Georgia, a small South Caucasian country, has long been considered a leader in the European Union’s Eastern Partnership program. Over the past two decades, relations with Brussels have significantly deepened.

Georgia has secured a free trade agreement and visa-free travel for citizens holding biometric passports, while benefiting from sustained EU financial, political and diplomatic support. This includes consistent backing for Georgia’s territorial integrity, as 20 percent of its territory remains occupied by the Russian Federation. 

Georgia’s current government, led by the Georgian Dream party, maintained largely stable relations with the EU for nearly a decade after coming to power in 2012. It positioned itself as pro-European in both domestic and foreign policy, while simultaneously pursuing what it described as a policy of “not irritating Russia,” which emphasised largely non-confrontational positions towards Moscow.

However, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has significantly reshaped political rhetoric in Georgia, contributing to the rise of strongly anti-European messaging. Much of this messaging has been spread by major information outlets affiliated with the ruling party and known for their pro-government stance.

The narratives circulating among the public increasingly mirror patterns common in Russian information campaigns, at times echoing similar discursive frames and messaging strategies. This article outlines the core narrative and messaging strategies that have gained special strength in Georgia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The anti-European turn, accompanied by intensified disinformation and propaganda efforts linked to shifting geopolitical dynamics, as well as continuing undemocratic decisions at the legislative and executive levels, has strained Georgia-EU relations.

Georgia is now a subject of growing scepticism, contributing to the suspension of several EU-funded initiatives and raising concerns about potential future restrictive measures, which will suspend the benefits, such as a visa-free regime, firstly for the decisionmakers, followed by ordinary citizens.

Post-2022 regional changes – Russia’s decreasing hard power influence

Russia’s influence in the South Caucasus has been strong for decades since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The occupation of Georgian territories – Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the conflict in Karabakh, Armenia’s dependence on Russia due to its regional isolation, Russia’s influence on Azerbaijan, and later the introduction of a peacekeeping mission in Karabakh have enabled Moscow to maintain hard power in the region. Russia is also effectively using soft power measures, particularly by promoting ideological narratives targeting growing EU and NATO influences.

Russia’s influence in the South Caucasus has been strong for decades since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had significant implications for the South Caucasus. Azerbaijan was able to regain control over Karabakh in 2023. The Karabakh region has been a source of conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan since the early 1990s.

After the outbreak of second Karabakh war in 2020, Russia deployed a peacekeeping mission in the region, which proved unable to effectively monitor the ceasefire between Armenia and Azerbaijan and in 2024 withdrew from the region. Considering the shifting regional realities, Armenia has started deepening its connections with the EU, attempting to balance Russian influence.

Altogether, these developments have left Russia with decreasing hard power influence in the region. However, this has opened space for informational influence strategies. Ironically, Georgia, the country that has historically been the most pro-European in the South Caucasus, appeared particularly vulnerable during this period to such campaigns, especially those targeting pro-Western and particularly pro-EU views.

Georgia’s vulnerability and echoes of Russian rhetoric

As mentioned, for almost a decade the Georgian Dream ruling party’s foreign policy has been based on balancing between the West and Russia. For years, this approach was communicated to the public as a pragmatic strategy, given Georgia’s geographic position and the continued military threat from Russia.

However, in parallel, over the last decade Georgia has also opened space for groups, media outlets and political actors using more radical rhetoric, sometimes openly pro-Russian.

Examples of these include far-right political actors such as the Alliance of Patriots, Alt-Info, and television channels that have been promoting anti-EU narratives. In their discourse, these actors have often attempted to shift public attention away from Russian threats toward vaguer concerns, such as the need to protect Georgian identity from foreign, primarily Western negative influences, including what they describe as “LGBTQI propaganda.” These actors have at times been regarded as informal “satellites” of the government, voicing messages that the authorities themselves were still avoiding publicly.

However, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the government itself has moved to the forefront of Euroscepticism, and at times openly propagandistic rhetoric. Recent trends indicate a shift toward clearly anti-Western, and occasionally hostile, messaging. The narratives have also increasingly portrayed Ukraine, historically a key partner of Georgia, as a negative actor.

Many of the messages constantly circulating among the Georgian public and supported by the government, echo Russian rhetorical patterns, particularly in their portrayal of the EU as a threat.

In some cases, Ukrainian leadership has been framed responsible for failing to prevent Russian aggression, while similar arguments have been extended domestically by accusing Georgia’s previous government of provoking Russian aggression in 2008. The launch and completion of a parliamentary investigation in relation to the 2008 war has further been used to reinforce these narratives and provide them with greater political legitimacy.

Many of the messages constantly circulating among the Georgian public and supported by the government, echo Russian rhetorical patterns, particularly in their portrayal of the EU as a threat and in their aim and ability to generate suspicion and confusion among the public. This has long fueled concerns about Georgian Dream’s potential ties to Russia.

At the same time, some observers argue that the party and its founder, oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili is primarily driven by own economic and security interests, while strategically using well-established informational mechanisms to maintain political power.

Core narratives  

In the Georgian case, social media does play a significant role in spreading anti-Western narratives, but reports show that traditional actors still play a significant role, like political figures and parties. Traditional media remains key too, with the most influential TV channels widely seen as supporting the government and actively deploying the same messaging.

This is especially relevant for reaching populations living outside the capital, in regions where these TV channels are sometimes the only source of information. It is interesting to note that, UK has already sanctioned Imedi and Postv channels, widely believed to be pro-governmental, by the end of February, for spreading misleading information about Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Many of these narratives repeat ideas and messaging that originate in Russian information campaigns and comparisons are provided to illustrate these parallels.

The data from several reports by different international and local organizations in Georgia, as well as limited number of academic publications on this topic suggest the existence of key narratives since 2022, that have been actively promoted among the Georgian public, both by the government and by satellite actors operating within the country.

Some key examples are outlined below. Many of these narratives repeat ideas and messaging that originate in Russian information campaigns and comparisons are provided to illustrate these parallels.

Georgian Sovereign Democracy

“Sovereign democracy” is a well-known Russian concept used to describe the governing model promoted by the Russian state. In simple terms, it can be understood as democracy practiced on a country’s own terms.

At the same time, Russian officials have consistently argued that their system is equal to, or even superior to Western democratic models. A key characteristic in this concept is that criticism of the system is often portrayed as suspicious or hostile, with critics frequently labeled as foreign agents, unfriendly actors or political enemies.

In recent years, similar messaging has played a key role in government rhetoric and among supporters of the Georgian authorities, particularly regarding EU political influence. The core argument suggests that Georgia no longer needs advice from its European partners on how to build democracy, while simultaneously promoting the view that Georgian democracy and the rule of law are in better condition than in parts of Europe.

Legislation supporting these restrictive practices has often been described by the ruling party as analogous to laws in the United States or Europe.

This messaging became especially dominant since November 2024, when the Georgian government decided to pause EU accession talks. The decision was followed by mass protests that continue daily across Georgia, as well as large-scale government suppression targeting civil society, opposition groups and independent media.

Legislation supporting these restrictive practices has often been described by the ruling party as analogous to laws in the United States or Europe. However, the European Commission has issued critical reports on these developments, portraying them as a serious threat to Georgia’s democratic future.

The narrative that “Georgia does not need advice on democracy,” often reinforced through selectively presented or manipulated examples of police misconduct, corruption or governance failures within the EU, closely resembles the Russian concept of “sovereign democracy,” which has long been used to shape public perceptions and justify political violence.

Stability vs. Ukrainisation

The narrative portraying Georgia as a “land of peace and stability under the Georgian Dream” government has been one of the most prominent since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It has been used to support the argument that Georgian Dream has saved the country from opening a so-called “second front” against Russia, while claiming that the collective West has been pressuring Georgia to do so, often through the vague notion of a “global war party.”

This messaging became particularly intense ahead of the 2024 parliamentary elections, aiming to instrumentalise societal fears of war in a country that has experienced several internal and external conflicts over the past 35 years.

The narrative has been closely linked to developments in Ukraine, promoting the perception that the West seeks Georgia’s “Ukrainisation” by opening a second front, while portraying the ruling party as the only political force capable of preventing such a scenario.

The broader practice of shaping public opinion against the collective West has often been identified as a well-established Russian strategy, in which conspiracy theories play a central role.

A particularly visible illustration of this messaging appeared in Tbilisi and other parts of Georgia ahead of the 2024 elections, where campaign banners displayed images of destroyed Ukrainian cities alongside images of peaceful Georgian landscapes. The campaign provoked strong critical reactions in Ukraine as well.

The broader practice of shaping public opinion against the collective West has often been identified as a well-established Russian strategy, in which conspiracy theories play a central role. The conspiracy narrative surrounding a so-called “global war party,” portraying Western governments and European institutions as opponents for the peace in Ukraine, has also been widely used in official Russian rhetoric.

Similar messaging patterns have appeared in Georgian political discourse, leading many researchers and practitioners to argue that Georgia is currently experiencing extensive, multi-level Russian influence operations, including efforts to shape public perceptions through disinformation and propaganda.

EU as the enemy of Georgian traditions

One of the most established anti-European narratives in Georgia has targeted Euro-integration by claiming that EU membership would destroy Georgia’s cultural identity and traditions.

This narrative has been particularly promoted by groups such as Alt-Info and similar actors that position themselves as defenders of Georgian traditions. Their rhetoric is often characterized by extreme right-wing views combined with religious arguments suggesting that opposing certain Western values is a moral and cultural obligation.

The narrative has specifically focused on sexual minority rights, claiming that EU membership would force Georgia to legalize same-sex marriage and allow Pride marches in the country.

Although other actors, including some religious figures have also contributed to spreading these messages, one of the most influential promoters of this discourse has recently been the government itself, which has emphasized “family sanctity” as a core national value while introducing restrictive legislation targeting sexual minorities.

Although public support for EU membership in Georgia remains consistently high, the persistence of Russian informational influence continues to present a significant challenge.

This approach is not unique to Georgia, as restrictive policies and rhetoric targeting sexual minorities have long been present in Russia. What is particularly notable, however, is that several studies indicate that Russia has systematically promoted such narratives through various channels, while supporting groups that adapt and localize these messages.

The broader objective of this strategy is to create distorted perceptions of Europe, undermine trust in European institutions and foster skepticism toward Euro-integration. Although public support for EU membership in Georgia remains consistently high, the persistence of Russian informational influence continues to present a significant challenge.

Impact on perceptions, Euroscepticism and EU-Georgia relations

The most critical question is: what impact do these information campaigns have on Georgian people’s perceptions of the collective West, and on the country’s aim to join the EU? As noted above, support for European integration remains strong among the Georgian public, with almost three-quarters of the population still supportive.

However, a closer look at surveys over the years reveals a noticeable decrease in positive perceptions and trust toward the EU in the last two years alone. EUNeighbours East has been producing annual survey results on the EU’s image and trust in Georgia, and comparing the reports from 2023 and 2025 clearly shows a drop of more than 10% in both categories.

The most critical question is: what impact do these information campaigns have on Georgian people’s perceptions of the collective West, and on the country’s aim to join the EU?

It is reasonable to consider that information campaigns influence public opinion and trust. Constant campaigns, originating from influential sources can succeed in creating confusion and prompting people to question previously held beliefs, eroding trust in the EU and in the long term, potentially decreasing support for integration.

The undemocratic tendencies and continued anti-EU rhetoric have left their mark on Georgian-EU relations. The European Union has repeatedly warned Georgian authorities that continuing this path will ultimately undo all the positive developments achieved over the years under different administrations.

The EU has also expressed concerns about anti-Union narratives in recent years. Georgia’s candidate status is currently largely symbolic, and the accession process is effectively frozen. The EU warns that it will remain so until the ruling party reverses course.

Concerning shifts and geopolitical influence through informational and ideological channels

The growing similarities between Georgian government messaging and narratives long associated with Russian informational strategies highlight a concerning shift in Georgia’s political and communicative landscape. Russian-style anti-Western rhetoric by ruling political figures and influential media, conspiracy theory-driven messaging, and hostile identity-based narratives have affected public trust in Western institutions and complicated Georgia’s relationship with the European Union.

These developments demonstrate that geopolitical influence in the South Caucasus is no longer exercised primarily through military or economic leverage, but increasingly through informational and ideological channels.

Georgia’s case also illustrates how external narratives can be localised and adapted to domestic political agendas, particularly during periods of geopolitical instability and societal vulnerability.

Georgia’s case also illustrates how external narratives can be localised and adapted to domestic political agendas, particularly during periods of geopolitical instability and societal vulnerability. The persistence of strong public support for EU membership suggests that Georgia’s European orientation remains continuous and deeply rooted. However, the continued use of anti-European discourse increases the risks of gradually reshaping public perceptions.

Understanding these dynamics is essential not only for Georgia’s democratic future but also for broader European engagement in the region. Addressing information influence operations within the context of Russia’s shifted regional strategies will remain critically important regarding Georgia and its European trajectory.

Nino Chanadiri is a political science researcher and analyst specialising in Eastern Europe and the Baltic Sea region. For years, she has contributed analytical and research-driven content to reputable organisations and journals in Georgia, Estonia and Poland, focusing on socio-political developments in South Caucasus, wider Eastern Europe and Baltic Sea region.

Article image: Etienne Dayer / Unsplash

Julkaisu Sovereignty, Stability and Suspicion: Russian Messaging in Georgia’s EU Debate ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.

The widespread disregard for human rights and international law that seems to characterise contemporary politics may lead one to believe that politics is about power and not about ethics.  This belief, however, is wrong and dangerous.

It is wrong because it reflects a wrong understanding of what politics, power and ethics are all about. It is dangerous because, this wrong understanding leads to the justification of violence and oppression and pave the ways to autocracy. Ultimately, this belief tells more of the personalities of those who hold it than of what politics is all about. 

The ethics of power

The are at least two kinds of people that think politics is about power rather than ethics. First, there are those who think that ethics, and moral values play no role in politics, second there are those who think the role these play is only instrumental: an accessoire that makes the exercise of power less costly and more effective.

The best example of the former type is Stephen Miller, Senior advisor of US President, Donald Trump, who candidly enough declared to journalist Jack Tapper on CNN: “We live in a world (…) that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time…”.  

“Other less candid (but smarter?) leaders refrain from voicing such radical opinions, but hold on to the belief, that role of ethics is only instrumental to the effective exercise of power. In politics and elsewhere, these leaders pay lip services to values such as sustainability, compassion, equality etc. as a practice of image management or “branding” for themselves and the institutions they represent. As German scholar Tomas Klikauer argued in his critique of management ethics, “Ethics is simply a somewhat distant add-on to management like milk in a coffee, if needed at all.”

To argue their case, the apologists of the instrumental role of ethics typically mobilise the “classics”, especially the all-time favourite among them: The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli. Despite his fame, this is an author that is read not as often and perhaps not as attentively, as it is quoted. In other words, there are reasons to believe that those who think of Machiavelli as a champion of the political ruthlessness, either haven’t read him or, if they did, they completely missed the point.

Machiavelli’s prescriptions do not deny the political relevance of virtue but quite the opposite. As Erica Benner argued in her book Machiavelli’s Prince: A New Reading: “At the Prince’s core is a biting critique of both ruthless realpolitik and amoral pragmatism, not a revolutionary new defence of these positions. Far from eroding ancient contrasts between good and evil, just and unjust, or tyranny and freedom, Machiavelli’s book shows readers the dire consequences that ensue when our language and practices fail clearly to distinguish them.”

Those who seek to justify ruthless behaviour in politics and elsewhere on grounds that only strength, deception and ultimately self-aggrandizement matter, know very little about power and how it works.

The instrumental (mis)use of ethics and the misinterpretation of as classic texts like Machiavelli’s Prince does not diminish the importance of ethics for the exercise of power, nor the important of these texts. It only tells of the quality of the leaders (mis)using them. These uses stand like a stain of filth on the fine clothes wore to compensate with appearances what is lacking in substance.

Those who seek to justify ruthless behaviour in politics and elsewhere on grounds that only strength, deception and ultimately self-aggrandizement matter, know very little about power and how it works. These people are not “realist”. They are just incompetent.

The instrumental use of ethics has entropic effects on the legitimacy of power and therefore on the effective exercise of power itself, because when the legitimacy of power declines, the roles of violence and fear increase. As history shows, there is always a point in which this equation delivers a negative result and people will choose to “fight” instead of “flight”.

Despite its falsity, this belief is appealing to leaders who lead without having neither the competences nor the integrity to do so. Still,  those who believe ethics are only instrumental to the exercise of power, to the manipulation of consent, and ultimately to oppression, should be aware of the power of ethics and of people’s inclination to eventually rebel against abuses.

The power of ethics

The power of ethics – the influence of moral principles and considerations on society, its institutions, on people’s lives and ultimately on the competition for political power – should not be underestimated. To acknowledge this power is important, not primarily for moral reasons, but for pragmatic ones – or as Machiavelli argued, for the effective exercise of authority.

In democratic regimes, this acknowledgement is particularly important because truly democratic leaders should be inspired by an ethic of democratic accountability (and e.g. pursue the long term welfare of the community they lead), rather than by an instrumental ethic: the manipulative use of moral principle and standards for the pursue of particular interests and the preservation of their influence.

To argue my point here I will rely on three metaphors: the glue, the compass and a promise (or a threat).

First the power of ethics can be thought of as a glue that keeps people together through consensus rather than coercion and bring about compliance through active participation instead of fear. Truly ethical behaviour by the leaders increases trust which becomes an important resource especially when the particular interests of some have to be sacrificed for the common good. 

Second, the power of ethics is the power of a compass that gives direction: it does not tell one where to go but it helps to get there rather than get lost. As Antti Kylliäinen recently argued in his book on ethics, Hyvänteossa, “values tell us what is good and worth thriving for” (“Arvot kertovat, mikä on hyvää ja tavoittelemisen arvoista”).

The power of ethics can be thought of as a glue that keeps people together through consensus rather than coercion and bring about compliance through active participation instead of fear.

If leaders neglect the influence of ethics and moral values, the individuals and communities that depends on them will get lost. When this happens, in politics and elsewhere, fragmentation, polarization and even violence increase because sacrifices are extolled for no other purpose than to preserve a leadership that has lost its direction and has no other purpose that preserving itself.

Third, the power of ethics can be described in relations to social functions similar to those performed by forms of speech like a promise (or a threat). It is perhaps an evolutionary fact that the constitution of society was originally inspired by the efforts of individual to increase their chances of survival by uniting or, as we would say today, hanging together so not to hang separately.

Whatever the reason, fundamental values and virtues participate to the human experience of life and its appeal depends on a promise about the possibility of a societal harmony: a reward for the effort of personal improvement with transformative effects on the relationship between the individual and society.

This promise, in other words, transforms the meaning of the social bond from a risk of subjugation and oppression to an opportunity for emancipation. The idea that “there is no such a thing as society” supports ideologies and policies that seek to isolate people: to break up collectives and let the individual stand alone and vulnerable against their rulers.

To “deny” society is to deny the “social contract” and pave the way to a social order based on fear. If the power of “ethics as a promise” is suppressed, the same will return as a threat – and once the Genie of fear is unleashed, however, the leaders that freed it are not immune from it.

These metaphors may perhaps also help to understand why the power of democratic ethics – a distinctive, post-feudal form that inspired and became politically relevant after the American and French revolutions – is what makes democratic regimes unique and uniquely resilient. In democracies, ethical leadership combines the power of ethics as a “glue”, as a “compass” and as “promise” transforming the people into the people that rule themselves or Demos: an indomitable community of individuals with the competences and the integrity necessary for self-rule.

Fundamental values and virtues participate to the human experience of life and its appeal depends on a promise about the possibility of a societal harmony.

The power of democratic ethics, in other word, is not an attribute of the leaders or the population. Rather it is an attribute of democratic politics: in essence, a relationship uniting the people and their leaders which establishes the Demos as a collective capable of deciding about own future and on the ways to bring that about.

In other words this is the power that establishes the actual rule of the people by the people as a practical possibility rather than a mere ideal. In this perspective, the resilience of democracies does not depend primarily on the qualities of their leaders but on the extent the importance of democratic ethics as the glue, the compass and the promise is acknowledged by both the people and their leaders.

When this acknowledgment collapses, because leaders deny or neglect the importance of democratic ethics and/or because the ethics of individualism and opportunism become influential, a democracy loses cohesion, direction and hope.  The leaders that effectively manage to interpret their role in relation to the responsibilities associated to democratic ethics, rather than the privileges of authority, are the “martyrs” of Demos: the “witnesses” of its existence and its political power. The rest are merely demagogues that corrupt the ideal of democracy.

Thinking the power of ethics in the age of polycrisis  

The subordination of ethics to power is nothing new. What is new is perhaps the combination of two tendencies. The first is the end of a useful fiction. In the years of the Cold War and its aftermath, the political support for democratic ethics in international politics was perhaps a fiction or facade – but a useful one, because it supported fundamental democratic principles, such as the rule of law and human rights, and the authority of institutions such as the United Nations  and the International Court of Justice that actually worked for a better world.

As the power of political actors that in the past supported this “fiction”  is currently used to undermine it, the result is not a better, more “honest” world but just the undermining of the values, the hopes and ultimately the “promise” these principles and institutions testified.

The other tendency, closely connected to the previous one, is the growing popularity of “transactional leadership” – a form of leadership in which authority is used to achieve more or less particular interests and short-term results – among political and corporate leaders, in domestic and international politics. The glorification of autocracy as “strong leadership” in both the state and the firm, by the likes of Stephen Miller, naturalizes the influence of toxic personalities in politics and in the working place. It inspires and justifies “organizational dehumanization”, the representation of people as “sacrificial citizens”, “extrajudicial killing” and abuses of the kind recently inflicted by ICE on the people in Minneapolis.

In the years of the Cold War and its aftermath, the political support for democratic ethics in international politics was perhaps a fiction or facade – but a useful one, because it supported fundamental democratic principles.

Independently from their declared ideological standpoints, too many political and corporate leaders around the world are uniting today in what philosopher Jacques Rancière called “the hatred for democracy”: a fundamental resentment for the very idea of the rule of the people by the people and for the ethics that supports it as a compass and as a promise.

For people of my generation and older – the Cold War & post WW2 generation respectively – the idea of ethics subordinated to power hurts because, at some point, in a not-so-distant past, we actually experienced the power of ethics. The world-wide consensus that created the UN and its Charter, the international law and human rights, was possible because our predecessors, having witnessed the horrors of the concentration camps and the nuclear effacement of innocent civilians, cared about the future of the generations to come, our present.

Those institutions were established as conceptual landmarks that, like monuments, are erected to testify of a past that must be remembered and its lessons heeded in order to avoid repeating tragic mistakes. That consensus expressed a union of ideals, directions and a promise that the leaders of today refuse to acknowledge.

I don’t think Machiavelli would consider this choice a wise one, nor the condition of a struggle for power deprived of meaning a desirable condition. And perhaps, he would join the  character “V” of the movie V for Vendetta and remind them that: “People should not be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people”.

PhD Matteo Stocchetti is docent in political communication at Helsinki University and Åbo Akademi. matteo.stocchetti[at]proton.me

Article image: rawkkim / Unsplash

Julkaisu The Ethics of Power and the Power of Ethics ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.

On 4th December 2025, after months of delays and uncertainty, fans of the Eurovision Song Contest received news many had hoped would not come. At its winter General Assembly in Geneva, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) cancelled a vote on Israel’s participation.

Israel, which the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza states has killed at least 70,000 Palestinians in its genocide against Palestine since October 2023, will be allowed to participate in the 2026 Eurovision in Vienna.

Israel’s determination to stay in Eurovision comes as little surprise to those who have followed the contest over recent years. President Isaac Herzog has intervened several times to ensure the state’s participation, most recently meeting with Roland Weissman, director of the Eurovision 2026 host broadcaster, Austria’s ÖRF, “to ensure Israel participates”, and creating a “dedicated team” for a concerted diplomatic campaign to keep Israel in the contest.

But the ultimate decision over whether Israel would be allowed to stay in the contest was made by the EBU. That decision raises important questions about the role the EBU plays in enabling states to use the contest for culturewashing, and what that means for audiences.

Culturewashing and complicity

A large body of scholarship on sport-, art-, culture- and pinkwashing shows us how states use the platforms provided by mega-events like Eurovision, the Olympics, and the World Cup to launder their reputations on an international stage.

As Olympics scholar Jules Boykoff puts it, sportswashing refers to the ways “political leaders use sports to appear important or legitimate on the world stage while stoking nationalism and deflecting attention from chronic social problems and human rights woes on the home front.”

States can distract audiences from violence or other political problems through spectacle and the promise of escapism. This is often achieved through staging lavish opening ceremonies that purport to “welcome” international audiences even as host states restrict who is physically or socially welcomed to the events – and happens in authoritarian regimes and democracies alike.

Additionally, music and politics scholar Marco Basioli explains show states use the positive, celebratory atmospheres and branding of an event to produce “acceptable instead of unpleasant representations” of their country. He points to the example of Russia’s decision to send Manizha, a Russian-Tajik feminist and pro-LGBTQ+ activist, to Eurovision in 2021 in order to create the impression that the state accepted progressive values.

The emphasis in sport- and culturewashing scholarship is often on the actions of the governments trying to hide or change perceptions of the violence and human rights abuses they are committing.

The emphasis in sport- and culturewashing scholarship is often on the actions of the governments trying to hide or change perceptions of the violence and human rights abuses they are committing. But a key part of the reason that states can use mega-events for political gain so effectively is because the event organisers let them. FIFA’s decision to award US President Donald Trump with “a peace prize” in December is one particularly absurd recent illustration of this process, but Eurovision is not far behind.

In other words, to understand how culturewashing works, we also have to pay attention to complicity. Complicity generally refers to being indirectly involved in wrongdoing or harm. Philosopher Hannah Arendt, for example, made a distinction between guilt (directly committing harm) and responsibility (taking responsibility for being part of a community that allowed harm or failed to prevent it).

In the context of mega-events, this means that organisers like the EBU are making a choice to provide a platform for genocidal states, which allows the states to normalise their actions in the international arena.

Non-political entertainment

The EBU goes to great lengths to try to hide its role in enabling Israel’s participation and avoid accountability. The most obvious way it does this is by claiming the contest is both “non-political” and “an entertainment show”. In April 2024, then-Executive Supervisor Martin Österdahl explicitly cited Eurovision’s status as entertainment to justify the contest’s supposedly “non-political” stance:

“We understand that people are concerned, but ultimately this is a music show, this is a family entertainment show, and we should focus on that. We are not the arena to solve a Middle East conflict.”

This rhetorical move downplays Eurovision’s active role on the geopolitical stage, including endorsing Israel’s participation. It also positions the contest as “harmless fun”, creating distance between the contest’s actions and responsibility for the broader political consequences of those actions.

In a single statement, the EBU managed to diminish the influence of the competing artists in order to absolve them of responsibility for participating, as well as dismiss the legitimate criticisms of fans and activists by framing them as bullies.

Since 2024, the EBU has expanded this rhetorical power beyond basic claims to neutrality to discursively restrict how responsibility and complicity can be framed in relation to Eurovision. In the months leading up to the Malmö edition of the contest, for example, many Eurovision fans, along with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and other activist groups, sent letters and petitions urging competing artists who had publicly expressed support for Palestine to withdraw.

In response, the EBU issued a statement chastising fans for engaging in “targeted social media campaigns against some of our participating artists.” The statement accused fans of “online abuse, hate speech, [and] harassment,” calling the public pressure “unacceptable and completely unfair, given the artists have no role in this decision.”

In a single statement, the EBU managed to diminish the influence of the competing artists in order to absolve them of responsibility for participating, as well as dismiss the legitimate criticisms of fans and activists by framing them as bullies. In doing so, the EBU constricts who can be seen as complicit, and what they are complicit – or not complicit – in.

In the December General Assembly meeting last year, the EBU deployed this tactic again by tying the already twice-delayed vote on Israel’s participation to the separate question of voting reform. This put the question of whether a state committing genocide should be allowed in the competition on the same footing as reforms to the integrity of the televoting system, reducing the political and humanitarian concerns raised by countries such as Slovenia and Spain to a technocratic procedural matter.

Reframing boycott as an individual choice

Slovenia, Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland and Iceland have withdrawn from the 2026 contest in protest. The Netherlands and Ireland have participated in the contest since its inception, and Ireland is one of the contest’s most successful participating countries – joint record holder for the highest number of wins (7, with Sweden), and the only country to have won three times consecutively. Spain and the Netherlands are also some of the contest’s largest financial contributors, paying in recent years approximately €330,000 and €250,000 in participation fees, respectively.

Despite this, the EBU is claiming the outcome of the December meeting as a victory. The EBU announced the result of the meeting in a statement declaring that “EBU Members show clear support for reforms to reinforce trust and protect neutrality of Eurovision”. Eurovision’s Executive Director, Martin Green, likewise claimed that the meeting reaffirmed “the belief that the Eurovision Song Contest shouldn’t be used as political theatre.”

The EBU is already trying to undermine the impact of the withdrawals by framing them as individual choice rather than principled action.

The fact that the EBU is willing to let these countries withdraw to protect a state committing genocide lays bare the lengths Eurovision will go to in order to maintain its relationship with Israel. The EBU is already trying to undermine the impact of the withdrawals by framing them as individual choice rather than principled action.

As Green noted in an interview following the meeting, “that’s their choice, I completely respect that.” Green also undermined the impact of the withdrawing states’ intention not to broadcast the contest next year by promising that the EBU will “fully make sure that the fans and the audiences can watch the show.”

Resisting complicity: Partial and total boycott

All of these decisions put audiences and artists in an unenviable position. The EBU has the authority to remove countries that do not live up to the contest’s stated values and broadcasting standards, as it did with Russia in 2022 and Belarus in 2021.

The national broadcasters had the procedural power at the EBU General Meeting to demand two separate votes – one for Israel’s participation and one for televoting reform. The broadcasters also still have the power to stand for what is right and make the contest financially unviable by joining the boycotting countries and demanding Israel’s exclusion. By refusing to act, the EBU and national broadcasters force individual fans to choose either to give up something they love, or to keep watching and be made complicit in the normalisation of genocide.

Eurovision fans enable Israel’s culturewashing campaign by continuing to watch and engage with the contest. As fan studies scholars such as Matt Hills explain, fans are not just avid followers of sport and culture, they are consumers, with the capacity to choose where and how they spend both their money and their attention, including to lobby for social or political change.

When Eurovision fans buy tickets to the live shows, buy merchandise, or participate in televoting, they are directly contributing to the financial success of the contest, and tacitly endorsing (or at least, not entirely rejecting) the decisions of its organisers.

The broadcasters also still have the power to stand for what is right and make the contest financially unviable by joining the boycotting countries and demanding Israel’s exclusion.

Many Eurovision fans recognise this financial link and have started engaging in what they call “partial boycott”, still watching but no longer spending money. This can be an important first step in individual fans’ processes of distancing themselves from an event they believe is no longer living up to the values they care about.

Yet even watching at home still indirectly enables culturewashing by providing Israel with an audience and allowing the EBU to claim the event is as popular as ever. According to the EBU, 166 million people tuned in to Eurovision in 2025 – 3 million more viewers than in 2024.

In contrast, total boycott that disrupts the viewing figures, and related actions such as attending alternative events or campaigning to persuade more national broadcasters to withdraw if Israel participates, make it much more difficult for Eurovision and Israel to claim that the contest is continuing as normal.

The boycott gains momentum

As difficult as navigating individual and collective complicity in enabling culturewashing can be for many fans, there is still hope. The five boycotting countries have dealt a massive reputational and financial blow to Eurovision. It is especially humiliating that, with only 35 participating countries confirmed, the 70^th anniversary of the event will be its smallest edition since the introduction of the semi-final in 2004.

The withdrawals are also an important victory for the BDS movement and for Palestine. Slovenia, the Netherlands, Ireland, Spain and Iceland have sent a clear moral message that they will not party with genocidaires. Emboldened by their action, many fans and artists have expressed their intention to boycott.

With only 35 participating countries confirmed, the 70^th anniversary of the event will be its smallest edition since the introduction of the semi-final in 2004.

Other countries and fan communities may yet follow suit, and the more people and countries join the boycott, the more the EBU will feel the pressure to exclude Israel. That momentum will also build around other international sporting competitions and cultural events in which Israel participates.

In an interval act during the 2025 Eurovision in Basel, one of the show’s hosts, Hazel Brugger, delivered a lyric that tellingly exposed the impact of Eurovision’s supposed apolitical stance: “non-political, strictly neutral / doesn’t matter if you’re good or brutal”. The more the EBU doubles down on the claim that Eurovision’s non-political stance allows it to unite through music, the more it shows us that what Eurovision has chosen to be united with is genocide and occupation.

Zoë Jay is a Kone Foundation-funded researcher in international politics at the Centre for European Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on fan communities and the politics of international mega-events.

Article image: The stage of the Eurovision Song Contest 2025 in Basel, Switzerland / MrSilesian / Wikimedia Commons CC0

Julkaisu Non-political, Strictly Neutral: Culturewashing and Complicity at the Eurovision Song Contest ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.

Colombia has been internationally known for its long-term armed conflict that began in the 1960s, the illicit cocaine production and trafficking that has been intimately associated with it, and its strategic relations with the United States in security and drug enforcement policy.

After decades of brutal war, a long-awaited and polarizing peace agreement was signed in 2016 between the Colombian government and the largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

According to the Truth Commission, the armed conflict had resulted in over 450,000 documented homicides and more than 120,000 disappeared persons, with right-wing paramilitaries – financed mainly by land-owners – being the main perpetrators, followed by guerrilla groups and state actors. Nearly six million persons had been internally displaced.

The results of the 2022 elections surprised everyone as the country, where many view socialism with suspicion, elected its first-ever left-wing President, Gustavo Petro. Since his election, Petro, a former guerrilla fighter of the M19 rebel group, has been determined to bring all actors of the armed conflict, including violent and illegal rebel and paramilitary groups, to the peace table; thus, the notion of “total” in his peace plan.

Yet internally the threat of violence and the power of criminal groups is on the rise. Meanwhile, the increased militarization and securitization of multilateral peace operations globally, lurks in the background.

The Promise of Total Peace vs. Reality on the Ground

In addition to the FARC, several other guerrilla groups and paramilitary groups were involved in the Colombian conflict. The Total Peace law created two streams of dialogue: political dialogues with illegal armed actors that had recognised political status, and “socio-legal dialogues” with those labelled highly organised criminal groups, including the drug cartels.

Although the Total Peace process began with a national-level approach, in practice, the dialogues that have made the most progress were those with a territorial focus, in which negotiations and agreements have been adapted to the specific context of the regions. Nevertheless, the results of the peace dialogue today, with only five months left of the current presidential term, have been mixed at best and the internal narrative of a false dichotomy between peace efforts and security is strengthened.

The dialogue with the National Liberation Army (ELN), the second largest guerrilla group, has been suspended due to escalating violence and a humanitarian crisis in the Catatumbo region, distrust between the negotiating parties, and the ELN’s continued engagement in human rights violations. For many years, Colombia has been the most dangerous country in the world for human rights defenders, particularly with regard to land, environmental, and Indigenous peoples’ rights.

Although the Total Peace process began with a national-level approach, in practice, the dialogues that have made the most progress were those with a territorial focus, in which negotiations and agreements have been adapted to the specific context of the regions.

However, the Comuneros del Sur, a splinter group, continues to negotiate with the government and has made progress on key issues, including humanitarian demining, the search for missing persons, weapons surrender, substitution of illicit crops, and the development of a territorial transformation programme.

For its part, the Bolivarian National Army Coordinator (CNEB), a group of former FARC combatants who rejected the 2016 peace plan, has begun a pilot programme for the voluntary substitution of coca crops across 30,000 hectares in Nariño and Putumayo, with the potential for nationwide expansion. The negotiations with the Estado Mayor de Bloques y Frentes (EMBF, the FARC dissident sect) have consolidated six agreements focusing on ending child recruitment, protecting the environment, and – most importantly – guaranteeing safety for the 2026 elections.

Dialogues with the Gaitanista Army of Colombia (EGC), a right-wing paramilitary group, and the Autodefensas Conquistadoras de la Sierra Nevada (ACSN), a paramilitary armed group, are facing major hurdles due to a lack of ceasefire compliance and persistent violence. A core challenge is the EGC is not looking to submit to justice, and its territorial control has vastly expanded, with more than 9,000 fighters and a leading role in cocaine and migrant trafficking in the region.

Despite these tensions, and following two rounds of talks in Doha, mediated by Norway, Spain, and Switzerland, the government is moving the negotiations to Tierralta, Córdoba, with the third cycle scheduled to begin in March 2026.

Legacy of the 2016 FARC Peace Agreement

Despite the continuation of violence, the 2016 peace agreement remains a landmark achievement, with nearly 12,000 FARC combatants disarmed. The majority remain committed to the reintegration process through productive projects and the formation of cooperatives. The FARC has transitioned into a political party, the Comunes, which has held seats in Congress for two legislative terms.

The accord also strengthened democratic guarantees for political opposition and expanded political participation more broadly. The agreement established a comprehensive transitional justice system, including the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) and the Truth Commission, to investigate and prosecute serious crimes and provide reparations for victims.

Despite the continuation of violence, the 2016 peace agreement remains a landmark achievement, with nearly 12,000 FARC combatants disarmed.

However, the implementation of its core provisions has been slow and uneven. As its 10th anniversary approaches, key areas like rural reform and security guarantees, as well as transitional justice initiatives, continue to lag, raising concerns about the long-term sustainability of the peace process. In particular, the slow pace of rural reform is a foundational failure that perpetuates the very conditions that fueled the original conflict.

Furthermore, the implementation of gender equality and ethnic inclusion has been particularly slow. Of the 130 gender-focused commitments, only 13% have been completed, while 17% have not even been started. Similarly, out of the 80 ethnically focused commitments, as related to Indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombians, just 13% have been fulfilled, and at least 60% have shown no progress in the last two years.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has been critical towards the lack of progress in implementing the 2016 agreement and of the role of the United Nations Verification Mission in Colombia responsible for monitoring its key provisions, leading to a weakening of its mandate.

Trump’s Changing Geopolitics toward Latin America

Traditionally, Colombia has been the strongest US ally in South America. Since the initiation of Plan Colombia in 2000, which focuses on counternarcotics and security efforts, Colombia has consistently ranked as one of the largest recipients of US foreign aid.

While President Joe Biden pronounced Colombia as the most important non-NATO ally to the U.S., tensions have escalated during the second Trump Administration. In January 2025, when Petro declined to accept a US military aircraft carrying Colombian deportees, the relationship between him and Trump – both active social media users – heated up online.

In July 2025, when the US Agency for International Development (USAID) closed its operations worldwide, Colombia was among the hardest-hit countries, losing 82 per cent of its US funding. The impacts have been felt most severely with regard to refugees and internally displaced persons, whose numbers in Colombia are among the highest in the world, not solely due to long histories of war but also due to nearly three million refugees from neighbouring Venezuela. 

When the US Agency for International Development (USAID) closed its operations worldwide, Colombia was among the hardest-hit countries, losing 82 per cent of its US funding. The impacts have been felt most severely with regard to refugees and internally displaced persons.

In recent months, the Trump administration has designated Colombia as a major illicit drug-producing country, accusing its political leadership of failing to meet coca eradication goals and allowing coca cultivation and cocaine production to break “all-time records”. Subsequently, President Petro and his family members and other close allies have been sanctioned under the pretext of their involvement in “the global illicit drug trade”.

The situation in Colombia has become tense due to Trump’s revival of the Monroe Doctrine, now known as the “Donroe Doctrine”, which aims at re-establishing U.S. supremacy in the Western hemisphere.

After U.S. attacks on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean in November, Petro announced that Colombia’s security forces would stop sharing intelligence with the US due to its severe human rights violations. Trump responded that he could extend anti-drug military operations in Colombia. After the U.S. military intervention in Venezuela in January, Trump has repeated his threats.

The Fragile Gamble of Colombian Diplomacy

The incomplete implementation of the 2016 peace agreement and the state’s failure to establish a comprehensive presence in areas once controlled by the FARC has created a power vacuum that has led to the rise of dissident groups. As a result, they now pose a significant threat to peace, fueling a new wave of violence and complicating the government’s efforts to achieve “Total Peace.”

Additionally, external challenges to peace have risen from the global shift in geopolitical strategy that prioritizes “hard power” over peace mediation, and the threats of a former ally, the U.S., whose extrajudicial airstrikes and military buildup in the Caribbean signal a new phase in U.S.-Latin American relations.

Carolina Buendía Sarmiento is a doctoral researcher of Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki.

Eija Ranta is an Academy Research Fellow and Senior University Lecturer of Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki.

Article image: David Restrepo / Unsplash

Julkaisu Colombia’s Complex Path to Peace in the Face of Trump’s Threats ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.

Silent Legacy (2025). Directors: Jenni Kivistö and Jussi Rastas, Finland

The movie Silent Legacy is a personal and intimate documentary about the life of dancer and choreographer Sibiry Konaté, based in Finland. Focusing on everyday life of Sibiry, the movie simultaneously presents intersections of identity, migration, dancing professionality, parenting, loneliness and friendship.

Most importantly, it invites us into the transnational life of Sibiry and unfolds tensions related to remittances – transfer of money or goods – back to Burkina Faso. Hence, the movie navigates on personal but also societal levels, revealing the silent legacy of monetary burdens connecting African diaspora members in Europe.

In the words of Sibiry: “It is a shadow of colonialism”. When you migrate to Europe, your position changes and what people see in you is money. This entails that you are expected to bring back money when you go to Western countries. As Sibiry notes: “Everybody relies on you so it’s a heavy burden”.

Behind the underlying burden of coloniality, the movie is visually beautiful, incorporating scenes from Tiene, Sibiry’s village in Burkina Faso. We see children dancing and playing, we hear the sounds of animals and can sense the dust in the sand.

These scenes are interwoven with Sibiry dancing in various contexts—against the white snow representing Finland, in an elevator, and in a white suit while spreading money—insightfully and sensitively illustrating how he navigates different spaces and positions in his transnational life.

Lost between two continents?

There is, from my white, Finnish, perspective a sadness in a legacy you cannot leave behind, a legacy that follows you around in your everyday life. This phenomenon is well pictured in the movie through voice messages from friends and family hoping for money.

Having lived in Finland for a long time, the sense of belonging to his village in Burkina Faso has changed. It becomes clear that the Sibiry who left Tiene is no longer welcome as the boy he once was, and that he is not able to go back living in Tiene as the Sibiry he was before moving to the West. Now, he is what he himself refers to as “a god from the land of white people”, everybody wants something from him.

There is, from my white, Finnish, perspective a sadness in a legacy you cannot leave behind, a legacy that follows you around in your everyday life. This phenomenon is well pictured in the movie through voice messages from friends and family hoping for money.

This movie contributes to unfolding various complexities in life, as Sibiry is partly an African decent migrant in Finland, struggling in a system with structural racism and partly a privileged European in the eyes of the Tienes relatives and friends. As he states:

“You’re lost between two countries, two continents”

In order to somewhat fulfill the request from friends and family, and perhaps also still the flow of requests of money, Sibiry plans to ship a van from Finland to Burkina Faso. In the burden of doing correctly, he ponders if sending a van can be perceived as showing off – or if the villagers will think the van is not good enough. We see how he negotiates on renovations of the van in Finland, packs the van full with necessities and then ships it to the African continent.

“This bus could bring big changes to Tiene”

Eventually the van does not make it to Sibirys’s village as due to various struggles and setbacks. In the movie, these moments and struggles are brilliantly filmed through the scene of the van, in a dark background, without its engine. Symbolically, the black hole where the engine once sat resonates with the feeling Sibiry might have; this is the thank you get for saving money to buy a van and shipping it to Burkina Faso – getting betrayed.

African remittance legacy

Situating the movie and Sibiry’s experiences in a larger perspective, Sibiry is part of the African diaspora in the Nordic countries. As noted by the United Nations, the amount of remittances to African countries has grown during the past years, due to a larger African diaspora but also due to mobile options for sending remittances.

Remittances from African diaspora members have a great impact on African economy, from macro structures such as larger companies to microstructures of households and neighborhoods. However, it appears that the report does not address the negative sides of remittances, the dark sides of monetary bounds that are well documented in the movie.

According to recent research, remittances also appear to increase conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa. Looking at individual experiences of remittance senders, research highlights socio-cultural norms, such as ubuntu, creating tensions and pressure among migrants to send money “back home”, while simultaneously settling in the host country.

The amount of remittances to African countries has grown during the past years, due to a larger African diaspora but also due to mobile options for sending remittances.

In the movie, we see Sibiry working at Posti and as a cleaner, picturing the precarious situation when it comes to employment for migrants of African descent in Finland. Due to structural challenges in the Finnish job market, such as employment and recruitment discrimination or unnecessary high language requirements, working in precarious positions at low paid jobs is something many migrants end up doing.

Personally, I feel this is such a waste of Sibiry’s dancing talent and feel sad for living in a society not appreciating the dancing expertise Sibiry brings to Finland. Ten years ago, I took part in Sibiry’s afro dance classes and recalled thinking that he should be teaching experts. And so he has been, but still, I cannot but feel frustration against attitudes in the job market in Finland.

“I came here to dance”

“For me dancing is freedom”

From my perspective, it feels unreasonable and unequal that in addition to striving to get along economically and settle in a new host country, one would need to send remittances “back home”. These are exactly the global inequalities Jenni Kivistö and Jussi Rastas with their documentary movies want to illustrate.

The white gaze

This is not the first documentary movie made by Jenni Kivistö and Jussi Rastas. Previously, the couple has been internationally recognized and awarded for their documentary movie Colombia in My Arms. In a documentary series about creative couples at the streaming site Yle Areena, we can follow their journey highlighting global inequalities and unfolding colonial legacies.

In recent years, the lens has also turned towards themselves, raising a discussion about representation and them as white from the Global North making movies about the Global South. We hear them pondering about whether it actually matters if they are white, making a movie in Africa or if it is more important to highlight inequalities than to critically scrutinize them being Europeans and racially white.  

I would suggest that both matters, and that it definitively matters if you are racially white when making movies about colonial legacies. It matters what information, what spaces, what standpoints and what resources you might access. Likewise, it matters that I have a white gaze when writing this review, it positions me differently than if it had been written by an African decent researcher. Scrutinizing the structurally powerful position one has supports self-reflection related to individual encounters, but also power encounters between the Global South and North societies.

Scrutinizing the structurally powerful position one has supports self-reflection related to individual encounters, but also power encounters between the Global South and North societies.

The film demonstrates considerable sensitivity, and Kivistö and Rastas’ personal experiences of living and spending significant time in the Global South inform their understanding of global inequalities. However, recognizing how being white matters would allow the viewers to feel – for coming movies- that this is an ethically sound movie, where white privileges are made conscious – and perhaps contested.

Towards the end, I want to thank both Sibiry and the documentary makers for this important movie, highlighting intersections of transnational life. Openly sharing personal relations, joys and disappointments for a large public requires strength and courage, thank you for this Sibiry. I really wish this documentary movie would be viewed by politicians, researchers and students and I wish Sibiry, that you will be able to dance, freely.

Liselott Sundbäck is a postdoctoral researcher in social policy at Åbo Akademi University.

Silent Legacy (Directors: Jenni Kivistö and Jussi Rastas, 2025) is screened at DocPoint-festival 3.–8.2.2026.
Check the screening programme for showtimes.

Read all Politiikasta DocPoint 2026 reviews in english here.

All Politiikasta DocPoint 2026 reviews in Finnish here.

Article image: Silent Legacy (2025) / DocPoint

Julkaisu DocPoint 2026: “For me, dancing is freedom” ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.

Am I calling you at a bad time? (2024). Director: Martta Tuomaala, Finland
All the Light That Remains (2025). Diector: Moona Pennanen, Finland
Spirits / Vuoiŋŋat (2025). Directors: Marja Viitahuhta, Ánnámáret, Turkka Inkilä, Ilkka Heinonen, Finland

DocPoint Helsinki Documentary Film Festival turns twenty-five this year, and the anniversary edition lands in Helsinki from 3rd to 8^th of February 2026. Across more than a hundred films, the program combines Finnish premieres from the international selection with domestic films, organized across international, national, and short film competitions.

Out of this year’s submissions, I had the chance to review three significant but very different works, each circling questions of voice, history, and what the camera can and cannot responsibly claim. Taken together, they make a strong case for catching the festival beyond the headline picks. Enough of the setting, now for the calls, the ruins, and the ghosts.

Am I calling you at a bad time? (2025)

Image: Still from Am I calling you at a bad time? (2025) /DocPoint

I first saw Martta Tuomaala’s work last year in a Helsinki gallery, in a tiny dark room that smelled faintly like the offices the unnamed narrator remembers from the 90s. Later, over coffee, a friend asked what it was about. I said it was about a voice learning how to behave. That reductive description feels more accurate after re-watching the work.

Am I calling you at a bad time? [En kai huonoon aikaan soittele?] is a creative documentary that follows a brief stretch of an unnamed narrator’s early working life, an unlikely coming of age story where adulthood arrives with a headset. Our accidental protagonist begins as a telemarketer at the age of 15, then moves through phone sex work, telephone surveys, and ends up in sales.

Though the roles change, “the phone” stubbornly stays put in her story. In terms of form, the work is not a documentary in the strict sense so much as a performed non-fiction or a stylized staging of reality, but let us keep the familiar term, documentary, in this text.

The weight of the work is mainly carried by a playful voice actor, who also happens to be the director and writer, and who wrestles with the Finnish language itself, stretching its rhythms and intonations until it becomes spirited rather than flat. The frisky voice-over often comes to the work’s rescue, as the piece relies heavily on archival images and amateur footage that can at times feel irrelevant or distracting.

The consistent color grading and the decision to keep the narrator faceless sit comfortably with the narrative and with the lived experience of the narrator, let us call her X. We are deliberately kept at a certain distance from X, as the work feels autobiographical without ever becoming self-examining or confessional. Still, its most affecting moments arrive when the work turns inward, such as when X reflects on the effects of her job on her psyche and admits that working as a phone sex operator made her suspicious of her male friends, wondering whether they belonged to the same group of creeps.

Between the jesting lines of voice narration, Tuomaala delivers sharp commentary on mental health, loneliness, and the narrow range of opportunities available to women in Finland’s industry-driven economy of the 80s and 90s.

Between the jesting lines of voice narration, Tuomaala delivers sharp commentary on mental health, loneliness, and the narrow range of opportunities available to women in Finland’s industry-driven economy of the 80s and 90s.

The work is at its most pointed when it turns to everyday gender dynamics. This comes through when X recalls being asked to soften (feminize) her deep voice to increase sales, being told off in a job interview for not wearing make-up or dressing like the other women in the office, or when she deliberately mispronounces the name of a tractor brand in order to keep massaging the masculine ego of the customer on the other end of the phone. X’s experiences belong to the 90s only on paper. In practice, they extend easily into 2026. So yes, now is exactly the kind of time this call should happen.

Thinking back to that first viewing in that small gallery, it feels fitting that the work resists a clean ending. Like a phone call that ends without a clear goodbye, it cuts off mid rhythm, leaving the line oddly open. X’s phone sex chapter brings to mind Judy in Spike Lee’s Girl 6 (1996), especially when Judy is coached to sound more like a stereotypical white woman. The difference is that Tuomaala, quite understandably, never makes you feel for X in the same way.

Although the ending is slightly awkward, the original music that closes the piece helps absorb that jolt. The work, overall, invites speculation about what it chooses not to pursue. There is room to wonder how it might have evolved more creatively through bolder formal decisions, particularly in its dealing with archival material and the supplementary shots that feel more utilitarian than considered.

Yet these limitations somehow settle into the work’s internal logic and allow it to function as a cohesive whole with its own peculiar style rather than a loosely stitched pastiche of the 90s. Yes, the call may at times feel awkward, but the voice behind the call knows what it is doing after all.

All The Light That Remains (2025)

Image: Still from All The Light That Remains (2025) / DocPoint

There is always something austere about films that begin from the idea of what remains. Moona Pennanen’s All The Light That Remains [Kaikki jäljelle jäävä valo] holds onto that formally restrained space early on, and asks the viewer to stay with the aftermath instead of chasing explanations. For a young filmmaker, that is an ambitious way to claim a voice. What sticks around after the 25-minute runtime is the mood the film generates, and much of that effect comes from Jesse Jalonen’s eye-catching cinematography and Pennanen’s consistent pacing. Taken as a whole, the film points to a personal style of working that does feel well thought-out, and it is a pleasant surprise to see that kind of clarity for such an early work.

All the Light That Remains is a hybrid documentary set in the abandoned mining village of Mätäsvaara, where the present collides with an uneasy past. The film opens with a group of young Ukrainians arriving by van. It never clearly spells out who they are or why they are there. At first they could pass for a group on a field trip, but through small visual cues and narrative detours, the film allows the viewer to infer that they are seasonal workers brought in for reforestation.

When the main character Oleksander enters the communal building where they are staying and finds an empty room, he meets another newcomer, Mykyta. The two form a loose duo, wandering around the village and picking up fragments of its history along the way. As they move through the village, they cross paths with a couple of Finnish geologists surveying the mine for a possible reopening, as rising molybdenum prices have brought new attention to the site.

Before going further, some context for Politiikasta readers can be useful. Mätäsvaara is located in Lieksa, North Karelia, on the eastern side of Lake Pielinen near the border with Nurmes. It was built rapidly during the wartime period as a purpose-made mining community, with housing and basic services organized around the mine itself.

The question is rather how far a work presented as “documentary” can go in bending historical specificity for emotional effect, and where that line begins to matter?

Today, the Finnish Heritage Agency lists Mätäsvaara as a nationally significant built cultural environment, mainly because its town plan was designed by Alvar Aalto. The mine operated as a molybdenum sulfide site and played a role in the German wartime industry. Molybdenum is used in alloy steels, including those required for arms production. A Lieksa city guide also marks the location of an “old prison camp” and notes that prisoners of war were brought to the mine as labor. During the Continuation War, Finland held roughly 64,000 Soviet soldiers as prisoners of war, along with about 5,700 taken during the earlier Winter War.

What matters for the film, however, is how this history is recorded. In official Finnish and international sources, these prisoners are not listed by modern national identities. They are consistently described as “Soviet prisoners of war”. In Finnish archives they appear as neuvostosotavangit or neuvostoliittolaiset sotavangit. In some cataloguing practices, the label “Russian” is used as a practical shorthand, even though broader historical accounts continue to frame them as Soviet prisoners.

Even an older MTV3 feature on a musical set in Mätäsvaara, for example, refers to “Russian prisoners of war” working at the mine in the summer of 1944. Against this background, Pennanen’s decision to foreground a specifically Ukrainian identity in the film for these prisoners appears to be deliberate. It intensifies the emotional weight of the setting and strategically taps into the current resonance of Ukrainian identity in Europe (without this adjustment the film’s structure falls apart). Is this a flaw? Not necessarily.

Cinema has always depended on dramatization, on bending and compressing reality in order to make it felt. The question is rather how far a work presented as “documentary” can go in bending historical specificity for emotional effect, and where that line begins to matter?

The film invites real questions, and only a work that aims high enough ever does that.

The film seems caught between two impulses that pull in opposite directions and they end up cancelling each other out, undermining the film’s overall coherence. As noted earlier, much of the film’s weight is carried by its beautiful cinematography, evident, for example, in the camera movement in the forest, wide shots at the beginning and the atmospheric cutaway shots toward the end. In its technical approach, these moments recall another film with “light” in its title, All We Imagine as Light, awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 2024.

The other pull comes from the script, which fails to rise to the level of the visual work and instead drags the film down. Rather than trusting the images, the script clings to them as a way to force its themes through. Its ideas about time, space, and inherited suffering are pushed so insistently through bland over-explanation that the visual language begins to suffocate under the weight. Artificial staging and poorly ordered dialogue only add to the problem. As cinematography reaches for subtext, the script uncreatively spoon feeds the audience with meaning (for example by long verbal padding about “grains”), and the two never stylistically align.

The clunky editing only amplifies the script’s weaknesses. The two geologists are poorly integrated into the narration, appearing like summoned ghosts who surface now and then to recite background information. Rather than enriching the film, they interrupt its visual logic. The opening quote from The Man Without Qualities does important work, grounding the film in an idea of time piling up beneath us while we pretend to stand on something stable. Yet it is hard to ignore that the real men without qualities here are the people on screen themselves, reduced to particles by a romanticized gaze. The world around them remains intact with its traumas, continuing to reproduce hierarchical ways of seeing, while even nature is stripped of specificity and turned into a symbolic pressure placed on the characters.

If this review runs longer than the others, it is because the film invites real questions, and only a work that aims high enough ever does that. For all its tensions, the film leaves a clear impression and makes Pennanen a filmmaker worth paying attention to right now.

Vuoiŋŋat (2025)

Image: Vuoiŋŋat (2025) / Docpoint

Marja Viitahuhta’s Vuoiŋŋat reminds us of a dark chapter in European history, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a documented movement now known as “scientific racism” used pseudo-scientific authority to justify imperialism, colonial domination, and ideas of white superiority, while legitimizing discrimination, the collection of human bodies, and state policy.

Germany became an early center for this thinking, with the founding of the German Society for Racial Hygiene in 1905 by Alfred Ploetz, promoting concepts of “racial health” and “purity” that later intensified across Europe in the 1930s. In the Nordics, a key milestone was the establishment of the State Institute for Racial Biology in Sweden’s Uppsala in 1922, led by Herman Lundborg, one of the most influential race scientists of the period. In this period, the Sámi population was systematically targeted by racial biology research through physical measurements and the removal of human remains.

In Finland, a major racial research program operated during the 1920s and 1930s under Professor Yrjö Kajava, during which approximately 37 percent of the Finnish Sámi population, totaling 795 individuals, were subjected to anthropometric measurement between 1926 and 1934. Within this context, grave disturbances are documented, including a 1934 anthropological expedition that exhumed seventy skeletons from the old cemetery island in Inari for study at the University of Helsinki. These remains later became the subject of long repatriation efforts, with ninety-five Sámi remains returned in 1995 and a further 172 repatriated in 2001 to the Sámi Museum Siida.

Although Vuoiŋŋat will not speak to everyone, what the work achieves through form deserves recognition.

In August 2022, Sámi human remains removed from burial grounds during the era of European racial science were reburied in Inari, Utsjoki, and Nellim in ceremonies led by Sámi communities in collaboration with church and state representatives. Viitahuhta dedicates her work to the Sámi ancestors whose remains were taken from their graves in the name of racial research.

Viitahuhta’s piece is a five-minute cameraless video built from animated digital auroras and a luohti performed by Sámi musician Ánnámáret, where the yoik gives voice to spirits that have been left without a place to rest. The title Vuoiŋŋat comes from the Northern Sámi word for spirits or life force, a term connected to the verb meaning “to breathe” and is used in Sámi cultural contexts to refer to ancestral or collective spirit. The Sámi political slogan ČSV includes the phrase Čájet Sámi Vuoiŋŋa! which is translated as “Show Sámi Spirit” where vuoiŋŋa is interpreted as “Sámi spirit” showing the word’s use to express presence or collective soul.

If you allow yourself to get lost into Viitahuhta’s experiment with form, the digitized images start to pull you in. Hold your gaze long enough and pareidolia kicks in. Shapes appear, and suddenly you wonder if the spirits are there on the screen, if they are watching you back, if one of them just waved at you.

Ánnámáret’s wordless vocalization carries the experience forward and holds it together. When her vocal register drops near the end into a deeper, grounded sound, it feels like another presence stepping in, as if a spirit is finally speaking plainly and letting its grief surface. Although Vuoiŋŋat will not speak to everyone, what the work achieves through form deserves recognition.

Rather than following a normative Western approach to her material, Viitahuhta’s work opens toward another way of thinking, one that the Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida helps put into words. As Nishida explained it, Western thought tends to treat form as being itself and formal completion as a measure of value, while East Asian thought allows for seeing the form of the formless and hearing the sound of the soundless. Without this kind of experimentation and had Viitahuhta adhered to a fixed Western ideal of form, the work would not reach the emotional force it carries.

Erfan Fatehi is a doctoral researcher in sociology at the university of Helsinki.

National Short Film Competition 1: The Verge of New, 2: Side by Side, and 3: Flashbacks are screened at DocPoint-festival between 3.–8.2.2026. Check the screening programme for showtimes.

Article images: DocPoint Helsinki

Read all Politiikasta DocPoint 2026 reviews in english here.
All Politiikasta DocPoint 2026 reviews in Finnish here.

Update 27.2.2026: Film names and link to screening schedule added

Julkaisu DocPoint 2026: From Calls to Spirits: Three New Finnish Films ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.

What happened to the politics in identity politics? Let me begin with a small social experiment I stumbled into, though it was billed as an art event.

A friend of mine, a visual artist, invited me to the debut of her latest piece. The venue was a familiar Helsinki art space that often hosts activist-leaning exhibitions. The theme this time was “resistance and emancipation” and the walls were hung with works that made their stance clear: slogans, symbolism, visual homages to liberation struggles from Palestine to Central Africa.

Alongside the art, there were “safer space” posters posted everywhere, including, inexplicably, the inside of the toilet doors. The assumption seemed to be that “political danger” could lurk anywhere, even at the urinal!

The crowd, no more than twenty people, consisted mostly of local artists and activists. You could tell from the tote bags and the bios on their social media, which often carry the word “activist” in three languages. Everyone knew everyone, or thought they did. The mood was gentle, respectful, almost reverent. That is, until someone said “third world”.

One of the invited artists (non-white, immigrant), was explaining the layers of meaning in her work. She mentioned being inspired by travels across “the third world,” and gave an example: the many names for camels in Arabic, depending on their color, gait, pregnancy, or the way they drank water. It was a poetic moment, light and thoughtful. Then came the interruption.

“I’m sorry, but I have to stop you,” said one of the event organizers (white, Finnish). “This is a safe space. Some people might feel offended with the term ‘third world.’ Please use ‘Global South’ or ‘developing countries’ instead.”

That did it. The group responded like clockwork: muttering from one corner, visible agreement from another, and a couple of eyerolls that no one was supposed to notice. Another participant stepped in, accusing the interrupter of hypocrisy: “You used the E-word in an Instagram story once,” they said, meaning Eskimo. “I’ve been to Canada, I know the context. You need to reflect on that.”

Someone else began to cry. Another person said the situation had become too violent for them to stay. On their way out, a small group of four said the space was no longer safe for BIPOC attendees. The speaker never got to finish her point about camels.

It became clear that it was not what was said, but who was saying it, that mattered. By the end, the topic of resistance was nowhere in sight. Instead, the group had managed to stage a sort of zero-budget morality play in which the script kept changing. Everyone was both accused and accuser, and the resolution was collective exhaustion.

As I watched the whole thing unfold, two thoughts came to mind. The first was: these people could not even manage a peaceful conversation among friends, yet they had gathered to talk about how to organize resistance.

The second was a flicker of those who came before: Steve Biko beaten to death in custody, Ruth First opening a letter bomb in her university office, Bobby Sands in his cell, Ai Weiwei under surveillance, Mahmoud Mohammed Taha walking calmly to the gallows.

Not one of them stormed out of a room because someone misused a label or because two people got passionate arguing. Needless to say that I did not expect anyone in that room to face the kind of risks these activists had endured. But the gap between the stakes (ongoing famine, burning children, ethnic cleansing) and the emotional sensitivities felt dizzying.

Something has happened to identity politics. The phrase “identity politics” was coined by the Combahee River Collective, a group of radical Black feminists and socialist organizers active in the 1970s. What they meant by it was almost the opposite of what it has come to mean. For them, identity was not a personal brand, an exclusive boundary or zero-sum game, but was a political position formed by overlapping systems of oppression.

As Black women, they had learned that white feminists often ignored racism, while Black liberation spaces sidelined sexism and homophobia. They fought both at once, refusing to rank or isolate these struggles. “We do not separate race from class,” they wrote, “because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.”

Identity was the starting point, not the destination. They refused to reduce politics to separate camps. Their vision was unapologetically anti-capitalist and universalist in every sense.

Do you want to know what the founders of identity politics might think of what it has become? Barbara Smith, one of the Combahee River Collective’s original members, has already weighed in:

“People are introduced to the concept in academic settings, and the people who are introducing them to it don’t have any political practice. They don’t have familiarity with how people mobilize and come together in order to make actual material change, not ideas, but material change in the real world; change that affects real people. It’s like they embrace identity, but they leave the politics on the floor.”

What I saw in that art space was just a slice-of-life version of a bigger complaint heard even in the left’s own power circles, from people who have been around leftist politics long enough to remember when the fight was about changing how power and resources were organized, not just how they were described.

For example, In Germany, Sahra Wagenknecht broke from Die Linke (the Left Party) accusing her former comrades of turning into a “lifestyle left” and forgetting the bread-and-butter fights. Across the water, sharing the same frustration, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana (who was suspended from Labour for voting against the Labour government to end the two-child benefit cap in July 2024) launched a new party promising to put “mass redistribution of wealth and power” back at the center. In what follows, I look at how losing sight of material change has helped the right weaponize identity while leaving the left atomized.

Victimhood as Political Capital: Progressive in Form, Conservative in Logic

Identity politics runs on a set of scripts. These days, it is common to hear people begin their opinions with lines like “As a [member of X group]…” or “Coming from a background of…” These are not just introductions. They function as credentials, as shortcuts to authority. The speaker’s identity is supposed to shield their words from challenge. “Lived experience” has become untouchable, placed on a pedestal where disagreement is treated as offense.

But there is nothing “progressive” about the idea that “I’ve suffered, therefore I cannot be questioned.” It historically mirrors authoritarian populism, where claiming victimhood means you are always right. Not to mention it is deeply hypocritical.

It is hypocritical because not all lived experience is treated equally. Who gets heard, whose story is sanctified, and whose is ignored depends on whether the narrative fits our ideological filters. A blissfully apolitical Moomin character can be immediately erased from a Brooklyn library wall because one individual decides it carries racist undertones, and little Gaza children’s drawings can be stripped from a London hospital because some Jewish visitors say they feel “vulnerable, harassed and victimised” being around these childish crayon-bright scenes of home and sky.

In both cases, the feeling of offence (when backed by the right badge of identity) is taken as unchallengeable truth, the complainant’s emotions accepted as fact, yet this courtesy is never universal. If we really believe lived experience is untouchable, then why do we not accept the accounts of police officers who shoot unarmed civilians (most frequently Black men) and claim “I feared for my life”? These officers may not necessarily be lying, but where does our political reasoning and judgment start?

The politics of recognition also demands that lived experience align with Western moral expectations: trauma, powerlessness, and gratitude for rescue. When it does not, it is likely to be suppressed, as in the United Nation’s attempts to silence the Rohingya who disrupted the official script.

Lived experience can also be used for reactionary ends. During the Vietnam War, officials used the lived suffering of a certain group of veterans to justify their actions, while anti-war voices like Ron Kovic (himself a wounded veteran) were vilified. This is why politics must not end with pain. Placing lived experience above argument shuts down debate. It turns every disagreement into a threat and every challenge into a violation of a “safe space”. 

Who gets heard, whose story is sanctified, and whose is ignored depends on whether the narrative fits our ideological filters.

In early 2025, the American-Soviet historian Izabella Tabarovsky had her planned talks at Turku’s Åbo Akademi and the University of Helsinki cancelled. In response, she published a self-important and visibly aggrieved article in Tablet Magazine.

Much of it is spent straining, in a roundabout way, to frame the cancellations as a case of antisemitism, relying on a handful of obscure historical references and incidents that barely register in Finnish public memory. Then, sensing the argument’s thinness, she abruptly shifts her identity politics front near the end: this, she declares, was really about institutional patriarchy, that is, powerful male administrators silencing their female subordinates.

It is a clumsy switch, but also a revealing one. Tabarovsky knows perfectly well why and in what political context her talks were cancelled; her own deleted posts make that clear. But like many others across the political spectrum, she understands the rules of the current game. Victimhood has become a form of political capital. In today’s attention economy, it does not matter where you stand (left, right, elite, marginal) or what privileges you enjoy. What matters is whether you can position yourself as the one being wronged, if only for some airtime.

Another problem with identity politics that makes it inherently conservative is its accidental loyalty to essentialism. As American anarchist essayist and activist Lawrence Jarach discusses, racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression are maintained through essentialist ideologies, that is, by assigning fixed, unchanging characteristics to groups based on attributes like race or gender, which leads to hierarchy and discrimination.

In trying to reverse these hierarchies, identity politics often adopts the same logic. It inverts the categories but keeps them intact, reinforcing the very framework it claims to challenge.

Sociologists like Norbert Elias instead emphasize the fluid, relational, and historical nature of identity, and that the relationship between a group and its members could change. For example, sociologist Samaneh Naseri’s study of LGBT refugees in Germany shows how people rework their sexual and gender identities in relation to cultural expectations, asylum systems, and politics of visibility. Defining politics through essential traits reproduces the very hierarchies it claims to oppose. Every time politics has relied on essentialist identity, it has ended up reinforcing exclusion, not undoing it.

One Identity per Struggle, Please…

Identity politics in its current form (particularly in New Left spaces, meaning contemporary progressive activism) makes solidarity difficult. Rather than bringing people together to fight shared conditions of oppression or push for material change, it tends to atomize them. Groups are treated as separate and competing, rather than interlinked and co-struggling.

Recently, this became clear at my own workplace. A colleague sent out an internal message about organizing aid for Palestine. Shortly after, an Ukrainian colleague responded by questioning why no such emails had been sent about Ukraine, and asking whether people were ignoring the suffering there.

It sounded like a clarification, but it worked like a boundary being drawn. It exposed the zero-sum logic identity politics breeds: when attention is a scarce resource, even the oppressed feel they must compete for it. This logic frames groups as if their experiences are so irreducibly different that they cannot share the same space, let alone a common cause. Each group is nudged toward fighting its own isolated battle.

This fracturing has not only weakened the left but has also been absorbed by the right. Reactionary politics today operates on the same identity logic it claims to oppose. The white working class is now packaged as a victimized group pitted against everyone else, especially immigrants. But instead of addressing the material causes that shape working-class life (precarity, housing, wages) right-wing discourse frames it as an identity category in need of protection.

Worse still, this logic echoes in even more toxic forms like the manosphere and so-called anti-woke school boards. It is all the same script: take “what feels like” social pain, strip it of class content, repackage it as identity-based entitlement and call it politics. Let us see how right-wing politics now stands tall on the very rug it spent decades pulling out from under the white working class.

The hypocrisy behind this shift is blatant. To understand where the white working class became an identity category rather than a class position, we need to start where the script was written: Britain. One of the earliest right-wing attempts to politicize white working-class identity came in Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, where he claimed a white working man warned that “in 15 or 20 years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”. But despite this start, the working class was long handed over to the left like an unwanted inheritance.

Rather than bringing people together to fight shared conditions of oppression or push for material change, it tends to atomize them. Groups are treated as separate and competing, rather than interlinked and co-struggling.

At least since the late 1990s, the white working class in Britain was routinely mocked and demonized under the term Chavs (a slur used to reduce them to vulgar, ignorant, and criminal). Comedy shows (like Little Britain), media pundits, and politicians leaned into it, selling the working poor as “scroungers” undeserving of support. This image was useful (and remains so in rightwing vocabularies world-wide with labels like suckers, dole bludgers, welfare queens and losers) for conservatives looking to justify cuts to public services and welfare.

The great rebranding happened. Chav disappeared from the respectable right’s vocabulary and was replaced with “white working class” as a fragile identity in need of rescue. The same group once ridiculed for being poor and uneducated was suddenly framed as under threat by multiculturalism, immigration, and liberal elites. In 2011, following the police shooting of Mark Duggan, a Black man, and the riots that broke out across England, the conservative British historian David Starkey made a racist statement on national television. He claimed that “a substantial section of the chavs… have become Black…the Whites have become Black” blaming what he described as a “violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture.”

By “turning Black,” Starkey was not referring to economic shifts or political alignment, but to an alleged cultural and identity transformation. For him, it was a double insult: first, for being white and working class (chavs) and second, for supposedly adopting what his racist worldview cast as an inferior Black culture. This is how people like him saw (still secretly do) the working class: as degenerate when poor, and contaminated when not properly white. Today, no right-wing politician uses the term chav. It has been replaced by a sanitized, weaponized identity politics engineered for nationalist ends.

Identity Politics™: Now with Corporate Sponsorship

Identity politics, as practiced in much of the contemporary left, has flung open the gates of something close to hell. Politics has been flattened into language policing and performance, where moral authority is earned through personal suffering and the public display of it. It has been hollowed out into a cult of “I” and a war of individual righteousness where nobody, absolutely nobody, gets to win.

Structural issues tend to become depoliticized, with energy redirected toward surface-level fixes like diversity optics rather than systemic change. Activists or influencers build followings by curating their trauma, identities, and politics into online personas. The left, atomized and weakened, seems better at issuing (ever-changing) moral verdicts and callouts than effective mobilization for material change. Meanwhile, the right has taken detailed notes. Reactionary politics has been rebranded by surfing the same identity currents the left amplified.

The absurd irony speaks for itself. A political camp that spent decades gutting public services and mocking the poor is now posing as the voice of the betrayed working class, thanks in part to the identity-driven scripts it borrowed from the left. Meanwhile, identity politics has become the fluent language of neoliberal policies. Identity has turned into currency, branding, and tokenism.

Structural issues tend to become depoliticized, with energy redirected toward surface-level fixes like diversity optics rather than systemic change.

Some of the most exploitative corporations on the planet like Coca-cola with long records of racial discrimination, pollution, and community harm have proudly become champions of identity politics. While draining and poisoning the water of poor communities in countries like India and Mexico, giant corporations fly in Robin DiAngelo to talk about whiteness. She accepts these gigs and charges up to $20,000 to hold “anti-racism” workshops. She apparently still has not noticed the irony, nor have the people who think White Fragility is a radical, emancipatory text.

Now, if you are reading this with your cynical monocle polished and your finger counting every time I have said the word “material,” you might be ready to accuse me of launching into some tired class-first tract. But NO! This is not a call to class reductionism. This is not an orthodox communist pamphlet, and this article is not here to erase race, gender, or sexuality. These forms of oppression do not neatly collapse into class. They cut across and reshape it. Class itself is not neutral. It is lived differently depending on your race, gender, and cultural identity.

In many contexts, the “working class” is still imagined as white and male, erasing the labor of women, migrants, and racialized workers. In others, entire groups are excluded from even entering formal labor markets. Even in so-called universal welfare states symbolic and institutional hierarchies remain intact. (See, for example, the overpolicing and systemic discrimination faced by Somali communities in Finland.)

The way forward, in this case, is looking back. It starts with re-reading the statement of those who coined the term identity politics and understanding their refusal of campist thinking, which still haunts the left. That means rejecting what historian Victoria Wolcott calls the “false choice” between class and race, or other forms of identity. We can learn a great deal from civil rights unionism in the 1930s, especially its Southern version, which brought together Black and white workers, feminists, socialists, and New Deal reformers in a shared fight.

There was a time when solidarity meant more than a theater for personal therapy and branding. Recovering that tradition is not nostalgia, it is survival for those whose lives are ground down by inequality and for any politics that aims to change the material conditions of life.

Erfan Fatehi is a doctoral researcher in sociology at the University of Helsinki.

Article image: Luke Heibert / Unsplash

Julkaisu Identity politics lost the plot and now comes in conservative packaging ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.

In early 2025, Indonesia became a member of BRICS, an intergovernmental organization of ten countries, namely Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Initiated by four founding countries – Brazil, Russia, India, and China – in 2009, and complemented by South Africa in 2010, BRICS (the name is derived from their initial letters) is a forum for the Global South.

With 10 member countries, including Indonesia, in 2025, BRICS consists of half the world’s population and 41% of the global economy. BRICS covers 33,76 % of the world’s income and produces key commodities for the world from food, energy, and minerals, such as grains, meat, palm oil, gas, oil, and nickel. Each BRICS members have their own interests in BRICS, which will be explained below. The question is whether these self-interests of BRICS members are suitable for Indonesia? Can BRICS support Indonesian interests, e.g in developing its mineral industry?

BRICS for multilateralism and Indonesia

BRICS is an alternative forum for non-Western countries, known as states in the Global South, to address the United Nations (UN)’s outdated structure to tackle multilateralism challenges.

First, the UN has always been dominated by five permanent members at the Security Council, or P5, whose members are China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. One of the P5 members may veto an agreed resolution from the UN’s General Assembly, hampering decision-making and efficient functionality of the Council. Second, the composition of the P5 represents the configuration of 1945 and not the world dynamic today, as there is no representation from Africa and South America in the Security Council.

To provide an alternative considering the challenges associated with the UN, BRICS plans to establish and strengthen multilateralism by supporting the representation from the middle-income countries and political reform in the UN, along with an established financial system. BRICS seeks to use a different financial system to provide another international alternative, aside from the Western blocs.

BRICS plans to establish and strengthen multilateralism by supporting the representation from the middle-income countries and political reform in the UN, along with an established financial system.

Aiming not to follow the system of the US-sponsored World Bank or the European-sponsored International Monetary Fund (IMF), BRICS plans to establish the New Development Bank (NDB), which uses the currency agreed by users and is more accesible for middle-income countries when it comes to loans and investments. Also, it aims to not use the US dollar anymore, known as de-dollarization. Avoidance of the use of Western currencies, especially US Dollar is likely due to the policy of Russia and China.

However, each of the founding countries of BRICS has their own agenda. Brazil, India and South Africa are all interested in becoming the permanent members of the UN’s Security Council. As seen in the BRICS membership expansion 2023, the guiding principle of BRICS is to “strengthen multilateralism” and thus “reform the multilateral system”.

Here, BRICS still accepts the UN and its Charter as “an indispensable cornerstone of multilateralism and international law”. However, the emerging membership at the UN from developing countries has not been acknowledged and thus, BRICS wants to reform the UN by adding new members to the UN Security Council. Consequently, according to this membership expansion procedure, the new member is required to support Brazil, India and South Africa to bid to the UN’s Security Council. Indonesia, thus, as a new member is expected to support this development.

BRICS still accepts the UN and its Charter as “an indispensable cornerstone of multilateralism and international law”. However, the emerging membership at the UN from developing countries has not been acknowledged and thus, BRICS wants to reform the UN by adding new members to the UN Security Council.

It is apparent for BRICS that UN is an important organization, but it needs to be reformed. Indeed, reforming the UN has been discussed even in the 1960s by the first Indonesian president, Sukarno, which led to Indonesia withdrew from the UN membership in 1965 (Indonesia re-joined the UN when the regime changed).

Recently, in the 79th Session of the UN General Assembly in New York on 25 September 2024, the President of Finland, Alexander Stubb initiated a concrete step to reform the UN, by adding the permanent members for the UN’s Security Council: two members from Asia, two from Africa and one from Latin America so the total number will be 10 permanent memberships, around 5% of the UN members. Is it acceptable for Indonesia if China and India would represent Asia?

Meanwhile, China uses soft power and diplomacy, such as through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), to lead the world’s energy transformation. It controls the development process, especially in Africa, even initiated the Global Development Initiatives at the UN (see e.g UN document A/76/345) and is likely to lead the agenda of the UN development pillar.

In turn, Russia would like to show the Western world that isolation and sanctions from the West due to its attack to Ukraine are ineffective. Russia wants to prove that it has “allies” in BRICS. Arguably, Russia is still one the world’s largest oil exporters, after Saudi Arabia, and Europe still depends on Russia’s natural gas. Russia also controlled the agenda in BRICS, such as inviting many delegations and heads of states (including the leader of Palestine) and discussing de-dollarization, as seen from the latest BRICS Summit in Kazan in 2024, showing activities without the involvement of Western countries.

Indonesia’s minerals and downstream strategy

Indonesia is known for its abundant reserves of natural resources, especially minerals deemed “critical” by many Western countries. These minerals, such as cobalt, nickel, platinum, tungsten, magnesium, and chromium, are a central element of the future of technology development, Indonesia’s critical mineral resources include nickel (1.5 billion tons), copper (640 million tons), bauxite (927 million tons), and tin (1.2 billion tons).

By building on these natural resources, Indonesia wishes to establish a thriving battery and electric vehicle (EV) industry. Realizing nickel’s potential, the Indonesian government banned the export of raw nickel ore in 2020, with its downstreaming policy (hilirisasi). As regulated by national Law no. 4/2009 on Mining Minerals and Coals, Indonesia downstream policy prohibits the export of raw materials (such as oil, gas, agro, coal, mining and mineral-based industry) to promote the development of the country’s processing and refining industry. This move promotes the added value in mining products before exportation, and this policy boosted Indonesia’s nickel export earnings, from $2 billion in 2019 to a huge rise $30 billion in 2022.

By joining BRICS, Indonesia may have support from middle-income countries, also to boost its economy without Western controls.

However, China currently dominates all stages of the global EV battery supply chain. To mitigate the risks associated with one dominant market actor, the US and the European Union (EU) are actively seeking to adopt new partners and partnerships to reduce dependencies on China. One of such forum is the US-led Minerals Security Partnership (MSP). Indonesia serves a good potential partner due to its natural resources that MSP seeks.

However, Indonesia’s nickel export ban has triggered disputes with trading partners. The EU filed a complaint to the World Trade Organization (WTO) arguing for the violation of free trade principles. The trade tension also came from the US to limit Indonesia’s market reach, with the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) excluding Indonesian nickel from EV tax incentives.

Indeed, the EU-filed suits against the Indonesian export ban policy were seen by Indonesians as a form of domination of Western powers in the global economic system, and by joining BRICS, Indonesia may have support from middle-income countries, also to boost its economy without Western controls.

Indonesia and “free-active” diplomacy?

In the first place, Indonesia wants to be partners to all countries and states. As the founding father, Mohammad Hatta, stated Indonesian foreign policy adheres to “free and active” (bebas dan aktif) diplomacy, meaning cooperation with all countries, without taking extreme steps or following one bloc of power, such as the US-led Western and USSR-led communist blocs during the Cold War. It is also known as non-alignment policy. Such policy marked Indonesia as one of Non-Aligned Movement founders since 1955.

Now by joining BRICS, does Indonesia still apply its non-aligned policy and free-active diplomacy? Citizens with the help of today’s fast information and social media may “push” the government to act and sometimes it is allegedly hard for Indonesia to act neutral. Moreover, with the challenges of the climate crisis, technology, sustainability issues, and conflict mitigation, the world needs a multilateral process that leans towards one big bloc, namely majority votes. With BRICS membership, Indonesia had shown its preference.

In the Ukrainian war 2022, Indonesia seemed to act neutral and the president at that time, Joko Widodo even had a chance to visit both Ukraine and Russian leaders. Indonesian citizens, though, were mostly pro-Russian, believing that Russia was fighting the US and its puppet government in Ukraine. In these circumstances, it is hard to act neutral.

Also, with Indonesia among the first countries to recognize Palestine in 1988, this means that Indonesia does not support Israel, the US’s ally. Meanwhile, disregarding Taiwan to support China’s one-state policy also shows that Indonesia is leaning toward a big country power.

Indonesian membership in BRICS inclines towards the formation of one bloc of the Global South.

However, cooperation with the US-led MSP could facilitate “upgrading” the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) requirements in Indonesia and provide access to sustainable financing. Some ”Western” investments have been cancelled due to Indonesia’s poor ESG record, leading to, for example, ecological impacts on the citizens surrounding the mining area. This could also lead to reduced dominance of Chinese companies in the Indonesian market, noting that a single supplier or dominant actor increases the supply chain risks. Cooperation with MSP would thus help Indonesia upgrade its nickel production for the battery/EV ecosystem development according to the ESG-related regulatory requirements.

On one hand, BRICS does not provide information on how Indonesia could be supported in its economic potential. On the other hand, Indonesia’s membership in BRICS shows closer cooperation with China and Russia that is perceived as ”a risk” by the Western bloc. Leaning towards one bloc is likely to undermine the potential to cooperate under the MSP which may help Indonesia to step up its game concerning environmental and social sustainability.

Indonesian membership in BRICS inclines towards the formation of one bloc of the Global South, as there is no Western representative there. However, at the same time, Indonesia is also a member of G20, with 18 other countries, along with the EU and African Union (since 2023), which represents 85% of the world economy and two-thirds of the global population. All founders of BRICS are also members of G20.

Indonesia should think strategically about its BRICS membership for Indonesian interests, too. It is not only a chance for Indonesia to contribute more to the world, but also a place to boost the Indonesian economy through its natural resources. Instead of supporting ambitions of a few countries in BRICS (in acquiring UN position) and violating its own ‘free and active’ diplomacy or non-alignment policy, it is time that Indonesia shows what it’s worth and stops being solely a follower.

BRICS shows that non-Western countries have potential in redefining global governance, especially as they are producers of key minerals for green technologies, accelerated by “global transition to a low-carbon economy, driven by technological advancement and the push for sustainable energy resources”. It is best to implement sustainable work in a multilateral way, as initiated by the UN, BRICS, even MSP, instead of, e.g. bilateral cooperation with China.

Ratih D. Adiputri is a postdoc researcher at the University of Lapland and the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, focusing on research in green energy transition from the Global South perspectives and environmental multilateralism.

Article image: CHUTTERSNAP / Unsplash

Julkaisu BRICS and Indonesia: Between non-alignment policy and mineral strategy ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.

For centuries, Africa’s vast wealth fuelled the ambitions of foreign empires. Colonial powers plundered gold, diamonds, cocoa, and minerals, enslaving millions and impoverishing entire populations. In the post-independence era, exploitative contracts and lopsided trade deals perpetuated this plunder, enriching foreign corporations while leaving hundreds of millions in poverty. Today, a monumental shift is sweeping the continent. African leaders are rewriting the rules of global trade, scaling back ties with foreign powers and embracing resource sovereignty.

Ghana, for instance, has rejected Western aid tied to political conditions that historically forced development paths serving foreign interests over national priorities, instead asserting its right to chart an independent development path. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have expelled French troops, ending decades of military presence that served Paris’s geopolitical goals while undermining the stability and welfare of local communities. Zambia is cracking down on foreign mining companies, enforcing stricter regulations to curb worker exploitation and environmental degradation, Senegal is pushing back against trade agreements with Europe, that favour foreign producers and suppress the growth of local businesses and farmers, advocating for policies that enable homegrown economic resilience.

Adding to these efforts, Algeria is focusing on African-led security and economic initiatives, such as mediating Sahel conflicts and boosting intra-African energy trade, while limiting engagement with NATO to the Mediterranean Dialogue to safeguard its non-aligned stance and promote Global South solidarity. Zimbabwe is moving to ban the export of lithium concentrates from 2027, Kenya is reviewing infrastructure and energy contracts with Chinese and Western companies suspected of imposing unsustainable debt burdens and compromising national control. Similarly, Nigeria is tightening oversight of foreign oil and gas companies revising production-sharing contracts to increase local revenue and ensure greater equity in partnerships with multinationals like Shell and ExxonMobil.

Their project is as urgent as it is ambitious, grounded in self-determination, regional integration, and the development of homegrown institutions capable of managing and defending Africa’s wealth on its own terms: Africa’s wealth must serve Africa first.

At its centre lie Africa’s premier strategic frameworks: the African Union (AU), which champions solidarity-driven economic cooperation; the African Mining Vision (AMV), which promotes value addition, regional beneficiation, and sovereign control over mineral wealth; and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), envisioned as the world’s largest single market. The AfCFTA is particularly important as it aims to radically transform intra-African trade by dismantling tariff barriers and harmonising regulatory frameworks, thereby reducing the continent’s dependence on foreign powers. In the process, it lays the foundation for a continental economic front defined by unity and strategic coherence, strengthening collective bargaining power and allowing African nations to engage the global economy not as disjointed, dependent clients, but as coordinated actors – a single bloc – capable of asserting their interests as equals on the world stage.

The DRC Makes a Different Deal

Meanwhile the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is going in a strikingly different direction. Its government is currently negotiating a high-stakes bilateral agreement to hand over operational control of an estimated $24 trillion worth of critical minerals to the USA in exchange for military equipment, tactical training, and on-the-ground security assistance against the March 23 (M23) insurgency that has destabilised its eastern provinces for over a decade.

The DRC holds over 70% of the world’s known cobalt reserves, in addition to vast deposits of copper, lithium, and rare earth elements, essential to the functioning of electric vehicles, high-capacity batteries, solar and wind infrastructure, semiconductors, drones, precision-guided weapons, and emerging artificial intelligence hardware systems. Whoever commands access to these materials will have control over the direction of global civilisation, wielding decisive economic and strategic power especially in the global clean energy future. Global powers are acutely aware of this, and, as expected, have been aggressively courting the DRC for years.

The DRC holds over 70% of the world’s known cobalt reserves, in addition to vast deposits of copper, lithium, and rare earth elements.

China has already entrenched itself in the DRC’s mineral economy through a dense network of state-owned enterprises and infrastructure-for-minerals swap deals, controlling nearly 40% of Congo’s cobalt output by 2024. The European Union (EU) is playing catch-up through its Global Gateway initiative, offering infrastructure funding and “strategic partnerships” to avoid total dependence on Chinese and Russian inputs.

Now, it appears, the USA is set to overtake both, not through a competitive bidding process or multilateral consensus, but because the DRC itself is voluntarily advancing a deal granting Big Tech giants Apple, Tesla, and Google, alongside major defence contractors, direct and guaranteed access to its critical minerals. The proposed terms include below-market extraction rates, long-term supply guarantees, and state-backed logistics coordination. If finalised, the deal will hardwire American dominance into both the global clean energy economy and the next-generation military-industrial complex.

In return, the government of the DRC anticipates an American arsenal. This includes advanced military equipment, elite tactical training, and real-time counterinsurgency support to significantly degrade or dismantle the M23 insurgency.

M23’s Devastating Hold on the DRC

M23, emerging from the collapse of the 2009 Goma Peace Agreement, ranks among Central Africa’s most lethal and resilient non-state armed groups: transnationally networked, financially fortified through illicit mineral revenues, and sophisticated. The group currently controls vast swathes of the eastern provinces of North and South Kivu, which hold some of the world’s most lucrative coltan and gold mines, effectively hijacking the region’s critical resource flows. This has led to instability in the region, fuelling a cascading humanitarian disaster.

M23’s offensives displaced nearly 2.8 million in 2024 alone, accounting for 73% of all internal displacements in the DRC that year. In North Kivu,  Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) treated nearly 40,000 survivors of sexual violence attributed to M23 operations, marking the highest figure recorded in a single year. In rebel-held territories, food insecurity has surged, leaving millions at risk of starvation.

The environmental toll has also been catastrophic, with nearly half of the animal life in these same territories reportedly wiped out. Since January 2025, the group has killed an estimated 7,000 civilians. And its forced recruitment of child soldiers has become a chilling fixture of its operational strategy, entrenching trauma across generations. There is no mistaking the scale of the crisis.

DRC’s pursuit of a minerals-for-security deal with the USA reads, at least on the surface, as a desperate but straightforwardly pragmatic, technocratic, commercial exchange.

The government is not equipped to respond. The national army is structurally incapable of mounting an effective counter to M23 as a result of decades of structural adjustment and austerity programmes imposed by the IMF and World Bank in the DRC. These programmes prioritised debt repayment, fiscal restraint, and market liberalisation over the essential tasks of state-building and national security. Military infrastructure has crumbled, procurement systems are plagued by corruption and mismanagement, and troop morale remains dangerously low due to inconsistent salaries, inadequate training, and insufficient equipment.

Efforts to fill this security vacuum through regional cooperation have largely failed. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the East African Community (EAC) have offered inconsistent and undercoordinated interventions. Meanwhile, the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping mission has lost credibility, widely viewed by the Congolese as either ineffectual, unable to protect civilians or repel rebel advances, or complicit in maintaining the violent status quo in which instability and resource extraction coexist as tolerated norms. The cost of continued inaction grows heavier by the day, threatening to tip the crisis into irreversible collapse.

Against this backdrop, the DRC’s pursuit of a minerals-for-security deal with the USA reads, at least on the surface, as a desperate but straightforwardly pragmatic, technocratic, commercial exchange – a necessary, if radical, attempt to reclaim sovereign control over its eastern provinces, safeguard its critical mineral wealth, and restore a semblance of order in a region held hostage by M23. In this light, it is difficult to dispute the legitimacy of its demand for support from a superpower with overwhelming military capacity.

A Betrayal of Africa’s Future

At its core, however, this deal is a geopolitical earthquake in the emerging architecture of African political economy – a betrayal not of intent or incompetence, but of principle. For, as it prioritises immediate transactional benefit, it also severs the moral and strategic thread that binds Africa’s wealth to Africa’s people, cutting to the very heart of the collective aspiration that Africa’s wealth must serve Africa first. This is not just a Congolese issue – at stake is nothing less than the entire trajectory of African resource politics and, by extension, the continent’s future.

While the deal is presented as a solution to the M23 insurgency, it does not address its root causes, making it no more than a superficial fix on a wounded nation – a sedative rather than a cure, like a temporary quelling of symptoms while the disease festers beneath. Equally troubling is that the deal offers militarisation without any meaningful diplomatic framework or peacebuilding vision. There are no provisions for local reconciliation, no community-led demobilisation, no engagement with civil society and regional actors who might sustain peace – just more weapons in an already volatile landscape.

At stake is nothing less than the entire trajectory of African resource politics and, by extension, the continent’s future.

Worse still, the deal sidesteps state-building entirely. It does not repair institutions, strengthen governance, or develop long-term administrative capacity, leaving the DRC politically fragile and dependent on foreign intervention – a broken leg hobbling Africa’s collective ascent.

More grievously, the deal openly bypasses African-led security frameworks and sidelines regional bodies like the SADC and the AU, outsourcing the DRC’s crisis response to a global superpower. Arguably, this choice is a quiet admission that the DRC lacks confidence in Africa’s ability to manage its own challenges; that African nations cannot depend on African help. They must look outward.

This reconditions the political imagination of current and future African leaders, normalising dangerous ideas: the future belongs to those who sell it; survival, not sovereignty, is the highest aspiration; dependency is inevitable and perhaps even desirable; Africa’s salvation lies not in its own collective strength but in the whims and favours of foreign patrons. This mentality sets a precedent of external arbitration in intra-African affairs, rendering regional diplomacy obsolete and weakening the continent’s security architecture from within.

To transfer critical minerals without public consent or transparent debate is to rob the Congolese of their most powerful leverage. It is to deny them the power to influence how their wealth is used – and who benefits from it.

Perhaps most tragically, the Congolese people, the very communities battered by M23’s violence, are spoken for, negotiated over, and excluded from the decisions being made about their land and future. Their exclusion is deepened by the injustice of the deal. The minerals at stake are not mere economic assets but generational capital in a world increasingly driven by green technologies and the geopolitics of critical minerals. To transfer them without public consent or transparent debate is to rob the Congolese of their most powerful leverage. It is to deny them the power to influence how their wealth is used – and who benefits from it.

This denial extends beyond the borders of the DRC. By proceeding without meaningful consultation or coordination with neighbouring African countries, the deal risks fracturing continental unity and undermining Africa’s collective claim to its wealth and future. It opens the door for external powers to exploit Africa’s resources unilaterally, threatening to revitalise a dangerous dynamic akin to the Scramble for Africa. This is where strategic mineral wealth becomes a contested prize in superpower rivalries, and ordinary Africans bear the human and political costs.

The deal sends a clear and unsettling message, devastatingly out of step with the continent’s ambitions: Africa’s resources remain up for grabs.

The question looms large from here: will the DRC’s choice end Africa’s long march toward resource sovereignty, or will it serve as a cautionary tale that stimulates the continent to forge stronger, more united paths forward free from the shackles of foreign domination?

Moshumee Dewoo is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Political History at the University of Helsinki

Article image: A mining quarry in Mambanga in the Djugu territory, DRC. Alfani Franck / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Julkaisu The Democratic Republic of Congo’s $24 Trillion Betrayal of Africa ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.

On March 19, 2025, something shifted in Türkiye. Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul and a leading opposition figure, had his diploma canceled — and the next day, he was sent to prison. What followed was unexpected: after years of political silence, people began returning to the streets. This moment of rupture raised a crucial question — what emotional and political dynamics make such reactivation possible?

The recent wave of protests in Türkiye signals a major emotional and political rupture: after more than a decade of fear, repression, and political apathy. To understand this renewed momentum, we must return to the emotional and narrative landscape of the 2013 Gezi Park protests. This means not only exploring how people remember the protests but also revisiting how they first began and why they resonated so widely.

To understand the emotional legacy of the Gezi protests, it is important to recall how they began. In May of 2013, Türkiye witnessed an unexpected wave of resistance. What started as a small sit-in by a group of environmentalists trying to protect a park in central Istanbul — Gezi Park — quickly transformed into a massive nationwide uprising. People rose up against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — then Prime Minister and leader of the ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party) — and his increasingly conservative and repressive regime.

As part of my doctoral research, I conducted 52 one-time retrospective interviews in late 2019 and early 2020 with individuals who participated in Gezi. These interviews explored how participants recalled and narrated the pre-Gezi grievances, the emotional transformation during the protests, and the aftermath shaped by increasing authoritarianism.

Drawing on the work of sociologists Francesca Polletta (narrative), James M. Jasper (protest and emotions) and Randall Collins (emotional energy) , the study examines how emotions and storytelling practices shaped participants’ political memory and post-Gezi disengagement. Participants reflected on these periods through a rich emotional vocabulary — mistrust, worry, fear, anger, hope, joy, disillusionment — showing how emotions structured both their memories and responses.

These emotional patterns are not just analytically useful but politically vital. Recent research highlights that hope is central to sustaining democratic life. As political scientists Mikko Leino and Katariina Kulha argue, democratic deliberation can spark hopeful and compassionate emotions, supporting long-term, future-oriented engagement. Similarly, another political scientist Antonin Lacelle-Webster suggests that hope is not a result but a condition of democratic action — an emotional foundation for imagining and striving toward alternatives.

The findings reveal that while the state’s harsh repression led to widespread withdrawal and self-censorship, the emotional memory of Gezi persisted as a latent force. Today, as fear begins to subside, this suppressed emotional memory is being reactivated — reigniting not only resistance, but also a renewed belief in the possibility of democracy.

Tensions That Paved the Way to Gezi

The protests were not organized by a single group or ideology. Instead, they drew in people from across the political and cultural spectrum: secular and religious, leftists and nationalists, feminists, LGBTQ+ individuals, students, workers, and even anti-capitalist Muslims.

Despite their differences, they were united in their opposition to the Erdoğan regime’s authoritarianism and its steady erosion of democratic institutions. It was an eruption of accumulated frustration — over moral policing, police brutality, the shrinking of civic freedoms, and the narrowing of public life. Many had already been feeling pushed out of public life.

What made Gezi remarkable was not a single unified demand, but a shared emotional threshold — the collective sense that democracy was slipping away, and that people could no longer accept the way things were.

There was growing anxiety over political Islamism, the narrowing of personal freedoms, and an increasing sense of being watched, judged, and silenced. What made Gezi remarkable was not a single unified demand, but a shared emotional threshold — the collective sense that democracy was slipping away, and that people could no longer accept the way things were.

Long before tents were pitched in the park, the pressure was mounting. A young woman from Ankara described how she adjusted her personal life: “I stopped wearing short skirts and didn’t invite my boyfriend over anymore. People in the building stared. I felt like I had to hide.” Another participant pointed to broader mechanisms of control: “The alcohol bans, the mosque sermons about how women should behave — all of it felt like an attempt to reshape how we live.” These were not merely private discomforts. They reflected a deeper collective fear — that the secular and democratic foundations of the Republic were being steadily replaced by a more intrusive, moralistic, and authoritarian regime.

During the Protest: Togetherness

When the protests began, something shifted. It was not just about saving a park anymore. People who had never joined a demonstration before found themselves standing next to seasoned activists. “We weren’t all the same,” one man said. “But we all said: this is too much.”

Despite their differences, people were drawn together by a shared anger toward Erdoğan’s regime. This collective anger served as a bridge — allowing people from different ideological and social backgrounds to unite and express a common refusal. At the same time, many still held on to the hope that Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian rule could be stopped and that the erosion of democratic institutions might be reversed. When this hope became collective during the protests — shared by thousands in the streets — it grew stronger, transforming into a powerful emotional force that fueled mass mobilization.

Rather than forming a collective identity in the traditional sense, protesters built a sense of commonality grounded in shared emotions — especially anger, urgency, hope and mutual recognition. These emotional bonds created a strong sense of solidarity and togetherness, even among those who had previously kept their distance or distrusted each other. Drawing on sociologist Laurent Thévenot’s idea of commonality in the plural, the protests became a space where people did not need to share the same political views — they just needed to feel the same intensity of rejection.

The protests became a space where people did not need to share the same political views — they just needed to feel the same intensity of rejection.

In the square, people shared food, medicine, songs — and moments of joy, even under police violence. For many, this was the first time public space felt like it belonged to everyone. One participant said: “Just being there, refusing to leave, was our way of saying — we exist.”

A woman from the Anti-Capitalist Muslims recalled how people who previously used to keep their distance — especially Kemalists — approached their stand in the park and said things like, “You’re actually really kind people.” She added, “Every day, 300 to 400 people visit us. They asked questions, they stayed, and they listened. People who used to see us as backward in the past were suddenly getting to know us.” Protest made unlikely connections possible — not by forcing sameness, but through simple presence and shared care.

Gezi did not end in victory. The park was eventually emptied by force, many were detained, and Erdoğan’s regime came out stronger than before. “Gezi taught me that we are not alone,” one participant told me. “It gave us a memory — and that memory still gives us strength.”

Repression and Retreat: The Post-Gezi Landscape

After the Gezi protests, the state launched a systematic campaign of repression. Protesters were detained, beaten, surveilled, and marked as “terrorists” or “traitors.” Many were fired from public sector jobs or blacklisted, especially those working in education, media, or civil society. Universities were purged of critical voices, and cultural or political gatherings were closely monitored or banned altogether. Fear, anxiety, and mistrust replaced the hope and solidarity once felt in the square.

Many participants withdrew from visible political life, feeling that any form of resistance could lead to punishment. As a result, some turned inward — either disengaging entirely or finding quieter, more localized ways to resist. The emotional toll was heavy: a mix of grief, disappointment, hopefulness and unresolved longing for the sense of unity they once shared.

The fear of state retaliation has fundamentally reshaped the dynamics of collective action. The burden of responsibility no longer lies solely in moral or political conviction — it now carries legal and personal risks.

One participant explained: “Now, I think three times before posting anything on social media. I’ve stopped sharing anything political. Even when I retweet something on Twitter, I pause and wonder — could this get me into trouble later?”

Another participant, who was a member of a political party, explained: “We can’t invite people to protests anymore. If something happens to them, we’re the ones held responsible. Because of that, our calls for action have almost completely stopped.”

These two accounts reflect how the fear of state retaliation has fundamentally reshaped the dynamics of collective action. The burden of responsibility no longer lies solely in moral or political conviction — it now carries legal and personal risks. As a result, political engagement has become not only emotionally taxing but also strategically constrained. Even those in organized political structures feel paralyzed, leading to a visible decline in public mobilization efforts. The space for collective dissent shrinks not just through direct bans or police force, but also through internalized fear and anticipatory self-censorship.

Moreover, one participant even said, “If something as massive as Gezi didn’t change anything, then nothing will.” These findings suggest that emotions like hope are not merely reflective of political conditions — they are constitutive of whether democratic participation can flourish or fade.

The Return of Democratic Hope

The wave of protests that began on March 19, 2025, still continues today and carries an uncertain future — it is too early to say whether they will lead to democratic restoration or end in disappointment, as Gezi once did. But one thing appears to have shifted: the deep sense of defeat and fear that had settled after Gezi seems to be breaking. People are returning to the streets again, despite years of repression, which may indicate that the emotional withdrawal and political apathy of the post-Gezi period is slowly giving way to renewed engagement.

While the Gezi protests emerged from a hopeful belief that democratic backsliding could still be stopped, today’s protests reflect a more urgent demand — not just to defend democracy, but to reclaim what has already been lost. The hope that once united people in resistance has reawakened, shaped by a clearer understanding of what is at stake and what it means to act together under authoritarian rule.

The emotional memory of Gezi — especially the experience of solidarity, shared anger, and political awakening — continues to resonate, even though my data predates the most recent protests. This legacy may help explain why, in this new moment, people are once again finding ways to raise their voices — perhaps this time with more clarity, purpose, and a renewed hope for democratic change.

Tülay Yılmaz is Doctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, and Member of the Centre for the Sociology of Democracy (CSD) research group.

Article image: Mstyslav Chernov / Wikimedia Commons_CC BY-SA 3.0

Julkaisu Breaking the Wall of Fear and Hopelessness: Protest, Memory, and Resistance in Contemporary Türkiye ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.