UntoldMag - مجلة ما انحكت (2025)

05/11/2025

What does it really mean to work as an influencer in Brazil?

In her report for UntoldMag, Jéssica de Almeida looks beyond filters and sponsorships to reveal the precarious labor that sustains Brazil’s booming creator economy, one of the largest in the world.

For influencers like Luan da Silva, being “online” is a full-time job: planning, filming, editing, posting, and constantly engaging with followers. “I call myself a multi-artist,” he says, “but this is work, every single day.”

Researchers describe this phenomenon as the platformization of work, the reorganization of labor through digital infrastructures that mediate, monitor, and profit from users’ activity.
As Nina Desgranges of the Institute of Technology and Society (ITS) explains, “Content creators can be classified as platform workers and, more specifically, as cultural workers in the platform economy.”

Brazil now ranks first worldwide on Instagram and second on TikTok and YouTube in number of influencers but behind these figures lies an unregulated economy. Creators depend on opaque algorithms that determine their reach and income, without transparency or recourse when visibility plummets.

Some legal efforts are underway. The proposed Bill 2630/2020- the Internet Freedom, Responsibility, and Transparency Law- aims to regulate platforms like Meta, Google, and TikTok, focusing on misinformation and hate speech. But it could also open the door for long-overdue protections for digital creators: data transparency, fair monetization, and intellectual property safeguards.

As Luan reflects:

“This profession can transform our lives, but beyond specialists, we, and especially Gen Z, need to be heard and commit to this debate.”

De Almeida’s piece situates influencers not as glamorous outliers, but as part of a broader workforce shaped by algorithmic control, invisible labor, and cultural production.
It challenges policymakers, platforms, and audiences to recognize digital creators as what they are: workers, deserving of rights, regulation, and respect.

🔗 Read Brazilian Influencers: We Are Precarious Workers Too! by Jéssica de Almeida on UntoldMag.
https://f.mtr.cool/haqjdzcovl

03/11/2025

When the war in Sudan broke out on April 15, 2023, few could imagine how deeply it would unravel what remained of the country’s revolution.
Over two years later, the war between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has become one of the world’s most devastating- and underreported- crises.

In his article for UntoldMag, Hamid Khalafallah traces how the promise of democracy that began with Sudan’s 2018 revolution collapsed under the weight of military power, elite fragmentation, and international complacency.

After the ouster of Omar al-Bashir in 2019, a fragile civilian–military coalition was formed to guide Sudan’s transition. But deep structural flaws, coupled with mutual mistrust, culminated in a military coup in October 2021, a turning point that shattered hopes for democratic governance and set the stage for war.
When fighting erupted between SAF and RSF in 2023, it quickly escalated into a national disaster: mass displacement, famine, atrocities, and ethnic violence have reached catastrophic levels.

While international humanitarian responses faltered- slowed by insecurity, bureaucracy, and political caution- Sudanese civil society mobilized. Grassroots resistance committees, once known for organizing protests, became the country’s first responders, delivering aid, medical support, and community safety in the absence of the state.

Khalafallah dissects the failure of global diplomacy: platforms such as the Jeddah talks excluded regional actors and Sudanese civilians, producing agreements that were neither inclusive nor enforceable. Ceasefires were signed and broken in quick succession, deepening distrust and prolonging suffering.

This piece remains as urgent today as when it was first published. It reminds us that Sudan’s war is not an isolated event but the result of structural neglect, the slow dismantling of a revolution that once embodied civic courage and collective hope.
Revisiting it now, as RSF atrocities intensify, underscores a hard truth: without sustained international engagement that centers Sudanese civilians, the nightmare will continue.

🔗 Read Sudan’s War: A Protracted Nightmare by Hamid Khalafallah on UntoldMag.
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28/10/2025

What connects a Midwestern U.S. city to Palestine?

In his essay for UntoldMag, Hashem Abushama reads David Hugill’s Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis as more than a study of urban history, it becomes a map of how settler colonialism survives in contemporary geographies, from the streets of Minneapolis to the walls of Gaza.

Hugill’s book traces how postwar U.S. urbanization depended on Indigenous dispossession. Policies of “relocation” coerced Native communities into cities like Minneapolis-St. Paul, where they faced poverty, surveillance, and state violence. Treaties once described as a “monstrous conspiracy” transferred Dakota land to Euro-American settlers, while the 1862 Dakota revolt- crushed through the largest mass execution in U.S. history- revealed how colonial modernity enforces control through law, violence, and urban space.

Abushama extends this analysis to Palestine, showing how the same political grammar of containment and recognition is redeployed through the Oslo Accords (1994), accords that fractured Palestinian geography, delayed refugee justice, and institutionalized racial hierarchies under the guise of “self-governance.”
This, he argues, is not peacebuilding but a continuation of the colonial project: the transformation of occupation into administration, and of resistance into management.

Neoliberal urbanism becomes a new settler frontier. In Ramallah as in Minneapolis, privatization and redevelopment convert dispossession into the language of progress. “The unfolding genocide in Gaza,” Abushama writes, “is the culmination of a settler colonial project that insists on dispossession.”

Through Hugill’s framework, the essay exposes how settler colonialism operates not as an event but as a structure, shaping the architectures of racial capitalism, law, and urban planning across continents. The violence that expels Indigenous peoples in North America and Palestinians in Gaza is sustained by the same modern myths: development, security, and peace.

This piece marks an urgent intersection between political geography, urban studies, and decolonial critique, insisting that understanding cities means confronting the empires that built them.
🔗 Read From Minneapolis to Palestine: Cities under Settler Colonialism by Hashem Abushama on UntoldMag.
https://f.mtr.cool/orgofbxfbg

Illustration by Yaser Safi.

23/10/2025

What does it mean to turn Algerian sound into resistance?

In her piece for UntoldMag, Giulia Crisci explores how Algerian women are reclaiming radio, podcasting, and sound art as feminist spaces of creation and defiance. From clandestine revolutionary broadcasts during the war of independence to today’s podcasts produced in bedrooms, cafés, and improvised studios, sound remains a site where women’s stories can live freely, unfiltered, unjudged, and unforgotten.

At the heart of the story is Radio Voix de Femmes, Algeria’s first feminist web radio, founded in 1995 and still active today. Its journalists, Medjeda Zouine and Nadjoua Rahem, record from the Maison de la Presse in Algiers - a symbolic space of journalistic resistance during the “Décennie Noire.” Their mission is clear: to make women’s stories audible in a media landscape that still too often silences them.

New generations are now carrying this struggle into digital form. The Laha_podcast collective documents women artists, their successes, and the systemic inequalities reinforced by the Algerian Family Code. Meanwhile, Besma Ait’s Thawra (“Revolution”) podcast weaves together the genealogy of feminist activism - connecting anti-colonial struggle, exile, and the contemporary fight for equality. “Women’s voice is a revolution,” she says, echoing and inverting an old adage that once warned: “The voice of women brings shame.”

Another central figure, Amel Hadjadj, founder of the Journal Féministe Algérien, believes that “sound is the future of struggles.” Her collective trains women activists to record, edit, and publish their own audio work. Sound, she explains, allows intimacy and protection - giving voice to those who might not appear before a camera, including LGBTQIA+ activists and women for whom speaking publicly remains a risk.

Crisci’s essay also highlights the new generation of collectives such as Algerian Feminists, who use podcasts to break taboos around menstruation and womanhood, and filmmakers like Sonia Ahnou and Habiba Djahanine, who transform everyday female experience into shared aural memory.

In a society where official media remain heavily regulated, these feminist soundscapes represent something radical - an insistence on hearing and being heard. They are archives in the making, echoing decades of silence, defiance, and survival.

🔗 Read the full story by Giulia Crisci on UntoldMag-link in comments

21/10/2025

What stories can hair carry across generations?

In her deeply personal article Teta’s Hair, Palestinian-American artist and writer Gina Al-Karablieh weaves an intergenerational narrative of resilience - where curls, braids, and olive oil become languages of memory and survival.

Her grandmother, Teta Sadika, spent a lifetime covering and caring for her hair: washing it with olive oil soap, braiding it before tending the soil, and wrapping it beneath white and beige scarves.
These gestures, repeated quietly over decades, were acts of dignity and protection. “Hair is sacred and must be protected,” she would say, a belief shared by many Palestinian women who have long treated the body as a site of both devotion and defiance.

Al-Karablieh follows these rituals as they travel through generations. Her mother inherits them, massaging oil into her daughter’s scalp before school each morning - a practice that becomes a lesson in care, continuity, and resistance.
“The knowledge of tending to hair was passed down… an act of love, nourishment, and quiet resilience,” she writes.

As her grandmother’s life ends, hair becomes the thread that refuses to break. “There are a thousand ways to remember her, but my hair will always be ours alone.” Each curl, each strand, is transformed into testimony, a reminder that Palestinian women’s survival has always been both intimate and political.

For Al-Karablieh, hair is more than metaphor. It is inheritance, ritual, and resistance. In her words, “Every curl that grows back is a verse, every strand a memory woven into my being.”

Through this story of one family, Teta’s Hair restores the tactile, everyday forms of Palestinian women’s resilience - the gestures that endure when language falters and when entire histories are threatened with erasure.

🔗 Read the full photo essay on UntoldMag-link in comments.

17/10/2025

In her piece “Dolma from a Plastic Plate,” Lubna Rashid- environmental researcher and writer- unpacks the psychological and social dimensions of our collective disconnection from nature.
She invites us to look beyond policy and economics, into the human mind shaped by conflict, insecurity, and inherited trauma - and how these forces quietly shape our environmental behavior.

Rashid introduces a crucial question:
If we already know what must be done to protect the planet, why do we still fail to act?

Drawing from behavioral science and her own lived experience between Iraq and Europe, she explores several psychological phenomena that help explain this paradox:

The Search for Safety: when prolonged instability rewires the brain to focus on survival, not sustainability.

The Finite Pool of Worry: the mind’s limited capacity to process multiple crises - where war, poverty, and injustice consume the space for environmental concern.

Pluralistic Ignorance: the widespread illusion that others don’t care about the environment, which reinforces collective silence.

Social Norms and Family Pressures: how collectivist cultures prioritize belonging over behavioral change, creating emotional barriers to sustainable choices.

The essay also highlights gender as an ecological lens.
In patriarchal societies, women- often positioned as caregivers- hold transformative power in shaping environmental practices within families and communities. Yet they remain excluded from decision-making spaces where ecological futures are negotiated.

Rashid calls for a more integrated approach to sustainability, one that connects environmental reform with mental health, emotional resilience, and social justice.

“True change requires healing, storytelling, and empathy. Sustainability begins in the human psyche, long before it reaches the policy paper.”

Read “Dolma from a Plastic Plate” by Lubna Rashid on UntoldMag.

16/10/2025

What defines a literature born in exile, shaped by fragmentation, censorship, and resistance? In this interview with Walid El Houri, literary scholar Refqa Abu-Remaileh reflects on the making of A Country of Words, a digital atlas that reimagines Palestinian literature beyond borders and timelines.
Developed as part of the PalREAD project, the platform maps a century of Palestinian literary production- from the British Mandate period to the pre-Oslo years- through an interactive, non-linear digital space that connects writers, periodicals, and archives dispersed across the globe.

For Abu-Remaileh, the motivation was both intellectual and personal. “Even though the existing work was incredibly important,” she says, “it felt like we couldn’t see the bigger picture: how everything connects, how the diaspora relates to the homeland, and how we make sense of a history shaped by fragmentation.”

Rather than producing a conventional, chronological history, A Country of Words visualizes what she calls a “literature in motion” - a network of texts, memories, and cultural relationships spanning Beirut, Haifa, Baghdad, Santiago, and beyond. Its design mirrors its subject: non-linear, participatory, and democratic.

The project also redefines what constitutes “Palestinian literature.” While it remains part of modern Arabic literature, its distinctiveness lies in the conditions of its creation. “It’s a national literature without a nation-state,” Abu-Remaileh notes, “a literature that is unhoused, fragmented, scattered across geographies.” Written and read under occupation, exile, and censorship, it carries the marks of statelessness in every form it takes.

The result is an atlas that challenges both erasure and reduction. It expands the literary field beyond a handful of famous names, tracing instead a dynamic network of poets, editors, critics, and cultural workers whose contributions have often been marginalized.

Through decades of scattered archives and oral histories, Abu-Remaileh uncovers recurring patterns- imprisonment, censorship, massacres- that reveal how literature has always coexisted with repression. “When you write literary history, you don’t expect to be documenting prisons and massacres,” she reflects, “but these elements kept appearing so forcefully that I couldn’t ignore them.”

At its core, A Country of Words is not just a digital project, but a political and ethical intervention. It documents how Palestinian writers have continued to create under erasure, transforming survival into form. “The erasure isn’t new,” Abu-Remaileh reminds us, “but neither is the resistance.”

🔗 Read the full interview on UntoldMag-link in first comment.
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14/10/2025

The project “My Fascist Grandpa” by Italian artist and photographer Laura Fiorio confronts Italy’s fascist and colonial past through a deeply personal lens. Working with her grandfather’s photo archive from the Italian occupation of Ethiopia, Fiorio projects private images onto fascist architecture, unsettling the silence around colonial violence and exposing how much of it remains denied or forgotten.

In dialogue with Maaza Mengiste - the Ethiopian-American author of The Shadow King, a Booker Prize–shortlisted novel that reclaims the erased history of women fighters in Ethiopia- the project traces how colonial amnesia was institutionalized, how women’s participation was silenced, and how sexual and structural violence persisted both on and off the battlefield.

“My Fascist Grandpa” is not only about the past. It asks what unfinished decolonization means today, in a political climate where fascist ideologies remain embedded in institutions, borders, and economic systems under new names.

Part of a larger collaboration with Mario Margani, Entity of Decolonisation, DAAS, DAAR, and Garage Arts Platform, the project was originally published in ECCHR’s 2022 Annual Report and is now featured on UntoldMag.
DAAS - Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Studies ECCHR - European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights

13/10/2025

Imagine walking through your own neighbourhood and being stopped at a checkpoint - not by a soldier, but by a camera. You look into a lens, and an algorithm decides your fate. Green means you pass. Red means you are detained or turned back.

For thousands of Palestinians, this is not dystopian fiction - it is a daily reality in which life under occupation is dictated not by human beings but by machines. In East Jerusalem and Hebron, cameras line the streets “every five metres,” according to Amnesty International, creating what the organisation describes as “an atmosphere of fear, anxiety and repression,” one that further entrenches Israel’s system of apartheid.

Journalist Ethan Rooney traces how this new regime of control has taken shape. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli soldiers use a smartphone application called Blue Wolf, photographing Palestinians and matching their faces against vast databases collected through thousands of cameras. Amnesty’s lead researcher on AI and human rights, Matt Mahmoudi, explained how this logic of control has become “gamified,” with soldiers competing to upload the most faces for rewards and extra leave.

As Human Rights Watch warns, this represents “a new phase of frictionless occupation,” one in which human judgement is replaced by algorithmic classification. Amnesty’s report notes that even soldiers hesitate to override the computer’s decision, even when they personally know the person to be harmless.

Behind this network lies a global chain of complicity. Amnesty traced components of the surveillance infrastructure to TKH Group in the Netherlands, while Hewlett Packard provides biometric systems, Hikvision supplies cameras, and Microsoft Azure’s cloud stores “millions” of intercepted Palestinian phone calls, according to a joint investigation by The Guardian, 972 Magazine, and Local Call. What emerges is not a local policy of control but a global economy of surveillance sustained by Western investment.

the article asks a global question: if what is happening in occupied Palestine is a preview, what does it tell us about the future of policing, migration, and civil rights elsewhere?

🔗 Read the full article on UntoldMag:
https://f.mtr.cool/tajhwhgwte

08/10/2025

After over a decade of war, sanctions, and systemic collapse, Syria’s oil sector has become the stage for a new geopolitical contest.
As EU and U.S. restrictions ease, foreign energy giants and Gulf investors are lining up to reclaim access to Syria’s battered oil fields - raising difficult questions about ownership, legality, and accountability.

At the center of this scramble is Croatia’s INA, whose legacy in Syria dates back to 1965, when Yugoslav engineers trained Syrian counterparts.
At its peak, INA was producing around 350,000 barrels a day in partnership with the Assad regime.

When the war intensified and sanctions took hold in 2012, INA suspended operations under a force majeure clause, asserting that it could no longer fulfill its contracts. Yet, even in withdrawal, the company quietly retained parts of its assets “in case geopolitical circumstances change.”

Now, as those circumstances shift, INA appears ready to return-alongside a growing number of regional and international actors.
Yet the human cost behind these opportunities remains largely unaddressed.
The same oil infrastructure that once financed authoritarian power and foreign patronage now sits atop unresolved ownership disputes, corruption scandals, and ongoing human-rights violations.

Legal experts warn that most pre-war contracts are outdated. Energy consultant Christina Abi explains:
“The terms of the contract have changed by default-they don’t apply to the situation anymore.”
Meanwhile, Hungary’s MOL Group, which holds nearly half of INA’s shares, remains entangled in a long-running arbitration saga with the Croatian government-an emblem of how energy politics, legal maneuvering, and governance failures are deeply intertwined.

On the ground, insecurity persists. UN Envoy Geir Pedersen continues to document killings, kidnappings, and attacks on minority communities in Syria.

For companies like INA and its competitors, the question is no longer just one of access-but of legitimacy. Can a country still reeling from displacement, economic collapse, and social fragmentation afford another cycle of extraction without justice or reform?

As Harrison Budak writes in UntoldMag:
“When war-torn oil fields reopen, the real struggle begins - not over barrels, but over who gets to decide the future they fuel.”
Read the full investigation by Harrison Budak on UntoldMag.
🔗 https://f.mtr.cool/ylzfzfssbs

07/10/2025

On this day two years ago, a new chapter of pain and devastation began in Palestine - not as a passing event, but as the beginning of an ongoing genocide that transcends time and place.

UntoldMag revisits voices from our dossier Palestine: 21st Century Genocide, tracing how annihilation extends beyond the physical: into memory, technology, and representation.

From the haunting digital scars of Gaza mapped on Google Earth (The Cartographic War by Zina Q.), to families forced to guess who lies beneath the rubble (I Carry Their Grave Wherever I Go by Husam Maarouf);
from a city that resists erasure through its people’s stories (The Memory of the City Resisting Genocide by Mariam Mohammed Al Khateeb), to grief inherited across generations (A Chronicle of Loss and Unending Grief by Abdalhadi Alijla);
from Big Tech’s complicity in building the infrastructure of occupation (Beyond Project Nimbus by Reem Almasri), to propaganda that weaponizes queerness as a tool of erasure (No Pride in Genocide by Joseph Kai);
and to the deliberate execution of medics whose care became an act of defiance (Across War Zones, Targeting Healthcare Has Become a Strategy, Not an Accident by Walid el Houri).

Each story bears witness to how genocide mutates, spreads, and sustains itself through every layer of life - from rubble to code, from the body to the archive.

Two years on, Gaza remains besieged - by bombs, by complicity, by impunity, by silence.
Remembering is not enough; it is a political act of resistance.

Photo by Issam Hajjaj, illustrated by Zena El Abdallah

Read more: Palestine: 21st Century Genocide on UntoldMag.
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03/10/2025

In Karnataka’s Nagarhole Tiger Reserve, the Jenu Kuruba- honey-gatherers who have lived in the forest for centuries- sat down to share a simple meal on their ancestral land. Within hours, police arrived, shelters were torn down, and the community was branded “encroachers.”

The reality is very different. The Jenu Kuruba are not intruders but guardians of the forest. Their traditions of honey gathering, bamboo cutting, fire management, and medicinal foraging have sustained biodiversity long before conservation laws were written.

Since the 1970s, however, conservation policies have displaced hundreds of families. Some were moved for the creation of the Kabini Reservoir, others into resettlement colonies, and many ended up as bonded labourers in coffee plantations. As J.C. Thimma, a tribal leader, recalls: “There was an orchestrated effort in portraying us, villagers and tribals, as poachers.”

The 2006 Forest Rights Act (FRA) was designed to dismantle this colonial legacy. On paper, it overrides older laws and secures tribal rights to forest land. But implementation has been fraught: of the five million claims filed nationwide, nearly half were rejected or remain pending. In Karnataka, thousands of Jenu Kuruba claims are stuck in bureaucratic limbo. As governance expert C.R. Bijoy puts it: “The real problem is not the law, but the state’s persistent disregard for it, and the lack of judicial oversight.”

Meanwhile, massive development schemes such as the Dharti Aaba Janjatiya Gram Utkarsh Abhiyan promise infrastructure and livelihoods, with billions in investment. Yet, as activists argue, without the right to live in forests, such promises are hollow.

This is not only a local story. With nearly 300 million Indians dependent on forests for their livelihoods, the clash in Nagarhole is a test case: Will India’s conservation model continue a colonial legacy of exclusion, or can it evolve into one that recognises indigenous stewardship and justice?

The Jenu Kuruba’s struggle is a fight for survival, dignity, and recognition that forests are living homes, spaces where people and wildlife have always coexisted.

Read the full feature by Vasudevan Sridharan on UntoldMag:
🔗https://f.mtr.cool/nlkjvtdkpc

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