At the end of June, I spoke to European peace activists in a meeting organized by the International Peace Bureau, as part of its ongoing initiative on Common Security. The following is my presentation, edited to include sources and minor updates.

I will talk today about how we need to speak honestly and openly what happened over the last 30 or 35 years, and what brought us to this current moment, so we can begin to have a different conversation, about Common Security.

I’m going to start with how I realized this while working in grassroots activism, in marginal places that are worst affected by armed conflict and other forms of violence and oppression. Like Chechnya and the North Caucasus, or eastern and southern Ukraine, or Belarus. I’ve worked with activists in these communities for over 20 years. I had long had a vague feeling that civil society and particularly peace and human rights movements were being twisted into instruments of donor countries’ foreign and security policies, which they were wielding to the detriment of their opponents (of course back then we didn’t refer to them as opponents). I had no words to describe this then, but I do now.

But I also thought that if we did everything right in grassroots civil society, according to the best practices from graduate school courses and UN manuals and the like, we could resist this harmful trend. And then we could still get towards peace, democracy and justice on our continent, and of course elsewhere, too.

Over the years of working with grassroots activists, though, I watched how our spaces and our work were being manhandled, distorted and eroded by Western foreign policy and especially bilateral foreign aid agencies, the latter in turn following agendas developed by foundations acting as a sort of vanguard of ideas. And of course, in many post-Soviet countries and not only there, domestic security services and governments also exerted more and more pressure on activists, and worse, though this was often to a significant extent in response to the prior instrumentalization of activists by foreign actors. Between the geopolitical agendas of Western governments and the suspicion and repression of local governments, genuine grassroots mobilization was undermined.

The unipolar moment was many things, but it was also the era in which foreign-funded NGOs became a thing, a big thing: they exploded in numbers and resources. In my work, that was mostly Western-funded NGOs inside the former Soviet Union, but it played out along similar lines elsewhere in the Global South.

In the 1990s, NGOs were all the rage. They were supposed to somehow, miraculously, solve the problems which governments, diplomats, international organizations had not been able to solve. Already then, wise people started diagnosing something called NGOization: instead of movements borne by citizens and accountable to them, instead of para-political institutions that socialize society, we got freestanding social entrepreneurs and technocratic managers, who formed elites powered by foreign money and whose ideas and activities were often out of sync with their communities.

The dysfunction and harm that has come from this is well-known. This NGO industry, this specific form of soft power projected by the West into the rest, is facing a crisis moment. Last fall, even Foreign Policy Magazine put out an issue with a lead article, by Adam Tooze of all people, provocatively titled “The End of Development”. By this, he means the end of development aid as a practice and a form of politics as we have known it for decades and especially in the post-Cold War period of High Technocracy. In the same issue, another article, “Why the world turned on NGOs”, describes how NGOs were once the golden child among foreign policy actors and are now pariahs.

Let me explain with the story of a field I know intimately - feminist peace activism. Feminist anti-war movements developed a sophisticated understanding of women, war and peace over more than a century, until they were finally able to pour it into the Women, Peace and Security agenda adopted by the UN Security Council 26 years ago -as resolution 1325.

And then this agenda was turned on its head: it became about putting more women in uniform and tanks, about how women can help make armies more “lethal”. It became about women piloting drones and launching missiles. It sidelined actual women peace leaders. It took away the few resources women’s movements have and gave them to men and to militarism. Organizations like NATO can simply buy themselves the feminist label and agenda, because they can easily put on conferences and sponsor other flashy public-facing events, while feminist activists are penniless and silenced. This causes enormous harm to women activists and even more to all women affected by war.

If we zoom out from the NGO industry and civil society to a higher level of international relations, there is a book titled “The Cunning of Gender Violence. Geopolitics and Feminism”, which argues that in Western establishment discourse, our opponents are written off as patriarchal and misogynist so they can be targeted with war. We have all witnessed this. “Men oppress women and girls in Afghanistan, Iran or Gaza, therefore we should bomb that country, including, unfortunately, the women and girls in it, but it is ultimately for their own good.”

There is even a cottage industry trying to draw Russia as the antidote to Western women’s rights and equality and tying this to the current war between Russia and Ukraine, as if escalating the war to somehow defeat Russia was the feminist thing to do.

What does all of this have to do with Common Security? A lot!

If we rebuilt our international relations along a Common Security model, civil society activism would no longer be captured, distorted and discarded in the pursuit of zero-sum geopolitical competition. The spaces needed for liberation, representation and solidarity could open up again, oxygen would flood back in. Our ideas and labor could no longer be instrumentalized for their tawdry opposites. Real civic mobilization, incidentally the only thing that can ever halt militarism, could then begin to revive.

In the outline for today’s conversation, there is a diagnosis that we are witnessing “the decline of international law and transactional power politics, the new arms race and the collapse of the disarmament regime, the dangers of a possible escalation of the war in Ukraine and the catastrophic consequences of the wars raging across various continents, climate change and the growing gap between rich and poor, as well as the expansion of nuclear arsenals”.

But this didn’t happen because leaders became forgetful, didn’t study history, or simply as a result of a series of unfortunate, but entirely coincidental, events. It happened because of the pursuit of specific grand strategies by the West. And also by others, although the latter arguably in response to the grand strategies the West pursued. We have to name these grand strategies, describe them, acknowledge that they are ruinous for all of us and the world, so that we can dismantle and reject them and devise new grand strategies that return us to arms control and disarmament, deescalation, ending wars, making diplomacy the default and the norm and that enable us to tackle the great challenges of our new era, namely climate change and oligarchy-level inequality.

I don’t actually like talking about grand strategy. It is such a pompous term. The kind of people who talk about it a lot are usually not very nice. But a grand strategy is basically the answer to the question “who do we want to be in this world, and which means will we use to that end?” A Common Security approach isn’t just an operational handbook for day-to-day international relations, it is in fact a grand strategy. Therefore, if we want Common Security, we have to relinquish the grand strategy we are pursuing to date.

So let’s name the grand strategy that has brought us to this brink: Western primacy (or US primacy that is vicariously enjoyed by Western allies); the end of history; unipolarity or the unipolar moment; the Wolfowitz doctrine of global US hegemony; the empire; predatory hegemony as Stephen Walt has recently termed it. These past days, I have come across variations of those terms that reverberate with the naked, heightened stakes of our specific moment: “rich-country militarism”, “white nationalist End of History”, “Western hegemonic anxiety”.

Attendant features of this order are - or until not long ago were - a global economic and financial order that heavily benefits rich, industrialized and technology-hoarding nations; hegemony of Western political and economic ideas, culture, corporations etc; quasi-colonial regimes in a number of regions, such as the Middle East, West Africa, but also, closer to home, Bosnia and Kosovo; the capture of multilateral institutions by Western geopolitical and ideological agendas, for example many of the UN development agencies or - since we are talking about Olaf Palme and Common Security - of the OSCE - rendering these institutions tainted and (at least in the eyes of those opponents with whom we must find a way back to peace) beyond redemption.

If we want Common Security, we must get to a politics that rejects the pursuit of dominance - military, economic, ideological. We must be honest with ourselves about how Common Security isn’t just a different technique that gets us to the same outcome as zero-sum geopolitical competition: to primacy, or the end of history, where all other states become like us, but also accept our dominance. Common Security gets us to a different outcome, one in which other states and regions have interests and can thrive and where their sovereignty is respected.

An outcome where the West is no longer the leader in everything, so that everyone can feel secure. As Anton Jäger late last year described it as “After a century in which Europe was in charge, with highly ambiguous results, [such a relative decline] might free Europeans of the burdening neurosis of mastery.”

Last week, on April 28, the European Parliament adopted a resolution calling on EU member states to adopt consent-based rape laws. Even if you believe, as I do, that all sexual contact absent freely given, explicit consent constitutes rape and that therefore consent-based rape laws are imperative (more on why they’re still not enough below), this resolution represents a cascade of missteps, each of which deplete the struggle against patriarchal violence against women. It is also symptomatic of the European Parliament’s constant, unchecked lunging at political and legal powers that it does not possess under the EU treaties.

Powers that in fact none of the institutions of the EU possess. Title V of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (Articles 67–89) regulates “Justice, freedom and security” and leaves criminal law and criminal justice to the member states. The treaty does not define crimes, their punishment or the criminal process through which criminal justice is administered, and it does not endow any EU institutions with the power to do so. Title V covers what is necessary for the EU to function as an open space with a common external borders - EU citizenship, migration, coordinating member states’ fight against organized transnational crime etc. - but makes a conspicuously wide berth around substantive definitions of individual crimes.

So we have an illicit, unconstitutional and ultimately undemocratic power grab by an EU body, which is bad enough. Its subject matter makes it more ominous still: sexual violence against women and how to stop it.

Imperial boomerang theory holds that bad habits picked up in the course of conquering and pacifying empires will eventually come home. Typically, this is with straightforward forms of repression in mind, like police state methods or torture. But if the imperialism is subtle, the boomerang might be, too. EU enlargement directed at its near-abroad offers a technocratic playbook containing the secret sauce of European prosperity to elites and incentivizes their cooperation, while gently blanching democracy and accountability out of politics.

There is a curious parallel to last week’s European Parliament resolution in the rash decision to grant Ukraine EU-candidate status in June 2022. Back then, the EU handed Ukraine a laundry list of reforms to implement before its candidate status would be confirmed. One of those demands was ratifying the Istanbul Convention, full name “Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence”, which mandates consent-based rape laws. Ukraine ratified the convention within 48 hours after the EU made it a condition of candidacy. Previously, successive pre- and post-Maidan governments had failed to do so for eleven years.

It was a curious overreach by the EU, because the convention was not created by the EU, but the Council of Europe, a separate, older all-European intergovernmental organization that sets common norms for human rights and democracy. The convention’s subject matter - violence against women - is not subject to EU regulation. The EU does not and cannot oblige its members to ratify the convention. Five current EU members have not ratified it and don’t seem likely to, the remainder have taken their time to do so (up to eight years between signature and ratification), and in at least two, populist leaders intermittently flirt with leaving it. Yet in 2024, the EU itself acceeded to the convention. It was a pointless, legally dubious move since it has no powers in the areas the convention regulates, the kind of vapid grandstanding that animates Brussels politics.

Back in 2022, my Ukrainian feminist friends were jubilant at the overnight ratification. I was dismayed, though, and published an article to explain why: when political struggles that must be fought and won the hard way, right in the heart of society, are instead kicked up the chain into the realm of international organizations and treaties, we lose the struggle. Instead of taking on patriarchal violence the radical way, in communities, families, schools and the streets, grassroots activists are groomed to seek salvation in international mechanisms. Foreign patrons promise them miraculous shortcuts to social change, which turn out mirages.

In such a constellation, the normal democratic process is suspended. There is no broad public debate, no coalition- and consensus-building, no forging of mobilized constituencies that will hold the government accountable for translating the convention into domestic laws and enforcing them.

Ratifying an international convention is easy, especially if a government has no intention of implementing it. A 2024 comparative paper on consent-based rape laws across Europe found that in Ukraine there had been “little domestic pressure” to adopt such a law and that it had come about through “coercive isomorphism” (the approximation of norms due to international pressure).

When Ukraine came in for its first scheduled review under the Istanbul convention in summer 2024, a coalition of Ukrainian and international women’s rights groups submitted a shadow report laying out how police, prosecutors and judges stubbornly ignore the new consent-based rape law, and instead conduct investigations and trials based on their old biases about rape. The convention was ratified, a law was adopted, but nothing has changed for rape victims.

Arguably, ratification of the Istanbul convention only ever served as box-ticking and virtue-signalling, both for Ukraine’s government and the EU officials that put it on Ukraine’s to-do list. This anodyne, technocratic feminism is deployed as decoration. Neither side cares about women, girls and their safety from violence.

I won’t get into whether Ukraine’s government should be expected to adopt reforms, especially those it clearly considers irrelevant, while facing an all-consuming national crisis. Ukrainian officials certainly seem confident they can, after all they insist the country can complete the entire EU accession process by next year. But Ukraine is incidental here. It serves as an illustration of the imperial boomerang, which is now swooshing back to Brussels and about to hit EU citizens.

Just like the EU did when mandating Ukraine to ratify the Istanbul convention in 2022, the European Parliament goes out of its way - literally, by venturing beyond its legal and political prerogatives - to sink its claws into a profoundly political issue and tear it away from the profoundly political struggle it calls for. The imperial boomerang threatens to drain European democracies and civil societies, just like EU integration moves have drained the democracies and civil societies of the EU’s periphery through transactional norm transfer. The European Parliament cannot easily arrogate itself the formal power to micromanage member states’ criminal systems, but it can engage in cheap, hollow virtue-signalling and wrap itself in a faux-feminist flag.

Does it matter if good laws come into existence through flawed processes, through technocratic shortcuts ordered from above or far away?

Consent-based rape laws define rape as any sexual intercourse without active, explicit, freely-given consent. That makes them different from traditional rape laws, written by men from the self-serving male point of view that it’s only rape if it involves physical violence by the perpetrator and physical resistance or attempts to escape by the victim. Due to decades-long feminist advocacy and mass protest movements, the perspective of victims, who experience rape far more often as moments of “freeze” and “fawn” (if not as outright incapacitation due to drugging, choking etc) than “fight” and “flight”, is now codified into consent-based rape laws.

This is progress. However, rape - any rape, under any definition - isn’t just a vastly underreported crime; even when women do report, conviction rates are so low that British feminist lawyer Harriet Wistrich has argued that rape has effectively been decriminalized. A well-known parallel is the decades-old problem (scandal would be a better term) of rape kits in the US: the state refusing to test forensic evidence collected from rape victims’ bodies, sometimes making victims pay for the testing or destroying evidence without notifying them. What progress feminist movements have made towards better laws and policies around rape has been hard-won, incremental and infuriatingly precarious.

I’ll cut to the chase as to why: violence against women is the master key of the patriarchal order. It is the means by which men get what they want from women, including the use of their bodies. It is also the means by which men keep women scared, cowed and at their disposal, and the patriarchal order in place. This order functions even for men that never engage in violence and women that never experience it (although I have never known a woman who hasn’t faced gendered violence).

Since male violence against women is the central mechanism maintaining the patriarchal order, it is of an inordinate scale. A 2024 report by the UK’s Metropolitan police found that the number of perpetrators in United Kingdom may be an “eye-watering” four million and therefore far beyond the scope of the criminal justice system.

This - the scale of male violence against women and that it is the patriarchy’s central mechanism - is a pretty basic point. I am making it here to explain why rape laws adopted through coercive isomorphism - careless, thoughtless transactions between elites, over the heads of their female and male citizens - are not likely to result in significant changes in criminal justice outcomes, let alone in the prevalence of rape and other forms of violence against women. We’re not going to make so much as a chink in the patriarchy’s master key through technocratic trickery.

Even where consent-based rape laws are adopted as a result of organic democratic processes and civil society pressure, they’re hardly a silver bullet. The United Kingdom - with those “eye-watering” levels of male violence against women - has a consent-based rape law. In fact, it was a global pioneer, codifying a consent-based rape definition as part of the 2003 Sexual Offenses Act, a full eight years before the Istanbul Convention was drafted. The UK only ratified the convention in 2022.

Bringing down the levels of violence against women means chipping away at the patriarchal order itself. It requires a radical renegotiation of the social contract between the sexes. That takes everything we’ve got. It takes everything democracy puts at our disposal, and we have to make the most of it. It takes all the other institutions in our societies, too - culture, schools, media etc. Women can’t afford to ponder what came first - the chicken or the egg, the law or the social change. It has to be both at the same time. We have to wield every straw we can grasp at.

In German legal theory, the concept of the “sittenbildende Kraft des Strafrechts” (the morality-shaping force of criminal law) holds that criminalizing behaviors that society at the time considers innocuous changes societal perceptions and notions of morality. This is one straw we grasp at: laws will move the needle towards dismantling the patriarchy. But we can’t afford these laws to come about through bloodless technocracy or transnational elite deals, over the heads of citizens. We also need the movements, constituencies, debates and passions that come with a proper democratic process. They are the other straws we grasp at.

If the European Parliament succeeds in lifting the monumental task of renegotiating the social contract between the sexes out of our democracies and public squares, and if EU member states, lured by the prospect of glamorous girl-washing, pass carelessly copied and pasted consent-based rape laws, we lose the struggle and all the straws that grow from it. We can’t afford that if we want to come for the master key of the patriarchal order.

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Since I don’t want to clog anyone’s inbox, I’m tacking a few updates onto this post. They cover the issues of today’s post: the imperial boomerang turning back from Europe’s periphery, Ukraine, war, peace, democracy and Ersatz-democracy, and women’s activism.

• Together with Venzie Marinov, a Bulgarian-American who returned home and became an environmental activist, I wrote about the April 19 elections in Bulgaria, and how Western observers’ geopolitics and/or culture war lenses blind them to the issues mobilizing voters: war, peace, security, justice and dignity.

• The recording of our panel discussion “Men in the vans, women on the streets: gender, nation, and resistance against forced mobilization in Ukraine and ex-Yugoslavia” has been put online. It comes with a revealing origin story. , Marta Havryshko, , Milica Popovic and I had planned the panel together, and the Democracy Institute at Central European University agreed to host it, but then canceled abruptly after coming under pressure. Volodymyr rallied resistance, and the discussion was ultimately held in January, hosted by Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence. You can watch it here.

I want to dash this off while it is fresh in my mind, and also to pin myself down to this idea. Which is: Europeans may have just lucked out in a big way. For once, when I write “Europeans”, I don’t mean foreign policy elites, but average people. This current moment, at which Trump threatens at the very least tariffs and at worst something that is “no longer peace” to acquire Greenland, and at which Mark Carney has given “the most important political speech about international relations in 50 years”…

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…has come just in time to spare Europeans the militarization of their societies, economies, politics and foreign policies that I have been fretting about.

It’s quite simple, if a little counterintuitive. It is self-evident that Europe (in any political-organizational constellation) cannot fight the US over Greenland nor deter the US militarily, not now, not ever, or in any timeline that is relevant for our purposes.

All those German think tankers griping that they told us so, that if we had spent more on defense and become autonomous, Trump would not dare to threaten Greenland, they’re not just wrong, they’re lying. They advocated buying stuff that was supposed to be integrated into NATO. Things not meant for fighting or deterring the US, but for a Eurasian land war or maybe another GWOT-type expedition, always with the US on our side and controlling key military functions. Spending meant to keep the US sweet on NATO and in the mood for more vicarious primacy for its European allies.

I won’t go into military-technical detail, because I find that tedious and distasteful. Besides, there’s plenty of that stuff - pie charts, graphics with tank silhouettes, jargony reports - out there, if anyone is interested.

There was never going to be a right moment for Europeans to start building the kind of autonomous military power that could stand up to the US, let alone in the latter’s hemisphere. It would have been inconceivable while NATO was still one big, happy family. But once NATO starts to crack, as is arguably happening now, it is too late, because this kind of military build-up takes years, if not decades.

Conscious uncoupling was therefore never in the cards for the end of the world’s most powerful defensive alliance, certainly not at a time when that alliance was under pressure from the global order changing around it and its internal contradictions. It was always going to be acrimonious and abrupt, leaving a lag, a period of time during which Europeans would feel acutely threatened, naked, but could not possibly already have accrued the military means to defend themselves against a newly berserk US (or anyone else, for that matter).

This is where we are right now, and this is why I think we lucked out. We have dodged a bullet (normally I resist the militarist idioms, but here it is oh so apt). The current moment is a monumental window of opportunity for Europe. We cannot count on military power, so we have to use alternative, peaceful means. The Europeans’ hand is being forced. This could be a good thing.

Now, when the Kaja Kallas doctrine - “let’s all fight Russia and China together like in the good old days” - has finally flatlined, European leaders have moved on to the only lever they have at their disposal: the threat of tariffs and other economic tools. They have done so in the space of days.

Only last month (!!!), Ursula von der Leyen announced the era of energy independence from Russia, with her typical self-congratulatory fanfare. The writing about Trump and Greenland was already well on the wall by then. As so often with the Brussels Borg Collective, words lose their actual meaning. “Energy independence” means dependence on US liquified natural gas, coming to Europe on ships Trump could stop at any moment. Europe will soon import nearly half its gas from the US - as much as it imported from Russia at the start of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Europe is today more isolated globally and more dependent on the US than virtually ever before, much of this as a result of gleeful, arrogant, unforced choices. They have shown their disdain for the Global South especially, calling Israel’s 12-day war on Iran “doing our dirty work” and all but endorsing Trump’s attack on Venezuela.

At this conjecture, we need to rebuild our relations with the world, no longer from the pedestal of our junior partnership with the US, but eye to eye, and with humility. We will have to ask nicely. Countries in the Global South might not have us back. Although the signs are not too bad. The EU has just signed a trade deal with Mercosur and is close to signing one with India, after many years of footdragging.

The eye-to-eye part matters. Anton Jäger has recently described it, provocatively, as Europe’s “decline”, only to qualify it as “a healthily modest approach to the present” that “might even free Europeans of the burdening neurosis of mastery”. This could be such a relief.

Isabella Weber followed Carney’s speech with this cri du cœur, about joining forces with the Global South and accepting European peripheralization.

We lucked out that this moment, when our relative decline in power was so suddenly and starkly demonstrated, arrived before militarization has become entrenched in our nations. European leaders will now be forced to grasp around for other forms of security and solidarity. But this is also a moment to be vigilant, because militarism will seep right back into the discussion, as the go-to, default solution.

It is no coincidence that we’re hearing voices in Europe for “federalization” these past days: ditch our nation states - and all the democratic, political, historic and emotional capital they represent - and rush into an all-European federation, for one reason, and one reason only: to play violent geopolitics with the other global bullies. It is no coincidence, because this is how militarism works. Nothing is ever too good, too precious or too expensive when it comes to war. Everything must be sacrificed to it, even the thing we are supposedly fighting for.

The EU has long exhibited a well-documented democracy deficit,which has been exacerbated under the previous and current Commission, as it has usurped powers over foreign and defense policy which the treaties do not grant to it or indeed any of the EU’s organs. Along the way, the EU overrode its fiscal rules against borrowing - but exclusively for weapons purchases. All while governments across Europe (with a few laudable exceptions like Spain) roll out austerity, dismantle hard-won labor protections and berate their citizens when they demand functioning public transport, hospitals, schools and social protection.

In light of this, all this loose talk of federalization for the purpose of becoming a military power of global stature, is especially alarming. These people would destroy everything that makes Europe Europe - democracy, accountability, social peace and justice, people’s wellbeing, the idiosyncratic institutions that hold our diverse identities, the norm-based pooling of sovereignty that the EU stands for at its best - just so they can then take us to war, in a desperate last-ditch attemopt at shoring up a Western hegemony that was just pronounced dead on stage in Davos

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This is a remarkable moment that holds much opportunity and offers hope. Now come the labors of the plains. We’ve got a war to end in Europe, for starters.

Yet again, the conduct of European leaders is confounding. Trump and his people have been administering shocks to their system all year long. At first, it was just jabs at their vanity. Then, with the National Security Strategy, a taste of their own medicine of meddling in other countries' domestic affairs. The latest shock is menacing and outlandish. Trump threatens to seize Greenland one way or another, and he means it. He’s backed by his advisors and enabled by much of the American foreign policy establishment whose protestations are hardly adequate to the scale of the offense.

Again and again this past year, the Europeans have scrambled back to their feet after being knocked over - and proceeded to engage in conduct that goes above and beyond appeasement. They have bribed Trump to the point of economic self-harm, flattered him, consented to policies at odds with their national wellbeing and thoroughly debased themselves.

Now, when Denmark, a member state of the EU, faces literal dismemberment, European leaders cannot seem to muster firmness, let alone outrage. EU officials, the ones who are usually so loquacious when it comes to geopolitics (over which they have no formal authority, not that that has stopped them) have gone silent. A handful of troops from a small number of European states have landed in Greenland for a few days of “reconnaissance”. I thought that’s something militaries do on enemy territory, not their own, which they should know and be present on, after all.

Either way, it barely amounts to symbolic defiance. The mood seems to be that an American take-over of Greenland is happening, and the best Europe can hope for is to negotiate the terms. Danish officials are all grimfaced dejection.

The rest seem almost relieved that the situation in Iran allows them to feign distraction. They are not so secretly rooting for another US regime-change war. Just like they really had no problem with the US attacking Venezuela and kidnapping its president. They like regime-change wars, and they especially like the notion that people like them - the better sort, democracies - have a higher right to go to war, in the cause of democracy and values. Do they fail to see that undermining the prohibition of violence will have consequences for Greenland? Unlikely.

So far, so uncontroversial. We know that the Europeans have done all of this. It remains to figure out why. During a chat with a friend, my mind jumped to something in the story of Cinderella. Not in the Disney version, but the darker German original in Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

In the Grimms’ “Aschenputtel”, Cinderella befriends magical doves and pigeons. They guard her mother’s grave, support her against the unjust treatment by her stepmother and stepsisters and conjure dresses and slippers to wear to the ball where the prince falls in love with her. When the prince comes to her father’s house looking for the girl whose foot will fit the slipper Cinderella dropped as she ran home, the story departs from the sanitized Disney version.

Cinderella’s older stepsister tries on the slipper - “the golden shoe” - first, but is unable to squeeze in her big toe. The shoe is too small. Her mother hands her a knife and says “hack off your toe; once you are queen, you won’t need to walk anymore”. And so the girl cuts off her toe, forces her foot into the shoe, pushes through the pain and goes out to the prince, who takes her on his horse as his bride. On their way they pass the doves perched on the grave, who coo:

“there is blood in the shoe, the shoe is too small, the true bride still sits at home”.

The prince sees the blood rising on the girl’s white stocking and takes her back. The story repeats with the other stepsister, only she chops off her heel, told by her mother that “once you are queen, you won’t need to walk anymore”.

The patriarchal order is brutal and violent, including and especially in how it plays out on the bodies of women. Self-mutilation is not just the stuff of gory old tales. In the 2010s, when pointy-toed stiletto heels were all the rage, women had their baby toes amputated to fit into these unforgiving shoes. Fittingly, the popular procedure has been called Cinderella craze.

Why would (real and fictional) women consent to their literal dismemberment? Because it is the price they must pay to become queen: to attain a position of effortless supremacy adjacent to power. Why would women undergo painful, dangerous and ultimately disfiguring surgery in pursuit of Mar-a-Lago face? Our era is not that far from the body horror of the early modern period.

The cumulative conduct of European foreign policy elites over the course of the last year - their ostentatious obsequiousness to Trump, their eagerness to make costly, even ruinous concessions on trade, to discard sacred fiscal rules for arms spending, to risk their populations’ growing resentment over austerity and militarization, to turn their back on international law, and now finally their half-hearted resistance to their own dismemberment - cannot be explained by incompetence, cowardice, stupidity and delusions, even if all of those are present.

To the European foreign policy establishment1 , all of this is a price worth paying, for a chance at the ultimate prize: to somehow rope Trump back in for the project of US primacy, with all the privilege, power and status this entails for Europe. Or to wait him out until under the next administration the US reverts to factory settings, and meanwhile keep the war with Russia going by persistent stalling, until that day when it can be won.

To be queen is worth the sacrifice of a toe or a heel - or an autonomous island.

Post script: The images in this post are from a beautiful 1911 edition (the first print-run, in time for Christmas in 1910) of Grimms’ German Fairy Tales I bought in Vienna over the holidays. The beautiful exterior and condition of the book caught my eye as I walked by the dealer’s display, but what I found inside won me over. The dedication reads “My dear child, I am putting the first serious book in your hand. Keep it always and think with how much care and love your parents spin a dream of a child’s happiness around you. R. H. Christmas 1910.” There are many plates, at least one for each story, and extraordinarily beautiful. Some of them have been watercolored by a young owner of the book, with great care.

“[…]Ukraine considers conceding territory bitter, humiliating, and painful. Understandably so: giving up even more, after the country has lost so much and so many in defending itself, is intolerable. Russia seems grimly determined to gain the territory, if need be militarily, its recent progress on the battlefield making this threat all too credible.

In this conundrum, the inhabitants of this sliver of the Donbas are offered only two futures, both of them devastating. One, they will be handed to Russian occupation, with no say in the matter. If they don’t like it, they can leave behind their property, livelihood, the graves of their loved ones and become refugees. Two, their home will be pulverized as it turns into the next urban battleground and if they are lucky enough to survive, they will still come under Russian occupation.

Is this really the best peace-making we can muster? In any peace process and this one, too, territory need not be a zero-sum issue. Land, and the communities and infrastructure on it, lend themselves to a wide range of solutions that transcend “one side gets to have it, precisely so the other side can’t” and deliver a sturdier peace. As it happens, point 21 already contains language indicating a more promising direction: the “withdrawal zone will be considered a neutral demilitarized buffer zone.” Therein lies the beginnings of a way out of this impasse.[…]”

Read the full article at Responsible Statecraft. If some of it sounds familiar, that’s because you have read it here first.

“[…] European politicians, diplomats, aid workers, and the commentariat that cozies up to them have become used to living beyond their power-politics means: pompously lecturing others about values, heavy-handed interference in the internal affairs of third countries, seizing their resources and forcing their markets open, and dabbling in military adventurism, as in Libya. In the comfortable shade of American primacy, European states have been able to afford a self-centered, lucrative, and at times unscrupulous foreign policy. If the United States bids goodbye to its unipolar-era global hegemony, Europeans will lose the stature of vicarious primacy and have to start treating states around the world as sovereign equals. The thought of it brings many in Europe’s foreign policy establishment to the verge of a nervous breakdown.

The call of the hour, then, is to preserve Western primacy, ideally as nepo baby of the Americans, as in the past — however absurd this is at the moment the empire is imploding. Europe “takes responsibility for its own security,” translates to this: it spends a lot of money on all things war and drive the message home by placing large orders from the obscenely expensive US defense industry. These aren’t motivated by fear of an attack by Russia but meant as a bribe. NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte’s pathetic brownnosing vis-à-vis Trump or the most recent arrangement, under which Europeans will pay for American arms deliveries to Ukraine, express such thinking. […]”

Read the full piece at Jacobin.com.

This is the translated, revised version of an earlier German version I wrote for the fall 2025 print edition of Jacobin Germany.

I will keep this brief. What’s going on right now is deficient, impoverished peace-making. That is still infinitely better than continuing this war, especially if every day the war goes, the victim of the assault is losing irrecoverable ground. Once an end to the killing seems within our reach, every additional death seems especially, unbearably tragic. Who will be the last soldier to die once a ceasefire is signed? An unfathomable thought.

But the intractable issues in the eventual settlement of this war have long been clear, and the current approach, brusque and chaotic, appears unlikely to yield the transformative ideas needed for a breakthrough. What, then, could generate those ideas?

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Just weeks into the war, in March 2022, I spoke to a Ukrainian friend, who like so many had been on an activist journey of first supporting the army, then supporting veterans returning from the Donbas, then supporting their wives and children and finally protecting women from male violence and helping them build independent lives. Anya (not her real name), her community of women activists in their southern steppe city and I had been talking about peace and conflict for years, about how militarist violence was on the same spectrum as violence against women. By March 2022, her city was already occupied, and she was a refugee.

I spoke to Anya about the negotiations then going on, which eventually became known as the Istanbul talks. People don’t remember this now, but back then, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich was at those talks, and no one really knew why. We surmised it was because he was trying to get sanctions lifted that had been imposed on him.

“It’s disgusting”, Anya said. “Abramovich knows nothing about Ukrainians’ needs and sits at the negotiations only to look out for his own interests. We, on the other hand, know everything about Ukrainians’ needs and would work hard for them. We should be screaming at the world that there must be women at these talks.” I asked Anya, what if someone invited her to join the peace talks? “Of course I would go. I would do everything for my country.”

I was really struck by that last line, so I put it in an article. It was a profound reminder of the very thing I was arguing for: that women need to be at the negotiating table, and not just any women, but those who had served their communities and knew and cared deeply about them.

At that instant, I understood that for Anya, sitting at a table with these men would not be a privilege, not a distinction, not a reward, not glamorous, not exciting. It would be an ordeal, a sacrifice, a terrifying responsibility. She would give herself to protecting her people and the cities, towns and villages in which they had built lives, homes and happiness.

I think of Anya and women like her when I see the current impasse, the distance between the US-proffered peace plan and the one the Europeans (in their incarnation as the E3 - France, Germany, UK) countered with.

In a pattern that has played on repeat this year, European leaders once again seem aghast at the specter of peace in Ukraine, reacting first with sullen silence to the announcement of a new peace proposal, then with vacuous dogma followed by flustered damage control. Their eventual counter-proposal reads so detached from the observable reality of this war and the trade-off logic inherent to any peace deal, that the only conclusion can be that its authors intend to be spoilers: not strong enough to prevail with their objectives, but still able to torpedo attempts to make peace through disruption, manipulation and sabotage. This, too, has become a European pattern. That, and being passive-aggressive.

I think of Anya and her dedication because of one point in these peace plans, one that is deservedly a controversial sticking point: the parts of Donetsk oblast Ukraine still controls, including the cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, which Russia demands they withdraw from. This is extremely bitter, humiliating, infuriating, painful. The fact that Russia’s reasons for this demand may be purely military-technical doesn’t make it any less so. It adds insult to injury. The initial US proposal foresees ceding this territory to de facto Russian control. The European proposal insists on freezing the front where it runs right now (that is one of its poison pills). After a marathon day of talks, the US and Ukrainian delegations have refined the original proposal to 19 points, with the can of the territorial question kicked down the road.

I think of Anya, because between her love for her country and her experience as a relentless fighter for women and families in impossible predicaments, she has developed an awesome talent for creative solutions, for finding ways out of apparent dead ends. The reason why inclusive diplomacy - the participation of community representatives and especially women at all levels of peace-making - results in better, sturdier peace settlements is because of that love, that dedication, that deep knowledge of people’s needs and that ability to see beyond intractable deadlocks.

Territorial control need not be a zero-sum thing. It doesn’t have to be one side controlling it, precisely so the other side can’t. There are a multitude of arrangements imaginable that, while they might not satisfy the exclusive claims of either side, would meet their respective needs for security and would also ensure the safety, dignity and well-being of the people who live there.

There could be some version of shared or softened sovereignty, where Ukraine withdraws its military, but retains civilian access and a say in governance. There could be a timeline of periodically meeting commissions appointed by both sides and possibly a third-party mediator, or a deferral of the region’s status to a future moment, like in Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement. Or perhaps neither side seizes full military and civilian control and the region is instead transferred to a multilateral administration. All of these examples I am citing are clumsy and uninspired, because I am not Anya, and I do not have skin in the game. Her solutions would be sophisticated, astonishing break-throughs.

Like the mother in the story of the judgment of Solomon, Anya would do everything for her country. She would find a way to square the circle, save these cities and their people and make peace.

On October 22, it was reported that European states were working on a 12-point peace plan for ending the war between Russia and Ukraine. A number of outlets stated they had seen a leaked version. However, as late as November 3, President Zelensky said he hadn’t seen any such plan, and that it was all just brainstorming at this stage.

The initial news was trashed by the usual suspects, who have never come across a peace with Russia they didn’t hate. There was also more thoughtful skepticism about the feasibility of some of the plan’s provisions.

The glaring, gaping hole in the plan - judging by what has been reported - is the absence of any recognition that peace will require trade-offs, and that those trade-offs will inevitably reflect what the two sides bring to the negotiating table. Meaning, their relative military strength, where things stand on the battlefield and beyond, and economic and political factors. The plan doesn’t specify what would be Europe’s and Ukraine’s quid for Russia’s quo. That would be a lot like the Europeans, to forget matters of power and how the world works in general, but before I do them an injustice, I will say that it is early days, that I have not seen the plan, and that the quid pro quo stuff may be happening in separate consultations.

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All that said, there are two points in this plan which I find intriguing: points 9 and 10. Some of the remainder are also sensible, for example reserving Russian frozen assets for eventual, agreed rebuilding of Ukraine, instead of risking them in a convoluted borrowing scheme that has been compared to what caused the subprime lending crisis. But those points have been discussed elsewhere and previously. I don’t want to get carried away, but if the thinking behind points 9 and 10 is what I think it is (ok, maybe what I want to think it might be), then this is - almost - a breakthrough:

[…]

• The 9th point is controversial as it concerns a high-level dialogue between Kyiv and Moscow to “increase mutual understanding and respect for diversity of language, culture, and religion.”

• Officials from eastern EU countries that RFE/RL has been in touch with believe that this point plays up Russian allegations, often regarded as baseless, that Russian-language speakers in Ukraine were discriminated against and needed protection by Moscow.

• The next point is controversial for many European governments as it mentions “the start of negotiations on the permanent governance of the occupied territories.” This goes against the “maximalist” views that many EU capitals hold that Ukraine shouldn’t relinquish any new territories and that its territorial integrity is crucial.

  […]

I read points 9 and 10 as connected. Both of them shift the framework for peace to what it would mean for people: people-centered peace. Peace must be more than the absence of war. Peace has to make the lives of the people who have come through war safer, easier, more prosperous and happier, it has to allow them to heal their trauma, to find justice and recompense, to rebuild and to regain their dignity and agency, or it isn’t really peace at all. This is no sentimental notion (although I get plenty sentimental when I think of what must be happening right now in Pokrovsk), but a practical guideline for building a peace that will be sturdy, resilient, sustainable, that will keep war from breaking out again.

The EU plan’s mention of both “governance” in areas occupied by Russia and the cultural, religious and linguistic rights of those in territories under Ukraine’s control suggests something very bold. So bold, in fact, that I’m relieved only a few hundred people will read this, because I don’t want to have my head torn off for spelling it out: shared, or softened, sovereignty.

Understandably, few in Ukraine will like the sound of that, not ever, not after almost four years of this horrendous war. Sharing sovereignty with Russia????!!!! But the Russian side will likely react quite allergic to it, too: give any outsiders, whether it’s Ukrainians or some sort of UN-led administration, any say over the territories our armies have “liberated”????

The history of peace-making shows that when the question of who gets to rule which populations and territories is impossible to solve in a zero-sum way, when one or both sides fundamentally cannot accept such an arrangement, and the entire agreement would therefore fail altogether, you need to find a creative way out. That could be a Solomonic solution: you two can’t agree on who gets which piece of land? Well, then neither of you will get it. This is not entirely unserious. Placing parts of the Donbas under a United Nations administration has been suggested. It raises the question whether the UN, which is in a deep malaise of its own these days, is up to such a complex, politically sensitive task. But that’s a discussion for another day.

It could be a deferred solution. One especially elegant and courageous example would be a clause in the Good Friday Agreement that emerged from the peace process in Northern Ireland. It holds that if at any point in the future a majority of citizens of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland vote to reunite, it shall happen.

Or such a solution could be one in which both sides get a toe-hold in deciding what happens in the territories the other side controls: shared or softened sovereignty. This is the most demanding of all the creative solutions to a zero-sum deadlock. It requires inordinate discipline, good will and patience from both sides, and the willingness to let trust grow between them.

The substance of shared sovereignty is everyday business, so-called bread and butter issues: regulating free movement of people and possibly goods between territories occupied by Russia and those controlled by Ukraine, the mutual recognition of vital records and diplomas earned by young people on either side, the question of citizenship and passports, protecting the rights and interests of those forced to leave property or businesses behind and those buying such abandoned assets. Point 9 would introduce an explicitly rights-based component, of language, religious and cultural rights and identity, apparently on the Ukrainian side, but this would have reciprocal positive reverberations for populations under de facto Russian control as well. Having to deal with such granular but also mundane issues, and a great volume of them, has the beneficial effect of diffusing tensions, relaxing negotiators and rewarding constructive joint problem-solving.

Ideally - make that imperatively - any such arrangement should be negotiated, monitored and implemented in an inclusive manner: with people from the affected communities at the table. People with authority and trust in their communities, who are representative of them and well-informed about their needs. Social workers, school principals, activists, municipal workers, women, young and old people etc.

I’m probably reading too much into this, but it is tempting to believe that this war could come to an end, and with a constructive, people-centered peace process, too. It is also tempting to think that European diplomats and leaders are coming back to their senses.

In the Grimms’ fairy tale “Die Sterntaler” (usually translated as “The Star Money”, but “The Star Coins” is closer to the original), an orphaned girl becomes homeless and starts walking. She owns nothing in this world but the clothes on her body and a piece of bread. She encounters a hungry old man, to whom she gives her piece of bread. She also meets a succession of ragged, freezing children, to whom she gives her bonnet, waistcoat, skirt and finally, her undershirt, because it is getting dark, she is in the woods and no one will see her. Then, the stars start falling from the night sky and turn into shining coins. She finds herself in a new shirt from fine linen, in which she gathers up the coins and is rich for the rest of her life.

My work is not normally reminiscent of fairy tales, on the contrary. The business of keeping NGOs funded was usually tedious, granular, dense with inane technical trickery and exhausting. When I set out to help foreign grant-dependent NGOs transform their business models and start raising money from their communities, it wasn’t very magical, either. It was either the cold shoulder or hysterics for daring to suggest foreign grants shouldn’t be all there is, or it was months and years of yet more grant proposals, log frames, negotiations and logistics, coordinating zoom calls over different time zones, writing reports. What magical moments there are in fundraising, when one human being tells another “I trust you and I join your cause”, usually happen long after I have wrapped up my work.

Since the demise of USAID earlier this year, we’ve been seeing takes like The End of the Age of NGOs? in Foreign Affairs, or (!!!) in Foreign Policy declaring The End of Development (not even a question mark) and in the same issue a plaintive Why the World Turned on NGOs. I thought that if it’s now official that we’re at the end of an era - the era of the West claiming a controlling stake in other countries’ civil societies - I should revisit something I had started last winter: a handbook of sorts, for foreign aid agencies and philanthropic grant-makers who want to make the best of this moment, based on the thinking I had done about money, power, activism and sovereignty, and the experiments I ran to help NGOs devise new ways to be, beyond foreign grants.

The Midas touch refers to the recognition that our money, when we dispatch it into other, less wealthy and less powerful communities, has a baked-in distorting, deleterious effect, no matter how well we mean. Our money pulls communities this way and that, lifts up some and leaves others behind, amplifies some agendas and silences others, crowds out more tender shoots of mobilization. This causes frustration, stress, trauma, disorientation, a perpetual crisis of representation. Our money cannot actually lose that Midas touch with one simple trick or another. All we can do is change the dosage, until it is no longer toxic.

While editing the handbook, as I’m ruminating about money and power at the end of the unipolar moment, thinking things through to their end, my ideas turn radical, radical as in common sense, simple: What happens when you walk away from foreign grants? What happens when you do what you know is right and necessary, even if it seems impossible? Why do my activist friends experience such immense joy and gratification when they first raise money at home?

In my mind, the imagery of Die Sterntaler appears: radical love, trust, courage, and their rewards.

Below are some excerpts from the handbook. I’m not going to publish it here in full, because it is, by necessity, a condensed and superficial paper, meant to stimulate debate and collaborative brainstorming. It is not an exhaustive step-by-step implementation manual. There are plenty of pitfalls in the process of transitioning from dependence on foreign grants to raising money from your own community, plenty of lessons learned the hard way in a decade of experiments, too many to be outlined in the handbook with sufficient detail. I don’t want anything taken out of context, misunderstood, done shoddily or hastily, doing more harm than good. I want to help to get it right.

Those with a professional interest in weaning foreign grant-dependent NGOs from those grants and setting them on a path towards local support - grant-makers at transnational foundations, bilateral aid agencies, re-granting INGOs/NGOs, UN offices; or academics, think tankers, journalists, policy-makers etc. - who would like a copy of the handbook, please reach out to me. I am happy to have conversations and consultations with all relevant organizations and professionals in this field (pro bono, of course).

Excerpts from the handbook:

How to lose the Midas touch

New best practices for foreign aid/transnational grant-makers in the post-NGO era

The following are recommended practices and norms for policy-makers creating bilateral foreign aid programs and philanthropic leaders and managers. The purpose of these practices is to wean corporatized civil society organizations in foreign aid-dependent countries from their dependence on foreign funding, and, in the process transform into more authentic, independent and locally rooted movements. When these practices and norms are followed in grant-making to NGOs/CSOs/other types of civil society institutions in third countries, they reduce distortions, encourage healthy civil society development and limit or even avoid intrusion on these countries’, and their citizenry’s, sovereignty.

These norms can take the form of self-regulation, industry standards, best practice in the foreign aid (or philanthropic) professional community, but they may also be translated into binding policy or even law by bilateral donors, as appropriate.

[…]

The recommendations are underpinned by the following assumptions:

• Donors actually want third countries to have civil societies that deserve that name: that are strong, confident, well-supported by their own communities and accountable to them in meaningful ways, independent in the true sense of the world, including of their foreign donors. This assumption, unfortunately, is not a foregone conclusion, and that is why I don’t have much hope that the key points in this paper will ever be implemented, let alone at the “critical mass” scale that would be needed.

• Organized civil society organizations (CSOs or NGOs) should be generated from, and accountable to, the societies they belong to and claim to represent. There are no exceptions, no ifs and buts, no short cuts around this.

• Money is the single-most important and indispensable expression of citizens’ mandate to organized civil society, because it is the most powerful, widely available, practical, flexible and fungible (as compared to volunteering, protesting, signing petitions, following on social media etc). That fact cannot be set aside.

• Therefore, foreign funding of organized civil society is inherently problematic, and the greater the share of foreign funding for any one NGO or any countries’ organized civil society, the more problematic it is.

[…]

4. There should be a cumulative ceiling for foreign money in any NGO
   US bilateral funding (or any one bilateral donor’s or transnational foundation’s funding) should always be tied to the condition that cumulative, overall foreign funding to any one NGO does not exceed a certain percentage. For that percentage to be meaningful and not cosmetic, cumulative foreign funding should be no more than 50% (or 50% minus one), because combined foreign money should not have a controlling stake in any NGO, if only for important symbolic reasons. In the long term, a significantly lower share than 50% should be aimed for, so that local money genuinely dominates.

[…]

7. Can civil society be part of the top 5%?
   Donors should be far more alert to the fact that their long-term funding has created classes of elite professionals, whose incomes and other material benefits (foreign travel, access to international education and careers, paid-for drivers etc) place them in the top income percentiles of their often poor countries. This a problem, not just a minor and unintended side effect. It is ultimately self-defeating, if the goal is nurturing trusted civil society institutions. These income discrepancies between the NGO sector and the average member of the public lead to aloofness among NGOs, class-based biases and interests. They estrange NGOs from the communities they claim to represent and change their politics as a group or indeed as an industry.
   
   Grant-makers should take responsibility for this problem, apply deliberate measures to avoid this going forward and to dismantle these income disparities where they have already become entrenched.

[…]

15. Encourage policies in aid recipient countries that make foreign NGO funding redundant
    Bilateral donors should use their influence to encourage policies that domestic resource mobilization from average citizens. If this sounds like just another example of arm-twisting and meddling in other countries’ sovereign politics, let’s drop the sophistry for a moment and acknowledge that these policies are meant to phase out the very ability of foreign donors to engage in such meddling.

    
    One excellent policy is permitting citizens to designate a percentage (e.g. Romania – 3%, Moldova – 2%, Poland – 1.5%, Hungary – 1%) of their tax bill to go to local NGOs of their choice.

[…]

As a result, the NGOs will change, radically and dramatically: their shapes, sizes and forms, their legal formats, the very work they do and how they do it on the inside and outside, the ways in which people participate in them and engage with them, the ways in which they pursue their missions, even their missions themselves, never mind the people who work in them. Some NGOs, many perhaps, will not withstand the pressures and tensions of these new demands. This is no tragedy. They are not Siberian tigers. Others will take their place, if that place actually needs taking.

Every woman reading this will recognize herself in the following. (To my male readers: if you feel an urge to write “not all men” in the comments - don’t).

A man is getting too close for comfort, but instead of calling him out, I pretend I’m unaware of what is going on. It’s safer that way.

If I tell him to stop and get lost, who knows how he will react, and it’s just me and him in the train compartment, late at night. What will happen if I tell him to take his hand off my knee while he is animatedly talking at me about a woman’s true destiny? At best, it will make the rest of the long train ride very awkward. At worst, well….

There is also this: I know this isn’t about lust or love. It’s about power. He’s after my reaction of fear, panic and indignation because that makes him feel powerful. My shame would be his gain, or a laugh for his buddies, later. I won’t allow him to think he can do this to me. So I pretend I cannot hear his heavy breathing on a call that’s supposed to be about a volunteering initiative I run. I ignore the transgressive compliments, the intrusive questions, the sexist jokes, the weird brushing against me. I change the topic, I pretend I’m too nerdy, too focused on my job, too absorbed in my book, too bad at understanding his language, too naive to realize what’s going on.

People’s physiological and psychological responses to threats used to be summed up as “fight or flight”, but this has been expanded to “fight, flight, freeze, fawn” by women social workers and women psychologists who work with women who have experienced male violence (that’s virtually all women, just FYI). Freezing and fawning are vastly more common than fighting or fleeing, it goes without saying. Kicking up a fuss, let alone literally kicking a man, would almost always make things worse for women facing misogynistic, sexualized violence. Running away is an absurdly impractical suggestion when most of this violence is done by men who are part of our lives. We would never stop running.

But despite our pretend nonchalance, these incidents get locked into our memory, even if they last no more than a few seconds. They are moments of intense stress, when fear and revulsion make our internal alarm bells shrill and we have to improvise an ad-hoc response and keep our cool. Adrenaline floods our brain and changes the very way memories are formed and stored, ensuring we can never forget. I don’t feel shame exactly, not after a lifetime of feminist activism that taught me that the perpetrator should be ashamed, not I. But I feel humiliation, fury, regret, despair, my head spinning with it all.

An ostensibly very different kind of experiences left me with a sensation that felt the same as being faced with male violence. As if the sensation transferred from a different dimension, but intact, like it would in synesthesia: people who taste music, hear color, experience letters as warmth or cold. It transferred from a context of misogynistic, sexualized violence by those who hold power in the patriarchy to one of political or discourse dominance by those who hold power in the global order of the unipolar moment.

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Seared into my brain by all that adrenaline are the meetings, conferences, round tables with colleagues, allies, partners, all the ostensibly like-minded people from my professional eco-system of civil society promotion in the former Soviet Union and the colorless diplomats who were supposedly on our side, or worse, our self-appointed guardians. All those times when they’d start off by talking about how awful it was when women faced violence from their partners and families, what the numbers were in this or that study. And then they would veer, smoothly, into how this problem was so much worse in Russia than in the West, because Russia was just so much worse than the West and on a trajectory in the opposite direction, because we in the West had figured things out and made commitments, and ratified this convention and launched that project, and gathered here with appropriately somber faces. And then it would veer further, into how there was all this disinformation, into defending ourselves against it, into inserting our money into other countries’ civil societies, and how dare anyone object to such freedom of association?

So many meetings, workshops, seminars, conferences, veering from what was supposed to be just empathy and solidarity with victims and their defenders, to claiming those victims and their defenders as our cudgel against our opponents, in a very specific form of hybrid warfare and delegitimization.

And instead of fight or flight - jumping up, protesting, calling out how this was opportunistic, cynical, ruinous, part and parcel of an imperial mindset or primacist geopolitics or whatever you want to call it - I bit my tongue and played along. I’d go into freeze mode. I’d lower my head and pretend I was intently taking notes or digging for something in my bag, so I wouldn’t need to look at their faces, or so they wouldn’t notice me rolling my eyes.

Or I might go into fawn mode, keep my head up and put on a bland smile, give an extra-passionate presentation when it was my turn, earnest and heartfelt, as if I hadn’t noticed that the rest of them had been superficial or tendentious or laid out a plan as insane as “from now on, the EU will be the official protector of all human rights defenders in the world”1. I had to act stupid, or oblivious, or like I was just another hack with a lanyard who doesn’t care. This did not sit well with me. I was squirming and raging on the inside. I was so ill at ease I wanted to wriggle out of my skin.

With a few exceptions, when I had strenously vetted the pros and cons and jotted down talking points first, I didn’t stick my neck out and call things out. Unlike in that train compartment on the dark Ukrainian steppe, it wasn’t because of fear for my physical safety. What’s the worst thing that could happen to me in the air-conditioned conference rooms of the unipolar moment? Raised eyebrows, embarrassed silences, pouty rebuttals from suits with big titles, getting crossed off next year’s guest list?

In my defense I could say that I was usually in those spaces on behalf of other activists, and I had to deliver for them - above all, respectability (amazing what the right passport and credentials can do), but also an open door through which they could walk next. That wasn’t all, though. I admit to a selfish desire to be taken seriously, as a professional, an expert even. And to not a little magical thinking: if I did my work right, according to all the solemn best practices - de-centering ourselves, solidarity, never ever mixing base geopolitical objectives with supporting human rights and civil society - and if I insisted on those points, politely, professionally but firmly, then somehow, all the bad stuff would stop. Maybe not the West’s violent pursuit of primacy, but at least the instrumentalization of teenage girls’ empowerment projects for it.

There is curious absurdity in the suggestion that feminists might overcome the patriarchy if they freeze, fawn and play well with the lanyard class of the primacy over petits fours between dreary panels.

The synesthetic parallels dissipate eventually. They are a momentary sensation when confronted with violent systems of oppression: patriarchy and militarist primacy. A reminder to trust our brains and bodies when they are trying to tell us something. Something about how we can only dismantle the patriarchy and the primacy simultaneously. A woman’s work is never done.

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I have not posted anything written just for here for some months. It was due to circumstances - circumstances bringing up powerful thoughts that tie into one of the themes of this newsletter: my unease with the foreign-funded civil society industry, which kept deepening over the years until it was too much to handle. I tell people I walked away from my work - civil society promotion or whatever you want to call it, creating and managing NGO projects and constant grant-writing, grant-reporting and schmoozing with donors - but a more honest description would be that I crashed out.

The circumstances of my recent silence are that I moved - from small-town Maine back to Europe, after a quarter century in the US. Not because I felt compelled to flee Trumpist quasi-fascism or anything like that, although I did find it impossible to live well in the US. I have always wanted to return to Europe. Anywhere in Europe would do, and in the end it turned out to be Bulgaria.

Packing up for a move forces to you review your life, as you take every single item in your household in hand and decide what to store, what to take with you, what to donate, what to throw away. Items that remind me of the person that gave them to me, the moment I wore them, the state of mind I was in at that time, the hopes I had, the mistakes I made, the triumphs I thought were within my grasp but ultimately eluded me, the regrets and upsets. The move happened in July, though it seems longer ago already. If I had written about it sooner, this here might have come out more raw.

I had moved to Maine from New York City ten years earlier, in the summer of 2015. The move was for my husband’s PhD program, but I thought living in a small town in a rural state, novel and against the grain after living all my life in a succession of big cities, would be a good thing just then. In the year prior to that, I had undergone some of the greatest upheavals of my (professional) life. I’m keeping this vague, because it involves other people who still live and work in places where they are not safe, and because no one needs to have my personal dramas inflicted on them in their granular detail.

There had been success - the creation of large projects in places where such things had until then been unimaginable, projects that ticked all the boxes of doing transnational feminist activism right, according to our own, high standards. There had been tragedy - just after these successes, I got separated from my work and the people who had built it with me. It was a strange tragedy, one that didn’t come with a frame of reference for the sadness and frustration I felt, with an approved way of grieving and coping.

Then, in fall 2014, I started advising a women’s peace organization on Ukraine. Within months I had not only seen the impact of war, and civil war as it was then, on communities in Ukraine’s east and south, but I had met with Western diplomats and even UN agencies in Kyiv, and they seemed rabidly intent on ignoring the Minsk Accords and risking a greater war instead of resolving the conflict (an old-fashioned way to talk about transforming conflict, but it is apt here, because it was resolveable at the time). It caused me to lose trust in the institutions supposedly responsible for ensuring peace in Europe and the world. I had long had my doubts about them, but this was different. It left me profoundly shaken and from then on, until the big war broke out in 2022, I was always on edge.

At that moment, life in a quiet town with green things outside my window seemed like a good counterpoint. I was going to be busy. For the first four or five years after moving to Maine, I had so much work in Ukraine, Central Asia, Moldova and as far as Kenya and Colombia, that for months every year, I was hardly ever in my quiet office, looking out on green things through its stained-glass windows.

Despite the setbacks and my growing sense of doom over what might happen in Ukraine, these should have been the most fulfilling years of my life. My most out-there ideas were coming to fruition. I had even managed to overcome a contradiction in terms: winning over grant-makers to fund several runs of experimental projects on how to wean grant-funded NGOs from their grants and start raising money at home, from their communities. I had large numbers of fabulous colleagues. I succumbed regularly to “activist crushes”. I experienced moments of pure meaning, inspiration, satisfaction. They happened mostly on the sidelines of my actual work, but still.

I was busy, in demand even. But what kept me busy was “make-work”, the hyperactive, exhausting, anxiety- and burn-out-inducing, but ultimately misdirected, empty activity that takes the place of activism in the age of the NGO (which, according to a recent article in Foreign Affairs, is coming to an end, to no surprise of mine). I was busy with make-work, and I have the receipts for it: I kept them in binders for reporting on grants.

Clearing out my office in Maine, I dug through the flotsam and jetsam that had washed up on the shores of this Ersatz-activism. The debris of activities we must participate in so that we get to do any work at all (think everything related to grants, like collecting those receipts), activities that serve as the measure of having made it (fancy conference swag and lanyards), activities that illustrate how our movements have been captured, warped and left limping by big philanthropy, bilateral foreign aid agencies and the mechanisms of international organizations that become all-consuming hamster wheels for so many activists.

The NGOs I worked with - that I wrote grant proposals for, coached for conferences, strategized with, lobbied and networked for - were routinely referred to as “movements” by many of their grantmakers, a designation so absurd it could only have been self-soothing in the face of a much less inspired reality. If we are human rights and social justice movements, movements engaged in liberation, as our most woke grant coordinators at the most cutting-edge foundations would say with a straight face, then why are all the people in these movements full-time salaried professional-managerial types? Who have gone to the same graduate schools, or at least to executive summer programs that somehow condense those non-profit leadership or sustainable development lessons into three intensive weeks. Who collect business cards, from people they will only see once in their lives, in conference rooms, during coffee breaks and at dinner receptions, never leading to any meaningful collaboration (how could - and why should - there be meaningful collaboration between someone from Colombia and someone from Dagestan?). Or at least we did until those busy 2010s, until smart phones and social media displaced business cards.

Participants in the NGO-foreign aid-industrial complex lead the lives of high-end traveling salesmen. I did, at least until the pandemic, when we learned to use zoom. I was only ever on the margins of that industrial complex - outside the large funding streams, stretching meager budgets, working in places that weren’t on the top of international agendas, conjuring esoteric ideas - and yet even I collected stacks of boarding passes (it was a thing back when they were paper - we had to submit the stubs to our donors to prove we’d actually done the travel they’d paid for). At some point, I stopped throwing them away and started hoarding them like some morbid trophy.

Where is it written that being an activist, from an NGO working in or on a developing country or really any country, inevitably morphs into international travel, participation in international gatherings, held by international organizations? That the speed with which you start going to those events, the frequency with which you attend, the degree to which those gatherings are rarified and invitation-only, that all this is seen as the measure of your activism, the extent to which you have made it? Who had that bright idea?

Can we also talk about the fact that so many of these gatherings take place in actual palaces? The Palais des Nations in Geneva, where we hold those weirdly ritualistic sessions of UN treaty bodies, was at least built for the League of Nations. But the OSCE’s seat in Vienna is at the Hofburg, the actual Austrian Imperial Court palace. I remember sitting there in a gigantic ballroom with enormous chandeliers, in the second row behind the member states’ delegations seated around the immense table, shivering in a pencil dress from the too-cold air conditioning and from the fury rising inside me at the delegates’ self-congratulatory blandness and at myself for yet again trusting that something good could come from this, against my better knowledge.

It isn’t even about the obscenity of those palaces, though there is that. It’s about how we have accepted that matters of social justice and liberation will ultimately and decisively be resolved at international organizations that convene in palaces - the UN, OSCE etc - by comfortable diplomats whose grasp of these portfolios is so shallow I can’t even deride them as technocrats. It’s about the assumption that making it to a UN event is the making of an activist, as if she had delivered her petition to the place where it will finally be addressed for good.

Just once in all those years did I hear a UN officer say “all the best ideas and practices come from grassroots women’s rights activists, and with any luck we adopt them years later” at one of those panels. That moment is seared into my brain because it is so unheard of. Another moment seared into my brain is when at the 2018 session of the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women, Secretary-General Guterres addressed hundreds of women activists, those lucky enough to snag a pass among the thousands who try muscle their way into UN headquarters every March. Towards the end of an otherwise forgettable speech, he said “don’t forget, power is not given, power is taken”. He said it off-handedly, like something that slipped out despite his usually cautious instincts, from long-buried memory of that brief moment in his youth when he was a radical activist.

At the conferences, workshops, seminars, there was swag. Tastefully curated tote bags, clutches, cell phone covers, scrunchies, from sustainably made cloth featuring ethno blockprint. Symbolic stuff reminding us (as if we needed reminding) that we were there to talk about violence against women - key rings with plastic whistles to scare off sexual predators, a gadget in a neat pink container that enables women to pee standing up.

There were stacks of reports printed on heavy high-gloss paper, smelling of ink and the blood, sweat and tears of their earnest authors, doomed to be left behind in hotel rooms or gather dust on a shelf a long-haul flight away. Also, stacks of notepads, the graphic design on their covers strangely alike the world over, uplifting and intersectional, but anodyne.

There is an astonishing datapoint I think about a lot: by 1920, when after more than 70 years of uninterrupted movement-building and struggle American women finally got the vote, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), the largest such organization, had two million (!!!!) members. Since there were many more such groups that campaigned together with NAWSA, as many as 10% of all adult American women were members of the women’s rights movement - active, declared, card-carrying, cockades pinned to their lapels. This was a tenacious, dense, well-organized movement, able to stage protests and parades, lectures and fundraising picnics anywhere in the country. It was run by super-savvy operators, who conducted sophisticated, highly effective lobbying of (all-male) lawmakers. Yet across the US, there may have been just hundreds who worked for it full-time at its height. Hundreds, out of millions.

In contrast, the women’s rights NGOs I worked with, with a few remarkable exceptions, didn’t have any members. Everyone in them is a paid employee. Everyone is usually just a handful of always the same people, ageing together in their NGO cocoon like the three musketeers. To be perfectly accurate, everyone is potentially a full-time, professional-managerial, salaried staff member, with a title and business cards and meaningful work. Because in this viciously competitive and increasingly ossified sector with its capricious funders, most foreign-funded NGOs most anywhere around the world sit around freeze-dried, doing little or nothing for months between grants, and only when the next grant finally materializes, they come back to life, like those magic bathtub toys that blow up when wet, for the duration of that one project.

As I extricated myself from the NGO industry in the final years in Maine, the trappings of this lifestyle stopped accumulating, but I never had the heart to throw out the old binders, note pads, reports, badges. I dusted them off and stowed them away before leaving for Bulgaria. They remind me of the people who were at my side for years, their big hearts, their courage and tirelessness, their vicious sense of humor, their striking talents, their endearing flaws, how we used to bitch and moan about the NGO industry together. They remind me of me at a time when I still thought that I could make this work.

Post-script:

There was one more reason for the pause in posts. I had brain surgery, in May. Technically, it was more like skull surgery, about an inch in from my face, via the nose. No reason to be mysterious, and maybe this can be a public service announcement: reader, if your nose runs for months for no obvious reason, you might have a hole in your head. Specifically, in the thin layer of bone at the base of your skull between your brain and nasal cavity. This is called a CSF leak, and since it increases the risk of virulent meningitis, it has to be plugged. My surgeons, competent as they undoubtedly are, made it sound like a little light routine procedure, after which they would keep me in the hospital for a few days of relaxed rest and observation. I asked “can I bring my laptop and work?”, the surgeon said “sure”.

Long story short, the cure is worse than the disease. After surgery, I was hooked up to more wires than I remember. I had spinal fluid drained hourly for days, which makes the brain literally rattle around in your skull. Maybe not quite literally, but close enough - the fluid cushion around the brain is reduced, in order to lower pressure on the surgical plug while it heals. The effect is otherwordly, and not in a good way. It focuses what’s left of your mind on regaining a feeling of normal. Everything else recedes into the background. It has taken months to recover from the recovery. Other than as a public service announcement, I’m mentioning this here because the whole episode, for a while, reordered my priorities.

“[…] The “freedom of association equals free transnational flows of money” argument relies on a flawed logic: namely, that decades and billions of foreign-funded democracy promotion have not worked, and that therefore, they must continue in perpetuity or at least as long as we see fit, unhindered. In countries like Georgia, the descent into authoritarianism is supposedly so dramatic and inescapable, its democratic institutions so weak and a succession of ruling parties so incurably autocratic, that only NGOs, and only if they have unrestricted and non-transparent foreign funding, can save democracy. This is inconsistent and self-defeating, intellectually and as a practical strategy. It is also patronizing and biased, never mind unsustainable. If foreign donors must retain their capture of Georgian civil society, “independent” media and policy-making so that Georgia can be free, it is no wonder that the “Age of the NGO” has run its course. […]”

On September 9, I testified as a witness at hearing of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in the US Congress, on the topic of “Laws Regulating Foreign NGOs: Human Rights Implications”.

You can watch the video of the hearing and read my full written testimony and the testimonies of the other witnesses at the Commission’s website.

The full text was published by IPS-Journal, a publication of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. I swear I had nothing to do with that “delulu” subheading, that was their editor’s doing. But he must have read my mind.

Für die deutsche Originalversion, bitte hier klicken.

“[…] this approach puts the cart of military-spending-as-share-of-GDP before the horse of a dynamic assessment of the threats European countries actually face. Going on a spending spree to reach some arbitrary share of GDP or random number of billions of euros, to buy weapons systems favored by lobbyists but of dubious relevance, is a poor replacement for a comprehensive strategy for European security.

A European security strategy that deserves this name would have to include political and diplomatic efforts: war-ending diplomacy in the short term, followed by a crisis consultation mechanism that should be the beginning of a new European security architecture consisting of reciprocal regimes of arms control, confidence-building and eventual disarmament. […]”

Read the entire piece, published on 03/12/2025 by the Quincy Institute’s Responsible Statecraft website.

I learned yesterday that Wolfgang Sporrer passed away suddenly on February 10 and as I sat there stunned all morning, I realized I had to do a tribute to him, and sneak in some of the peace-making approaches he was so passionate about: how to involve ordinary people in making peace, so that peace would deliver for them. Wolfgang was a long-time hands-on diplomat and a teacher, but he was only a sometime author, so he may not be familiar to many. But he was one of the most informed, critical and constructive voices on the issue of war and peace in Ukraine and Europe. And a great guy, too.

I would like you to read the tribute on Responsible Statecraft, then google him, read his articles and interviews and listen to him on podcasts and webinars.

Money and power are inseparably connected, and money flowing from powerful interest groups therefore needs to be publicized, thoroughly scrutinized, and regulated. We know this. But we do not apply this knowledge when we funnel our money into the NGOs and political systems of the Global South.[…]”

Read the full piece - about lessons on big money in our domestic politics and how they might help us understand the politics and psychology of powerful Western states’ money in poor nations’ civil society, and how the latter is a symptom of the unipolar moment, about the US, Austria, Georgia and more - at Western-Backed NGOs: A Hollow Version of Civil Society.

An original German version was published in Jacobin’s German magazine in fall 2024 (paywalled).

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Since Trump first froze all spending by USAID and then proceeded to unleash Musk and his hounds onto agency staff, put everyone on paid leave, issued a stop order on all spending, merged it with the State Department and summoned all 10,000 overseas staff home, a cacophony of criticism of the agency and foreign aid in general has been swelling. Some of it is the crusty old classic drawing on base stinginess and envy, some of it cites all the most polemic cases of foreign aid waste, fraud and absurdity. This has been familiar since the Cold War.

There is a newer iteration, too, which in our social media era has wandered from the alienated fringe into the raucous mainstream: USAID meddles with foreign elections, does coups, color revolutions, Maidans, it’s a CIA-cut-out, one big psy-op, run by Deep State globalists. And that is ALL USAID does.

I see your criticism and I raise you mine: development aid is one big fraud. The world’s poorest countries receive less in foreign aid than they pay wealthy countries in interest payments on loans. Now add to that decades of unfair terms of trade, the brutally extractive industries we unleashed onto them, the proxy wars in which we have bled them white, the climate catastrophe wrought by our consumption that is drowning and parching them. Don’t forget that of those foreign aid budgets, much (up to 80% in the case of USAID) goes to our corporations and aid contractors. None of this is particularly subversive. These are established facts.

Therefore, Musk’s and Trump’s gleeful, shockingly lawless snuffing out of USAID isn’t a misguided overshooting of reform. It is a deliberate escalation of the cruelty and exploitation we have been inflicting on the world. I also don’t, for a minute, buy their and their supporters’ faux indignation at how USAID funded captive media, interfered in political processes, spawned astroturfed NGOs and altogether failed to respect other countries’ sovereignty and self-determination. As I am writing this, Trump has announced on live TV that the US will not only promote the ethnic cleansing of Gazans, but claim Gaza for itself. To own and build stuff there. These people have no concern for other nations’ sovereignty and self-determination.

For foreign aid to no longer be a fraud, we need debt forgiveness and a prohibition on high-interest loans, fair terms of trade, regulation of extractive transnational industries, equitable climate finance for low-income countries and an end to armed conflict. That’s a tall order. I’d like to think I will live to see it, but I have my doubts. A credible foreign aid policy would acknowledge these faraway objectives, but also start implementing the many incremental best practices that aid agencies like USAID have been outlining in hundreds (thousands?) of earnest, data-heavy, experience-based reports.

Because even if we set aside that foreign aid is a fraud, it’s also often implemented poorly: too much bureaucracy and monitoring, or too little accountability and safeguarding; dismissive of locals’ agency and insights, or too fast and loose with technical prescriptions (see how this works? damned if you do, damned if you don’t); wasteful, corrupt, distorting local markets, riddled with moral hazards for impoverished, desperate target populations. Entire libraries’ worth have been written about this, but for a brief, brisk introduction, you can start with this account of foreign aid realities in Haiti. This, too, of course, is no reason to smash foreign aid institutions and slash foreign aid spending. Quite the contrary.

My focus is the “USAID is a CIA cut-out” hype, though. It is lurid and titillating, perfect for social media outrage of the already alienated, but it is a caricature and a distraction. Reality is both far more complicated and far simpler.

In 2024, USAID disbursed $32.48 billion. Of that, $5.4 went to Ukraine, mostly to prop up the normal functioning of government. At https://foreignassistance.gov/, the resulting picture of global spending minus Ukraine is quite clear: of $27 billion disbursed,

• $8.37b went to Emergency Response (humanitarian aid)

• $4.709b to HIV/AIDS prevention/treatment

• $3.564b to Operating Expenses

• $2.081b to Basic Health

• $1.368b to Maternal and Child Health, Family Planning

• $1.13b to Agriculture

• and the remainder to Energy, Education, Environmental Protection and others…

….while 2.28b, out of $27b, went to “Government and Civil Society”. That’s the programmatic area that captures all the potentially iffy, regime-changey stuff. But it also contains perfectly kosher budget support to governments and other governance- and civil society-related programming that does not infringe on these countries’ sovereignty and is often welcomed by their governments.

So quite a bit less than 10% of USAID’s spending is on iffy stuff: election monitoring by groups that are suspiciously pro-opposition; teaching civil disobedience to students at hipster co-working spaces; slush funds for protest swag; social media campaigns and preachy news websites; tedious, endless memes and videos debunking this or that disinformation; the wholesale capture of entire civil society sectors and their transformation into an elitist professional-managerial class with pro-Western tastes and loyalties. A lot of it is hit and miss. It does not necessarily produce the preferred results.

These numbers make clear that USAID isn’t a purpose-built, cynical cover for sneaky, regime-changey stuff. That would be the most disproportionately expensive, conspicuous cover in the history of covers. USAID is the real thing: a foreign aid agency, primarily and earnestly concerned with things like malnutrition, economic growth, girls’ education and soil erosion. Making lots of mistakes and often neglecting its own guidance, but definitely a genuine foreign aid agency.

The sneaky, regime-changey stuff exists within it, though, and it is absolutely problematic, even if it encompasses far less than 10% of USAID’s spending. It crosses a line. I’m on the record about that. I became an activist in part because I was so uncomfortable with how civil society support was soaked through with geopolitics. Despite my (very modest) best efforts and to my increasing dismay, it got worse instead of better, especially in the last decade. Including during Trump’s first term. I realized this conflation of zero-sum geopolitics with supporting civil society would end up being ruinous, first and foremost for civil society in poor, fragile places with little resilience. That has proven true several times already and now it has come true again, with far more disastrous consequences than ever.

I imagine some people at USAID were not happy with the iffy stuff, which was getting too close for comfort into target countries’ sovereign politics. They might have felt queasy about it. In fact, years ago, some USAID staff and embassy diplomats told me as much. I expect most of them, working on technical things like water and sanitation, mobile banking or early childhood education, found it easy not to think too much about what that other office was doing, the one on the fifth floor (I’m making this one up).

This focus on the iffy stuff - the astroturfed NGOs, the wholly dependent “independent” media, the social media campaigns and worse - functions as a distraction, though. It captures anger and disgust with US excesses and corrals them towards pointless Schadenfreude, when instead we should channel our energy towards true solidarity with people around the world. If Trump and Musk were genuinely concerned about the activities under the “Government and Civil Society” header, if they were motivated by respect for other nations’ sovereignty, they could have just frozen that budget line and sealed the doors on the fifth floor only. Instead, they choose to stop all funding and all work (with a few, unclear exceptions). For good, if they get their way. Make no mistake, people will die because of this. Some probably already have died, in places and circumstances where death is always close. People will suffer hunger, sickness, pain and trauma, their lives will be blighted and knocked onto a harder trajectory.

We’re no closer to building a better way of being in the world, and that, I expect, is the point.

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The following are excerpts from a two-hour conversation with activists from eastern Ukraine, who have been working on women’s rights and armed conflict for a decade. They are displaced from their hometown, which was occupied in 2022.

You know what worries me about this war, now that it’s almost three years since it started? That we are becoming numb to all the horror and tragedy. Death no longer upsets us, the way it used to at first. The overall level of humanity in society is being lost. It makes me scared. We got used to it. It is awful.

The war will end, but from where do we get our humanity back?

One of our colleagues in Zaporizhzhia, which is being bombed all the time, told us that being under bombing, night after night, it’s like all the city’s residents being put against a wall. The soldiers in the firing line aim and shoot, and some of the people fall down dead. The rest can walk away. Until the next time.

In Odesa, when the air raid alarm goes off, it’s very short notice before impact. A few minutes, maybe. You have to drop everything and run.

The way the Russians are behaving in the territory they have occupied, it’s clear they don’t know or care about these places. “Novorossiya”? Come one, they don’t believe in that themselves. These places mean nothing to them.

Their attitude reminds me of something I used to observe when I worked as a real estate agent many years ago. Imagine an old couple has lived in their apartment for a very long time, until their death. During those many years, they have filled their rooms with books, books they thoughtfully collected, read and cherished. They have planted perennials and shrubs in the courtyard and tended to them. They have put so much labor, time and thought, never mind the cost, into acquiring these things, into making their home.

And then the old couple dies, their books are thrown into boxes to be taken out, maybe to be sold for pennies, maybe straight to the garbage, the plants in the courtyard wither and are pulled up. The apartment is put on the market, and when I show it to clients, all they are interested in is how many square meters there are, and whether you can hook up a washing machine. The love and value that have been invested in this home are invisible to them.

Talking about home, we must start thinking about getting settled once again, putting down roots, and where and how. These three years as internally displaced people have been a blur of moving around, of being unsettled. The international humanitarian aid agencies are curiously obsessed with putting up “modular housing” for refugees. Settlements quickly raised in the worst parts of town or beyond the edge of town, rows of huts from experimental materials like paper maché. No infrastructure around, at a safe distance from the original inhabitants of the city. At one such settlement, they told refugees they couldn’t move in with their cats.

It will be even worse when demobilization finally happens, as it probably will soon enough. You know there are soldiers at the front who have been fighting since the beginning of the war. Many of them are from the territories that are now occupied. They became homeless while they were at the front. They have nowhere to go home to. They will be demobilized into homelessness.

There are subsidized mortgage programs for veterans, at a very good interest rate, 4% if I remember correctly. That’s lower than inflation, so veterans can borrow money for free, technically. What kind of jobs they will have after demobilization is another question, of course.

This approach — demanding ever-greater inroads into sovereign politics and governance, asking vulnerable countries the impossible, arm-twisting and worse — will not restore the constructive partnership we once had with Georgia and continue to fan the country’s crisis.”

Read the entire piece, published on 12/02/2024 on the Quincy Institute’s Responsible Statecraft magazine.

The following are excerpts from a recent three-hour conversation with an activist from eastern Ukraine, who has been working on women’s rights and armed conflict for a decade. She is displaced from her hometown, which was occupied in 2022.

“My grandmother used to tell me about the years after the war [World War II]. She used to call it ‘the time of women’s tears’: first women cried because their men had been killed in the war, then they had to keep crying because those few men who had survived were mostly no good, and not good to them. You cried because one man had died, then the next one made sure you had reasons to cry. Any weak, good-for-nothing, lame man could easily find a woman back then. In fact, he could find several.

I worry about my oldest daughter. Her generation may be facing another such “time of women’s tears”. A generation with not enough men left, when women have to make do with any men they can get their hands on.

Our government, and really the world, cannot give our men who have fought the attention they need, compensation for what they suffered, the care and healing. So what they do instead is they give them power. In the next elections, you’ll see, all the parties will fill their candidate lists with veterans.

You would think that women would be able to fill the roles left empty by men who were mobilized or killed. But there is no concerted effort, no program to allow women to do this. All the empty seats are given to veterans. Everyone can then pat themselves on the back.

This started happening already when the old war started, in 2014. In all the elections, you had veterans as candidates. The parties could show them off on TV, it made them look good. A lot of these veterans had to be cajoled into politics, and so most of them would get nothing done once they were elected, they were just sitting there doing nothing. They were not exactly useless, but just unremarkable people.

Back then, the country had also just introduced gender quotas, so when parties would draw up election lists, they would go “one skirt, one veteran, one skirt, one veteran”. It’s going to be the same now. We think elections are coming quite soon, maybe in spring already. It’s in the air.

But really, I’m most concerned about how to record our regional stories. Because no matter what people say and what we’re supposed to say and not to say, Ukraine’s regions are very different from each other. We have different traditions, ways of life, culture, foods. Remember, years ago, long before the big war, I said we should write a book, because if we don’t tell our story of war, then they will tell their version, and ours will be erased? Of course I never got around to writing anything.

The most urgent now is to record the lives and culture of the regions that have come under occupation. There is a group of people whose experiences I want to document. They’re the “ferrymen”, they help people from the occupied territories leave and go, via Russia, to Europe, sometimes from there on to unoccupied Ukraine. And back, too. Yes, it happens. People go back to the occupied regions, sometimes temporarily. Some even go back and forth. The “ferrymen” know all the tricks and routes. They see what’s going on in the occupied regions, how local communities are affected.

So we’re all the same in Ukraine, all citizens, supposedly. But we displaced people, we need so much more than those who still have their homes, their old lives. The locals have had two or three generations to build what they have – their houses, their careers, their reputation and networks in the community. We, the displaced, are handed food and clothes when we arrive, and from that moment we’re the same as the locals, no extra support. But we have lost so much. We cannot function like the locals. We can’t rebuild our lives.

Everyone here is speaking about reparations.  About those frozen Russian funds and how they should be given to Ukrainians.

We have lost so much that is immaterial. We lost the men we might have married. We lost family support. We lost our childhood photographs. When the war first started, in 2014, I was a woman in my 30s. I had prospects, plans, potential. I was going to do big things. I lost all that. How can I be compensated for the future I never had? At what rate? At 10 hryvnia per year?

Who will compensate me for crying every night for three years? Not just for my 40 square meter apartment I left behind.

We are all the same and we are all united. But we need more than others, as displaced people.

We talk about peace plans and Marshall plans, and yet we don’t know whether we will live for the next half year. We talk about Trump and ICBMs, and then I hear from this woman [in a violent relationship], and does she care whether Trump was elected?

Domestic violence has exploded, it’s like a greenhouse for violence against women here. I can’t even find words to describe how much worse it has gotten.

Hero-worship plays plays a big role in politics, and then there is the mobilization issue. But imagine what is happening in families. I have text messages saved from women and girls who are in hell. When they turn to the police or other public institutions for help, and he’s serving or a veteran, they won’t touch him, at least not under the domestic violence law.

Lots of men are addicted to online gaming and betting. They might even bet away the measly child support payments families get from the government. So then she has to go to humanitarian aid groups and ask for baby formula.

Women are now the main resource for escaping mobilization. How so? Because she can give birth to a third child [note: fathers of three or more minor children are exempt from mobilization]. We’re seeing women giving birth at age 38, at 47 or even in their 50s, if necessary via IVF.  Or couples adopt or even just foster a child that brings their total number of children up to three. Then he won’t be mobilized, and if he is already serving, he will be de-mobilized. Imagine what happens to those newly adopted and fostered children.

We have had more than a hundred beneficiaries in our project, but to me, the best success story is that of our coordinator. She was in an abusive relationship for ten years. She didn’t even work. One of those “why would you need to go out and work, I earn enough to support us” situations. She only told us months after we had hired her. She was able to leave him. That’s my best motivation, this is what success means to me. It is such a big project, which has done so much. But it also changed the life of this one woman, and now she keeps encouraging women around her.

Speaking of projects and donors. I have never met anyone who is as arrogant towards us as local Ukrainians who have been put in charge of grantmaking. Much worse than the expats we encounter. These local grantmakers are so standoffish. If we say hi to them, they don’t even say hi back. And we’ve known them for years, been to meetings and conferences with them. I’m very much for paying other women respect. If I consider a woman an authority in her field, a leader, I will stand up to greet her. But these local grant-makers are no authorities on anything. All they do is control money.

I want the war to end, so we can return to uninterrupted life.”