or promote an alternative model, I conclude with two thoughts on how our educationally polarized politics can learn from his experience. First, although Abduh and likeminded reformists advocated the idea that everyone had to go to school to learn respect for diversity and pride in their own community, they themselves did not come out of such institutions. Rather, Abduh was inculcated in the tradition of Islamic higher education with roots in the Middle Ages that trained the discernment of religious scholars. These ulama came from all over the Islamic world to study in places like Cairo’s 1000-year old Al-Azhar, where Abduh studied. Though Abduh felt a reverential love for as well as a reflexive skepticism toward this curriculum, his belief that inclusion fosters the love of learning was shaped through his narrow experience of the ulama way of life. In this way, we can see that ideals of inclusion and self-respect institutionalized in our education system today are not limited to such a system.

My second thought is the cautionary reminder that the ulama enjoy with Muslim communities an organic relationship of trust and respect that liberal academia and the professional class simply do not have with society broadly today. Though they have tried, through educational coercion and media dominance, to universalize their experience of tolerance and love of learning, they have failed so thoroughly that the broader public in the United States and elsewhere seems poised to reject everything those ideals touch—from competitive elections to the court system—rather than endure more diversity “shoved down our throats.” This is obviously not the time for proponents of equality and solidarity (PMC or otherwise) to retreat from political action, but that action cannot be premised on the belief that the hard work and limited gains most people experience in school will result in a mutualistic love for the truth. Our inspiration from the ambitious optimism of progressive-era reformers like Abduh must also reflect a full knowledge of their partiality and limits.

When I moved to the United Kingdom in 2013, I thought Islam had six pillars: the declaration of faith, the five daily prayers, the fasting of Ramadan, the giving of alms, and the two pilgrimages: one to Makkah, and the other, naturally, to Dubai.

It was about five years after my conversion to Islam, and almost everyone I knew or followed on social media seemed committed to visiting Dubai at least once a year. Had Hajj become so expensive that Dubai replaced Makkah? The rituals were rather similar: circumambulating the Dubai Mall seven times, camping for a night in the desert, and throwing money (rather than pebbles in Mina) at consumer items ranging from designer clothes to A5 wagyu steaks.

Now, more than a decade later, the craze for Dubai has not subsided a whit (if the global popularity of Dubai chocolate is any indicator). As a sociologist researching Muslim-related issues in Euro-America, I have often wondered: what attracts so many Muslims—especially in the West—to Dubai?

Homeless Dreams

Dubai is not what it used to be. For anyone serious about corporate money today, Riyadh is the place to go. Dubai’s wannabe entrepreneurs, high-flying workers, and social media celebrities are now barely making ends meet—or trying to hold in place the cracked veneer of a six-star lifestyle. Everything is rented or on loan. From housing, to cars, to designer handbags, life in Dubai is simply becoming less and less affordable.1 And no, Dubai is not free of crime (unless you think white-collar crime doesn’t count).2 Only Dubai’s reputation as a tax haven still holds, alongside its infamy as the largest hub for sex work (and scandals) in the Middle East. Despite these realities, many people from around the world regularly vacation in Dubai, and some even contemplate permanently resettling there by making “hijra.”

Hijra, in its original sense, refers to the migration to Medina of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions from the oppression they faced in Makkah. Their aim was to freely build a true Muslim society. Today, any escape from an environment perceived as hostile to Muslims (typically “the West”) tends, haphazardly, to be described as a “hijra.” Yet much disagreement surrounds it as both a practice and an idea. While many British and American Muslims dream of making hijra to Dubai for its comforts, I have known people who made hijra to Tunisia in order to build a village in the desert from scratch, and others who made hijra to Jordan to set up a permaculture community. I have also met many French Muslims who made hijra within Europe itself—to the British city of Birmingham, for example. And while Dubai is a coveted hijra destination for many, the reality is that plenty of others who live and work there today contemplate migrating to “greener pastures” in Malaysia, Türkiye, Bosnia, or elsewhere across Asia and Europe. Everyone is looking for something different under the banner of “hijra.”

Romanticization plays some role here. In the twenty-first century, Islamic revivalist movements and popular culture have sold the Muslim diaspora the dream of a lost, romantic past: the times of the Revelation, the Golden Age of Islamic civilization under the Abbasids, the imperial strength of the Ottomans, and so on. These are depicted as times when Muslims were strong, affluent, and in power. The Islamicate of the past is imagined as untouched by the modern corruptions of the “West.” Television series like Omar and Diriliş: Ertuğrul, charismatic athletic figures like MMA champion Khabib Nurmagomedov, and scenes like the Speakers’ Corner “dawah” debates on social media are all highly popular because they piggyback on images of power that redress a collective loss of self-esteem. “We, Muslims, were once victorious,” so the mantra goes.

Curiously, this longing for the “golden age” of Islam often trades diasporic Asian, African, and Levantine cultures for the Arabian Peninsula’s own local, khaliji customs. Khaliji culture is perceived as “purer” because of its proximity to the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad and the holy sites of Makkah and Madinah. This image of purity is also the fruit of a concerted campaign by Saudi Arabia which, since the Cold War and under American influence, has sought to spread a particular form of Saudi-supremacist Islam to Euro-America.3 As a result, South Asian men in London can be heard calling themselves akhi instead of bhai, and can be seen in white thobes and head caps (remnants of Zoroastrianism) instead of shalwar kameez, djellabas, or bazin.4 These were among the ways that British Islamicate cultures sought to relocate themselves in an Arab and Middle Eastern imaginary, by asking “how can we live like the first Muslims did?” For many, Dubai emerges as an answer because it has both the aesthetics of “Islamic traditionalism” and the power of a regional hegemon.

Yet the search for a more empowered and authentic “Muslim” identity (conflated with “Arab” identity) by a homeless diaspora is not the only driver of hijra-cum-Dubai mania. It might not even be an especially important factor. The fact is that Muslims don’t migrate to Dubai in search of an alternative lifestyle, but to find an even deeper sense of comfort. In Dubai, your business loan can be as “halal” as your Big Mac. For many, that is an attractive promise.

Halalified Comfort

Anyone who visits downtown Dubai would scratch their head trying to find what differentiates it from any other large American urban center like Los Angeles or New York. The city itself was designed by British urban planner John Harris and modeled after large American metropolises with a focus on leisure and entertainment similar to Las Vegas.5 In the present day, one can find in Dubai all the comforts of any large American city: efficient public transit, luxury resorts, sports facilities, suburban houses in gated communities with swimming pools, and perhaps most importantly, all the major banks and fast-food chains of the world stamped with a big “halal” sign. The neoliberal structure of the Euro-American economy is perfectly reproduced in Dubai, and its rampant consumerism, unchecked capitalism, and exploitative labor practices all feel very familiar. These familiarities often play a greater role in attracting “Muslim migrants” than anything about Islam itself.

From mortgages and food to scam crypto projects, Dubai is a place where the uncritical copy-paste of Westernese life is custom-fit for a Muslim audience. There you can find, for example, Global Village, a giant theme park which aspires to be nothing more than a sort of Muslamic Disneyland. You can also purchase ZamZam water in $30 glass bottles, grab a nice glass of “halal” wine or champagne, visit the city’s all-new “halal” casinos, and purchase designer “Muslimwear” like the Nike hijab. These “halal” offerings not only commercialize Islam into a brand devoid of values and meaning but destroy the socio-spiritual and ethical fabric of a community. Muslims are not seen as two billion believers but two billion consumers. Labelling things “halal” without changing any of their questionable ethics has a name: “Islam by technicalities.” Anything can be made “halal” for the right amount of money. Going to the Las Vegas of the Middle East permits a life without hesitations or second guesses. You’ll never need to examine any food labels for traces of pork gelatin ever again. The trade-off is silent compliance: never question how everything around you is built and produced. Just consume and enjoy.

The commercialization of Islam represents an effort to depoliticize Muslims and disconnect them from their moral frameworks.6 What better way to erase the meaning of the hijab, for example, than to turn it into a fashion accessory? When people tell me about their role models, saying they want to see a Muslim Elon Musk, a Muslim Mark Zuckerberg, or a Muslim Rupert Murdoch, I always wonder why nobody thinks instead of a British Malcolm X, an American al-Ghazali, or a European Rabia al-Adawiyya. Why is it always white, rich, secular males who often have a disdain for Muslims that we take as role models? That so many Muslims cheered Hamza Yusuf’s engagement with Jordan Peterson, or the conversion to Islam of redpiller Andrew Tate, suggests that, despite seeing the “West” as an antagonist, Muslims still crave its validation. This is understandable for people who, for generations, have been deprived of financial stability, media representation, and political visibility.

This is part of the reason Dubai is so appealing: it is seen as the bastion of an imagined cultural and economic revenge on life. And in a twisted way, it is. But if retail therapy is not the answer, then what is?

Between Duty and Divestment

Perhaps a real hijra requires a move away from structures of oppression, not the “West.” The Palestinian-American professor Hatem Bazian says Muslims should be guided by a shared ethos which “must be about severing our relationship to products produced by corporation[s] in sweatshops [in] far distant lands, [and which use] the poverty of people to maximize profit while treating them as modern wage slaves.” The writer Ali Harfouch similarly urges us to “revolt against the Homo Economicus [the human that earns, produces, and consumes]” and to stop worshipping the “god of Capital.”

Bazian and Harfouch are right. We need to boycott and divest from systems of oppression around us, not just the amorphous idea of “the West.” By convincing ourselves that the problem is “the West” and not, say, rampant neoliberalism, we delude ourselves into thinking an “escape” to Dubai fulfills an ethical imperative. Ironically, Dubai is in fact a Western city par excellence and one of the global centers of neoliberal life.

Still, absolute divestment, both materially and ideologically, is no easy task. And, perhaps more importantly, it is not clear that “hijra” is the means by which to achieve it. If I were to “make hijra,” what happens to those I leave behind who cannot afford the luxury of packing up and leaving? Don’t I have a duty and responsibility toward them, given the privileges, resources, and knowledge I possess? Since I have learned how to navigate this society—my own home and community—who am I really benefitting by suddenly relocating to another, foreign place?

Beyond divestment, however, is the question of flourishing. Who will build the alternatives to the systems that we boycott? In a way, I believe these alternatives already exist, and we must actively nurture them. They are “too grassroots” to feature in mainstream media, not flashy enough to be “Instagrammable,” and they often fly under the radar of public attention. Whether it is through community hubs, artists collectives, alternative media platforms, healthcare initiatives, or even ethical fintech start-ups, people are constantly strategizing and organizing in response to the Dubaization of our lives. They are living out an alternative in the margins.

Perhaps some will argue there is a third path and that building alternatives requires resources which many marginalized communities cannot access. Accordingly, temporarily moving to Dubai, making a lot of tax-free money through corporate work, and then returning home can seem to make sense. Can’t Dubai, and the Gulf states more broadly, be a means to a righteous end? What if we took advantage of Dubai as a money pump with the aim of redistributing wealth within our own communities? While the idea is tempting, the fact remains that, in one way or another, we are contributing to an economy heavily reliant on exploitation. Isn’t every economic migrant from the West just fodder for Dubai to accelerate its growth?

In the videogame Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, the first mission is set in 2029 Dubai—or, more exactly, the ruins of Dubai. In a near future where the Emirate overly relies on unstable technology and questionable labor practices, a technological catastrophe leads workers to commit acts of violence, destroying properties and forcing people to flee. As a result, you—the player—are left roaming in a half-built luxury resort, admiring the skyline of the abandoned city. The deeper we wade into the age of agentic AI and technological acceleration, the less Deus Ex seems like fiction. Cataclysm or not, it is public knowledge that the Emirates’ natural reserves are limited. It is not a matter of if, but when, the oil reserves and money dry out. The cracks are already showing.

What will we do, then, when Dubai falls? Where will we go? We owe it to ourselves to start imagining a future without Dubai and all it represents while also thinking seriously and honestly about the limitations of “hijra” as we seek to build a better world.