What we’re reading: EU quietly funds Egypt’s abuses, drought hits Sudan, French ‘narcos’ in North Africa & more
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This issue of What We’re Reading covers the arbitrage economies; the French drug traffickers and multinational corporations exploiting the same porous borders and offshore banking systems, ambient YouTube videos born as refuge from the attention economy now getting swallowed back into it, and the quiet mechanics through which “stability” gets manufactured, whether it’s Morocco trading sovereignty for royal continuity, Jordan absorbing missiles meant for its patron, or Turkey outsourcing war to subcontractors and displaced Syrian labor.
At home, we’re exploring how the European Union (EU) is willing to keep the loans flowing regardless of what its own internal documents say about torture and disappearances, a sociologist’s diagnosis that the material conditions that made 2011 possible are still here (in fact, they’re worse), a Nubian activist’s story of generational displacement and dream of return, and a long, sharp read on how downtown Cairo’s art scene has become one of the primary mechanisms through which real estate gets structurally revalued.
World
North Africa, an increasingly uneasy hideout for French ‘narcos’ — Arthur Carpentier & Thomas Saintourens, Le Monde
In its six-part series titled “Africa under the influence,” Le Monde offers a surprisingly useful map of how international borders function less as barriers to crime than as arbitrage opportunities for capital. The third article in the installment traces the flight of French organized crime figures, such as the Marseille-based kingpin Félix “The Cat” Bingui, to North African countries like Morocco and Algeria, where dual citizenship and corruption have historically provided a shield against extradition and European police.
But perhaps what is most useful here is the explicit connection between geopolitics, state sovereignty, and the logistics of the drug trade. The authors demonstrate that a fugitive’s safety is entirely downstream of diplomatic relations. When the French state—unlawfully, I must say—formally recognized “Moroccan sovereignty” over the Western Sahara in 2024, the diplomatic thaw immediately translated into joint police operations and arrests of Franco-Moroccan dual nationals, showing that a “safe haven” was never a function of brilliant criminal evasion, rather, it was a state-level lease, revoked the moment the two ruling classes aligned their broader strategic interests.
This dynamic is equally clear in Algeria, where the arrest of Castellane network leader Mohamed Djeha only occurred after a high-level visit from the French director general of the national police.
In both cases, the fugitives were operating what is essentially a multinational logistics firm—managing private jets, cryptocurrency, speedboats, and offshore cash deposits—relying on the friction between national jurisdictions to protect their supply chains.
The piece is thinnest, however, when it uncritically echoes the perspective of the French Ministry of Justice and anti-narcotics agency (OFAST), treating the recent crackdown as a straightforward victory for “cooperation” and the rule of law, which misses the deeper structural irony that the very legal mechanisms that protect these traffickers—opaque banking systems, the ability to buy local influence, and borders that restrict labor but remain porous to capital—are the same mechanisms utilized by “legitimate” European corporations extracting wealth from the Global South, and the traffickers are simply operating the violent, unlicensed wing of the same offshore economy.
The article’s closing observation, that fugitives are now relocating their operations from Dubai and North Africa to Turkey, Thailand, or Indonesia, perfectly captures this underlying logic. Like any other economic actor conducting comparative analysis, they are simply seeking the next favorable regulatory environment, which only goes to show that under globalized capitalism, the line between an international outlaw and a savvy foreign investor is often just a matter of diplomatic paperwork.
How escaping overstimulation became big business — Megan Tomos, Wired
Megan Tomos outlines an almost perfect, closed loop of contemporary capitalism: the same digital economy that exhausts its subjects with quick editing, loud thumbnails, and relentless pacing has successfully monetized their need to recover from it. The piece explores how “ambient YouTube”—the sprawling genre of lo-fi hip hop, endless rainstorms, and virtual cozy cabins—first emerged as a digital refuge from an overstimulated internet, only to be seamlessly integrated into the very machinery it was ostensibly made to escape.
Tomos notes how this “refuge” is currently being industrialized and how AI video tools have begun flooding the zone, churning out synthetic ambient scenes at a fraction of the time and cost. What began as a decentralized, largely human-curated aesthetic of rest is now being automated by the platforms that produced the need for it in the first place.
Underneath the discussion of video trends sits a very familiar material relation. Capital extracts cognitive labor and attention until people are burned out, and when those exhausted users retreat to ambient videos to reproduce their capacity to work, socialize, or even scroll another day, capital follows them there. By deploying AI to generate these “calming environments,” tech platforms eliminate the human creators who previously built these spaces, capturing the ad revenue entirely for themselves. It is the literal automation of a human’s recovery time.
However, as is often the case with tech reporting, it treats this shift primarily as a story about the capabilities of generative AI rather than a story about the enclosure of a digital commons. The piece diagnoses the symptom—the internet’s favorite form of escape becoming “big business”—but does not name the disease. The core issue is not simply that AI can now make fake rain videos; it’s that under a profit-driven internet, even the act of staring blankly at a screen to soothe a fried nervous system must be converted into a frictionless, zero-labor commodity.
Still, the piece is a sharp observation of an increasingly grim reality. The tools built to capture our attention are now being trained to manage our exhaustion.
Region
Receding Nile Waters in Sudan: Renaissance Dam at the Heart of the Conflict – Shamael Al-Noor, Assafir Arabi
Rarely does anyone mention Sudan outside of the ongoing war. In this piece, Al-Noor reminds us that there is another direct threat to Sudan compounding the war: the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD).
She reports that a water crisis has hit Khartoum following a sharp drop in the Blue Nile’s level. First, the numbers: the daily inflow to the Roseires Dam reservoir fell from 207 to 129 million cubic meters between July 7–9, 2026, a shortfall of 76 million m³ per day, with knock-on effects at the Sennar Dam and stations north of Khartoum.
Second, Al-Noor draws a direct line between the drop and the broader political context between Sudan and Ethiopia: mutual accusations of backing opposing sides in Sudan’s civil war, with an Ethiopia-UAE axis aligned with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) against Egyptian backing for the Sudanese army.
Third, that Ethiopia has withheld dam data since February, meaning the drought hit without warning, since Sudan lacked the information to forecast it. This isn’t the first time Addis Ababa has done this, the same data blackout preceded unexpected flooding last year.
“The interplay between the Egypt-Sudan alliance and the ties between Ethiopia and the RSF during the current conflict appears to have driven Khartoum closer to Egypt on the water issue; notably, Sudan boycotted the official inauguration ceremony, seemingly as a gesture of goodwill toward Egypt,” Al-Noor writes. “This complex situation, exacerbated by the war, risks leaving Sudan vulnerable to exploitation by both Ethiopia and Egypt in equal measure.”
The Moroccan Mirage: Power, Dependency, and the Manufacture of Stability — Mohamed El Mokhtar, Palestine Chronicle
Mohamed El Mokhtar dissects the Moroccan state’s survival strategy, arguing that the monarchy’s enduring stability is nothing but a highly managed illusion built on strategic dependency, breaking down how Rabat operates as a vassal state, securing its dynastic continuity by trading sovereignty, regional solidarity, and its own citizens’ futures for the protection of Western powers.
The piece refuses to treat Morocco’s contradictory foreign policy—championing the Palestinian cause in rhetoric while normalizing relations with Israel and expanding security cooperation as Gaza is genocided—as hypocrisy or error. El Mokhtar frames it instead as a coherent method of governance. By weaponizing human distress, such as directing migrants toward Spanish enclaves to pressure Madrid, and instrumentalizing the Sahara issue to monopolize nationalist sentiment, the monarchy ensures that every crisis serves the sole imperative of regime preservation.
The material dimension of this political arrangement is given real weight in mapping how the celebrated “modernization” of Morocco’s economy has merely reorganized class stratification. Concentrated prosperity for French-speaking urban elites and royal-adjacent conglomerates sits directly alongside rural isolation, widespread precariousness, and the export of cheap labor. As the author notes, infrastructure outpaces institutions, and growth consolidates existing hierarchies rather than transforming them, producing a dual society where the youth are left dreaming only of exile.
Where the argument feels less developed is in its treatment of the internal mechanisms of resistance. While it rightly notes how Hassan II fractured the historical left, and Mohammed VI absorbed political Islam into a toothless institutional framework, it treats the regime’s ideological capture as almost absolute. The recent stirrings of Generation Z are mentioned as symptoms of economic desperation, but the actual friction points—how students or marginalized communities are attempting to organize outside this managed confusion—are left largely unexamined.
Ultimately, however, El Mokhtar delivers a forceful critique of how patrimonial power sustains itself by deliberately conflating the survival of the dynasty with the existence of the nation itself, rendering any alternative unthinkable.
Jordan, in the unwanted crosshairs of the Middle East war — Antonio Pita, El Pais
Client-state dependency is rarely cheap, but the invoice is usually settled in a currency other than airstrikes, and Antonio Pita’s report captures the exact moment when the rent on a geopolitical lease comes due in public. Examining the recent wave of Iranian missiles directed at US forces stationed in Jordan, the piece maps how a country that aggressively markets itself as a regional “oasis of stability” has been structurally engineered into a shock absorber for American imperialism.
The most revealing detail here is the semantic gymnastics required to maintain the illusion of national sovereignty. When the Jordanian foreign minister insists that the kingdom does not host American military bases, but rather “Jordanian bases with US troops stationed on them,” he is describing the precise mechanics of a proxy arrangement, where Washington does not need formal territorial ownership when $1.65 billion in annual aid buys a fully compliant security architecture.
Where the geopolitical framing falters, however, is in treating this alliance as a tragic geographic inevitability. Relying on Western think-tank consensus, the article suggests that a resource-poor nation has no other options for survival, which naturalizes a deliberate political choice. The Jordanian ruling class does not merely suffer the presence of US troops as an unwanted side effect; it requires that presence to insulate itself from an impoverished, heavily Palestinian working class furious over the ongoing genocide next door.
Pita’s report ultimately serves as a necessary diagnostic of the garrison state, showing that when a national economy is heavily underwritten by a foreign military apparatus, stability simply means catching the shrapnel aimed at your patron.
Ankara’s Discreet Armed Arm — Akram Kharief, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung
Akram Kharief’s paper for the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung meticulously tracks the mechanics of Turkey’s expanding defense industry. He unpacks how Ankara has fundamentally reshaped its projection of war across Syria, Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Sahel, swapping out traditional troop deployments for a composite, low-visibility model that consists of private military companies with ties to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development party, drone warfare, and contracted Syrian mercenaries.
The sharpest takeaway is Kharief’s demystification of the “private military contractor,” with a heavy focus on SADAT, which retired Turkish officers founded, and while the company is legally registered as a private consulting firm, the paper firmly establishes it as a deliberate appendage of the Turkish state. By offloading combat and training to this corporate entity, Erdoğan’s government bypasses potential oversight by opposition figures and civil society, shields itself from domestic backlash over troop casualties, and launders state violence through corporate logistics.
The structural reality of this “delegated force,” as Kharief labels it, is deeply rooted in labor exploitation, and this is where the paper’s material stakes become undeniable. The author points to the Syrian fighters shipped to Libya or the Caucasus, revealing how a ruined economy produces an endlessly extractable reserve army. These are not in any way ideological zealots fighting for a neo-Ottoman vision; they are displaced, immiserated men selling their capacity for violence because they believe it’s the only wage labor they have left to offer. Turkey’s military overreach essentially functions on an arbitrage of human desperation, extracting surplus geopolitical value from disposable Syrian bodies while shielding the Turkish ruling class from the physical and political costs of war.
What the report briefly touches on without going deep into it, and it honestly doesn’t need to, is tying this military franchising to the broader economic crisis within Turkey itself. Kharief is incredibly thorough on the operational details—the drones, the training agreements, the defense industry exports—to the point of sometimes isolating the geopolitical strategy from the severe domestic austerity driving it. The proliferation of Turkey’s defense sector and mercenary contracts is itself an attempt to stabilize a faltering, inflation-ridden economy through the creation of captive markets and security dependencies in Africa and the Middle East, and that connection remains implicit rather than fully theorized.
Still, it is a brilliantly detailed anatomy of contemporary military overreach and exploitation, and how Turkey’s modern ambitions rely just as heavily on subcontractors and legal deniability as it does on artillery, turning the battlefield into just another outsourced supply chain.
Egypt
The Palestinians the World Forgot — Hoda Sherif, The Nation
Ever since the outbreak of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, Egyptians have been adamantly defending the New Republic’s stance on Rafah, claiming that its policies have, singlehandedly, prevented the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai. Some, however, have gone so far as to claim that Egypt has never been home to a Palestinian displacement camp. An outright lie.
In this essay, Sherif, an Iranian-Egyptian journalist, tells the story of Canada Camp, a displacement camp built by Israel in the early 1970s near Rafah to house displaced Gazans. In 1982, when the Camp David Accords were signed, roughly 4,000 Palestinians were stranded in Canada Camp, on the Egyptian side of a binary border, separated by a wall of barbed wire from their family in Gaza.
Beyond her own reporting, Sherif lends her pen to Nisreen Najjar, a Rafah-born Palestinian separated from her family for decades by the “shouting fence” between Egypt and the Gaza Strip.
The camp was only emptied and dismantled in 2000.
Sherif doesn’t stop there. She links the past to the present, where 200,000 Palestinians have been displaced from Gaza to Egypt since October 2023, and the “Board of Peace” is another “catch-22,” much like the Camp David Accords were.
Beautifully written.
The show must go on: Unpublished documents confirm ‘violations’ don’t block EU financing — Beesan Kassab, Al Manassa
Beesan Kassab’s exclusive report on a leaked internal EU briefing finally liquidates the liberal fiction of “human rights conditionality” in European lending. Through unpublished documents, she traces exactly how the European Commission manages its macro-financial assistance to Cairo, proving that documented abuses by the Egyptian government are treated internally not as red lines, but as public relations hurdles to be rhetorically managed while the cash keeps flowing.
The real value of this investigation lies in its bureaucratic autopsy. Kassab shows us the exact mechanism by which a supposedly “values-driven institution” neutralizes its own mandate. The EU’s “conditionality” clauses, we learn, are designed with built-in escape hatches, ensuring that no amount of political repression will ever accidentally trigger a halt to funding. Ultimately, the performance of concern is the product, and the actual deliverable is a stable repressive partner on the southern Mediterranean willing to police Europe’s borders and absorb its surplus capital.
This is the base-superstructure dynamic operating—European human rights discourse functions here as a decorative annex to a balance sheet. The billions in EU loans are not a failure of democratic leverage, as liberal critics often complain; they are payment for services rendered. The EU is simply financing a subcontractor to manage the continent’s migration anxiety and secure offshore investments. Kassab’s reading of the internal memos perfectly captures how the European technocracy assesses violence: entirely acceptable as long as it happens outside their jurisdiction, carried out by a state apparatus they finance.
In this piece, Kassab has provided a frustrating archival receipt and a necessary read for anyone still laboring under the delusion that European capital will ever function as a “democratizing force” in the Global South.
Fractures in Egyptian Society: Scenes and Scenarios — Ali El-Raggal, Assafir Arabi
Not only a timely read, but a crucial one.
El-Raggal does two things here.
First, he lays down three scenes: rapidly escalating crime and suicide rates, an ever-widening gap between macroeconomic “success” and the collapse of purchasing power, and a state-led restructuring of urban space driven by security and economic anxiety.
Second, he moves from diagnosis to prognosis, offering three possible scenarios. A social collapse in which the state steps down from managing poorer districts it can no longer discipline, full state control with a small margin of social guarantees, or a new popular uprising.
For the third scenario, El-Raggal explains that while the regime “succeeded in repressing rebellion and opposition”, three main conditions, “volatile” is the word he used, foretell a possible popular uprising or a new revolutionary wave.
“A substantial segment of the middle and lower-middle classes, many of whom participated in the 2011 revolution and have since been joined by new generations, retains the capacity to destabilize the regime, provided they can organize their ranks and articulate a political vision and a framework for social struggle; widespread public resentment stemming from harsh economic measures; and the erosion of the ruling ideology, specifically, the military-branded version of “Egyptian nationalism”, alongside growing public weariness with the “war on terror” narrative and scare tactics invoking the fates of Syria and Iraq,” El-Raggal writes.
That is all to say that the material conditions that made the January 25 revolution possible persist, only without a political architecture to channel the pressure; no organized right, or organized left.
Inclusive Education in Egypt: A Right on Paper, a Bill for the Family — Aya Yasser, Zawia3
Egypt’s 2017 ministerial decree on school inclusion (damj) guarantees children with disabilities and learning difficulties a seat in ordinary public classrooms, alongside their peers, with accommodations suited to their needs. Yasser asks a simple question of that guarantee: paid for by whom?
The answer, laid out across a series of family interviews and advocacy testimony, is that the state wrote the right and the family covers the cost. Inclusion classrooms exist, but the “resource rooms” meant to support struggling students often sit locked, or are run as glorified sing-alongs rather than instruction.
Teachers receive little to no training in disability pedagogy, so children requiring support are, in the words of one advocate quoted in the piece, “left as prey” to neglect and bullying.
The “shadow teacher”, a private aide who accompanies a child through the school day, is often the only thing standing between a struggling student and total educational abandonment, and it is a cost families pay entirely out of pocket.
This is not a story “about disability policy”, per se, but more of a case study in how the state’s retreat from public provision gets pushed downward and outward onto the families with the least capacity to absorb it.
A right that requires a private tutor, a private diagnostic re-test, a private shadow teacher, and the time to navigate a bureaucracy that offers “a few months’ wait” for an evaluation slot, is not a right at all in any meaningful sense for a family living paycheck to paycheck. It’s a means-tested privilege wearing the language of universal entitlement.
Yasser does real work to map the gap between the law and its implementation.
On Nubian Memory, Constitutional Promises, and the Right of Return — Fatmeh Emam Sakory, Al Manassa
Struggle explained through solid and sensory personal essays—ones that feel like being led by the hand into someone’s experience, if muted through the many layers that mediate a more powerful in-person telling—are hard to come by. Especially without falling into the tricky “woe is me” trap.
Sakory’s essay quietly knocks at your heart’s door and delivers a suckerpunch, simultaneously.
Also published in the original Arabic on Al Manassa, Sakory tells the story of her generation, the third generation of displaced Nubians. Through a combination of memoir and political argument, she traces her family across three generations of displacement, each shaped by a different chapter of Nile engineering: her grandfather’s generation, uprooted by the 1902 Aswan Low Dam and its 1912/1933 heightenings; her father’s generation, which lived through the 1964 flooding of Nubia by the High Dam, the harshest displacement of all; and her own generation, still waiting on a promise the state has yet to keep.
The promise is Article 236 of the 2014 Constitution, which pledged Nubians the right to return to the shores of Lake Nubia within ten years. A deadline that passed more than two years ago.
Sakory chronicles a host of abuses experienced by her generation; from being banned from celebrating International Nubian Day on July 7 to having their lands, the ones they were meant to return to, become designated as restricted military zones closed to settlement or transit.
An absolute must-read.
On a sidenote, this essay brought to mind another beautiful essay.
Wast Qahirat al-Fann wal-Jantarah…Shajarah — Ali Hussein El-Adawy, Khatt30
Despite being an almost 45-minute read, it is worth every single one. This long-read is less essay and more thesis. El-Adawy’s core argument is this: contemporary art in Cairo has become one of the primary mechanisms through which real estate gets structurally revalued, because financialized capitalism has learned how to metabolize symbolic value and convert it directly into rent.
The essay itself traces exactly how this happened. When the New Republic relocated government ministries to the New Capital, downtown Cairo was left holding a huge stock of newly vacant, state-owned real estate in one of the city’s, if not the country’s, most valuable areas. And, instead of selling outright, the state, with the Ismaïlia Real Estate Investment Company and the Egypt Sovereign Fund, began managing downtown Cairo through investment partnerships with local and Gulf capital.
The nexus here is that they did not rely on restoration alone to raise the value of these buildings, largely because they needed a story. Enter contemporary art: exhibitions, design weeks, artist residencies, gallery partnerships, culminating in things like the Cairo International Art District initiative and a partnership with Christie’s. Historic buildings became venues; venues became “cultural hubs”; cultural hubs became, eventually, hotels and mixed-use developments with rents to match.
A picture-perfect packaging of a cosmopolitan downtown that does not exist, and has not existed, for nearly a century.
Unlike most stories on the gentrification of downtown Cairo, El-Adawy does not begin from a murky post-2011 revolution moment when developers arbitrarily moved in. Rather, he begins from the revolutionary moment itself, which allowed a wave of independent and often genuinely radical art to pour into downtown’s streets and squares. Things like Al Fann Midan’s Sheikh Imam revivals in Abdeen Square and the Genaina Theatre restaging mahraganat music for a middle-class audience of activists and intellectuals.
The image of downtown as a creative, participatory, radical space, produced in good faith by artists who saw themselves as allies of “the people,” became the thing that real estate capital needed to justify the neighborhood’s reinvention. The revolution’s aesthetics got recycled as the gentrifier’s pitch.
This is a case study in how “creative economy” language gets used to launder redistribution upward, dressing it as “revival,” which is not unique to Cairo. The same script of abandoned or “underused” public assets, a partnership structure that keeps nominal state ownership while handing operational control to private capital, and a cultural rebrand that makes the whole thing feel like renewal rather than dispossession shows up wherever this kind of urban restructuring happens.