Insights – The Conversation

Is time a fundamental part of reality? A quiet revolution in physics suggests not

2026-01-28T18:23:25Z

Time feels like the most basic feature of reality. Seconds tick, days pass and everything from planetary motion to human memory seems to unfold along a single, irreversible direction. We are born and we die, in exactly that order. We plan our lives around time, measure it obsessively and experience it as an unbroken flow from past to future. It feels so obvious that time moves forward that questioning it can seem almost pointless.

And yet, for more than a century, physics has struggled to say what time actually is. This struggle is not philosophical nitpicking. It sits at the heart of some of the deepest problems in science.

Modern physics relies on different, but equally important, frameworks. One is Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes the gravity and motion of large objects such as planets. Another is quantum mechanics, which rules the microcosmos of atoms and particles. And on an even larger scale, the standard model of cosmology describes the birth and evolution of the universe as a whole. All rely on time, yet they treat it in incompatible ways.

When physicists try to combine these theories into a single framework, time often behaves in unexpected and troubling ways. Sometimes it stretches. Sometimes it slows. Sometimes it disappears entirely.

The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.

Einstein’s theory of relativity was, in fact, the first major blow to our everyday intuition about time. Time, Einstein showed, is not universal. It runs at different speeds depending on gravity and motion. Two observers moving relative to one another will disagree about which events happened at the same time. Time became something elastic, woven together with space into a four-dimensional fabric called spacetime.

Quantum mechanics made things even stranger. In quantum theory, time is not something the theory explains. It is simply assumed. The equations of quantum mechanics describe how systems evolve with respect to time, but time itself remains an external parameter, a background clock that sits outside the theory.

This mismatch becomes acute when physicists try to describe gravity at the quantum level, which is crucial for developing the much coveted theory of everything – which links the main fundamental theories. But in many attempts to create such a theory, time vanishes as a parameter from the fundamental equations altogether. The universe appears frozen, described by equations that make no reference to change.

This puzzle is known as the problem of time, and it remains one of the most persistent obstacles to a unified theory of physics. Despite enormous progress in cosmology and particle physics, we still lack a clear explanation for why time flows at all.

Now a relatively new approach to physics, building on a mathematical framework called information theory, developed by Claude Shannon in the 1940s, has started coming up with surprising answers.

Entropy and the arrow of time

When physicists try to explain the direction of time, they often turn to a concept called entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states that disorder tends to increase. A glass can fall and shatter into a mess, but the shards never spontaneously leap back together. This asymmetry between past and future is often identified with the arrow of time.

This idea has been enormously influential. It explains why many processes are irreversible, including why we remember the past but not the future. If the universe started in a state of low entropy, and is getting messier as it evolves, that appears to explain why time moves forward. But entropy does not fully solve the problem of time.

It is hard to undo a mess. klevo/Shutterstock

For one thing, the fundamental quantum mechanical equations of physics do not distinguish between past and future. The arrow of time emerges only when we consider large numbers of particles and statistical behaviour. This also raises a deeper question: why did the universe start in such a low-entropy state to begin with? Statistically, there are more ways for a universe to have high entropy than low entropy, just as there are more ways for a room to be messy than tidy. So why would it start in a state that is so improbable?

The information revolution

Over the past few decades, a quiet but far-reaching revolution has taken place in physics. Information, once treated as an abstract bookkeeping tool used to track states or probabilities, has increasingly been recognised as a physical quantity in its own right, just like matter or radiation. While entropy measures how many microscopic states are possible, information measures how physical interactions limit and record those possibilities.

This shift did not happen overnight. It emerged gradually, driven by puzzles at the intersection of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics and gravity, where treating information as merely mathematical began to produce contradictions.

One of the earliest cracks appeared in black hole physics. When Stephen Hawking showed that black holes emit thermal radiation, it raised a disturbing possibility: information about whatever falls into a black hole might be permanently lost as heat. That conclusion conflicted with quantum mechanics, which demands that the entirety of information be preserved.

Resolving this tension forced physicists to confront a deeper truth. Information is not optional. If we want a full description of the universe that includes quantum mechanics, information cannot simply disappear without undermining the foundations of physics. This realisation had profound consequences. It became clear that information has thermodynamic cost, that erasing it dissipates energy, and that storing it requires physical resources.

In parallel, surprising connections emerged between gravity and thermodynamics. It was shown that Einstein’s equations can be derived from thermodynamic principles that link spacetime geometry directly to entropy and information. In this view, gravity doesn’t behave exactly like a fundamental force.

Instead, gravity appears to be what physicists call “emergent” – a phenomenon describing something that’s greater than the sum of its parts, arising from more fundamental constituents. Take temperature. We can all feel it, but on a fundamental level, a single particle can’t have temperature. It’s not a fundamental feature. Instead it only emerges as a result of many molecules moving collectively.

Similarly, gravity can be described as an emergent phenomenon, arising from statistical processes. Some physicists have even suggested that gravity itself may emerge from information, reflecting how information is distributed, encoded and processed.

These ideas invite a radical shift in perspective. Instead of treating spacetime as primary, and information as something that lives inside it, information may be the more fundamental ingredient from which spacetime itself emerges. Building on this research, my colleagues and I have explored a framework in which spacetime itself acts as a storage medium for information – and it has important consequences for how we view time.

In this approach, spacetime is not perfectly smooth, as relativity suggests, but composed of discrete elements, each with a finite capacity to record quantum information from passing particles and fields. These elements are not bits in the digital sense, but physical carriers of quantum information, capable of retaining memory of past interactions.

A useful way to picture them is to think of spacetime like a material made of tiny, memory-bearing cells. Just as a crystal lattice can store defects that appeared earlier in time, these microscopic spacetime elements can retain traces of the interactions that have passed through them. They are not particles in the usual sense described by the standard model of particle physics, but a more fundamental layer of physical structure that particle physics operates on rather than explains.

This has an important implication. If spacetime records information, then its present state reflects not only what exists now, but everything that has happened before. Regions that have experienced more interactions carry a different imprint of information than regions that have experienced fewer. The universe, in this view, does not merely evolve according to timeless laws applied to changing states. It remembers.

A recording cosmos

This memory is not metaphorical. Every physical interaction leaves an informational trace. Although the basic equations of quantum mechanics can be run forwards or backwards in time, real interactions never happen in isolation. They inevitably involve surroundings, leak information outward and leave lasting records of what has occurred. Once this information has spread into the wider environment, recovering it would require undoing not just a single event, but every physical change it caused along the way. In practice, that is impossible.

This is why information cannot be erased and broken cups do not reassemble. But the implication runs deeper. Each interaction writes something permanent into the structure of the universe, whether at the scale of atoms colliding or galaxies forming.

Geometry and information turn out to be deeply connected in this view. In our work, we have showed that how spacetime curves depends not only on mass and energy, as Einstein taught us, but also on how quantum information, particularly entanglement, is distributed. Entanglement is a quantum process that mysteriously links particles in distant regions of space – it enables them to share information despite the distance. And these informational links contribute to the effective geometry experienced by matter and radiation.

From this perspective, spacetime geometry is not just a response to what exists at a given moment, but to what has happened. Regions that have recorded many interactions tend, on average, to behave as if they curve more strongly, have stronger gravity, than regions that have recorded fewer.

This reframing subtly changes the role of spacetime. Instead of being a neutral arena in which events unfold, spacetime becomes an active participant. It stores information, constrains future dynamics and shapes how new interactions can occur. This naturally raises a deeper question. If spacetime records information, could time emerge from this recording process rather than being assumed from the start?

Time arising from information

Recently, we extended this informational perspective to time itself. Rather than treating time as a fundamental background parameter, we showed that temporal order emerges from irreversible information imprinting. In this view, time is not something added to physics by hand. It arises because information is written in physical processes and, under the known laws of thermodynamics and quantum physics, cannot be globally unwritten again. The idea is simple but far-reaching.

Every interaction, such as two particles crashing, writes information into the universe. These imprints accumulate. Because they cannot be erased, they define a natural ordering of events. Earlier states are those with fewer informational records. Later states are those with more.

Quantum equations do not prefer a direction of time, but the process of information spreading does. Once information has been spread out, there is no physical path back to a state in which it was localised. Temporal order is therefore anchored in this irreversibility, not in the equations themselves.

Time, in this view, is not something that exists independently of physical processes. It is the cumulative record of what has happened. Each interaction adds a new entry, and the arrow of time reflects the fact that this record only grows.

The future differs from the past because the universe contains more information about the past than it ever can about the future. This explains why time has a direction without relying on special, low-entropy initial conditions or purely statistical arguments. As long as interactions occur and information is irreversibly recorded, time advances.

Interestingly, this accumulated imprint of information may have observable consequences. At galactic scales, the residual information imprint behaves like an additional gravitational component, shaping how galaxies rotate without invoking new particles. Indeed, the unknown substance called dark matter was introduced to explain why galaxies and galaxy clusters rotate faster than their visible mass alone would allow.

In the informational picture, this extra gravitational pull does not come from invisible dark matter, but from the fact that spacetime itself has recorded a long history of interactions. Regions that have accumulated more informational imprints respond more strongly to motion and curvature, effectively boosting their gravity. Stars orbit faster not because more mass is present, but because the spacetime they move through carries a heavier informational memory of past interactions.

Galaxies rotate faster than they should. Wirestock Creators/Shutterstock

From this viewpoint, dark matter, dark energy and the arrow of time may all arise from a single underlying process: the irreversible accumulation of information.

Testing time

But could we ever test this theory? Ideas about time are often accused of being philosophical rather than scientific. Because time is so deeply woven into how we describe change, it is easy to assume that any attempt to rethink it must remain abstract. An informational approach, however, makes concrete predictions and connects directly to systems we can observe, model and in some cases experimentally probe.

Black holes provide a natural testing ground, as they seems to suggest information is erased. In the informational framework, this conflict is resolved by recognising that information is not destroyed but imprinted into spacetime before crossing the horizon. The black hole records it.

This has an important implication for time. As matter falls toward a black hole, interactions intensify and information imprinting accelerates. Time continues to advance locally because information continues to be written, even as classical notions of space and time break down near the horizon and appear to slow or freeze for distant observers.

As the black hole evaporates through Hawking radiation, the accumulated informational record does not vanish. Instead, it affects how radiation is emitted. The radiation should carry subtle signs that reflect the black hole’s history. In other words, the outgoing radiation is not perfectly random. Its structure is shaped by the information previously recorded in spacetime. Detecting such signs remains beyond current technology, but they provide a clear target for future theoretical and observational work.

The same principles can be explored in much smaller, controlled systems. In laboratory experiments with quantum computers, qubits (the quantum computer equivalent of bits) can be treated as finite-capacity information cells, just like the spacetime ones. Researchers have shown that even when the underlying quantum equations are reversible, the way information is written, spread and retrieved can generate an effective arrow of time in the lab. These experiments allow physicists to test how information storage limits affect reversibility, without needing cosmological or astrophysical systems.

Extensions of the same framework suggest that informational imprinting is not limited to gravity. It may play a role across all fundamental forces of nature, including electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. If this is correct, then time’s arrow should ultimately be traceable to how all interactions record information, not just gravitational ones. Testing this would involve looking for limits on reversibility or information recovery across different physical processes.

Taken together, these examples show that informational time is not an abstract reinterpretation. It links black holes, quantum experiments and fundamental interactions through a shared physical mechanism, one that can be explored, constrained and potentially falsified as our experimental reach continues to grow.

What time really is

Ideas about information do not replace relativity or quantum mechanics. In everyday conditions, informational time closely tracks the time measured by clocks. For most practical purposes, the familiar picture of time works extremely well. The difference appears in regimes where conventional descriptions struggle.

Near black hole horizons or during the earliest moments of the universe, the usual notion of time as a smooth, external coordinate becomes ambiguous. Informational time, by contrast, remains well defined as long as interactions occur and information is irreversibly recorded.

All this may leave you wondering what time really is. This shift reframes the longstanding debate. The question is no longer whether time must be assumed as a fundamental ingredient of the universe, but whether it reflects a deeper underlying process.

In this view, the arrow of time can emerge naturally from physical interactions that record information and cannot be undone. Time, then, is not a mysterious background parameter standing apart from physics. It is something the universe generates internally through its own dynamics. It is not ultimately a fundamental part of reality, but emerges from more basic constituents such as information.

Whether this framework turns out to be a final answer or a stepping stone remains to be seen. Like many ideas in fundamental physics, it will stand or fall based on how well it connects theory to observation. But it already suggests a striking change in perspective.

The universe does not simply exist in time. Time is something the universe continuously writes into itself.

For you: more from our Insights series:

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Florian Neukart does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

‘We ran from monsters’: Once welcomed by Germany after IS genocide, Yazidis are now deported to a life of limbo in refugee camps

2026-01-23T17:31:58Z

Khanke IDP (Internally Displaced Person) camp in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in August 2025. Aleksandra Ancite-Jepifanova

The sun burns down on a small village less than 20 miles north-east of Mosul, Iraq. Milisia, 14, and her sister Madlin, 13, greet me at the gate in flawless, almost accent-free German. They lead me into the yard of a grey, rectangular, one-story building where their family rents a single room.

We sit in the heat, joined by their mother and two younger brothers, aged nine and ten. Their eyes hold a mixture of hope and despair – as if I am both a bridge to the world they lost and a reminder of it. The girls hand me a carefully preserved plastic folder: their end-of-year school assessments from Germany.

I flip through the papers, and a teacher’s note catches my eye: “Despite not having German as her mother tongue, Madlin was always able to express herself clearly. She participated eagerly in lessons, was open and receptive to new content, and always strived for her own creative ideas. In written work, she was focused and willing to make an effort.” (translation from German.)

This folder is one of the few tangible remnants of a life that was abruptly torn apart a year ago. Until October 2024, the family lived in Adlkofen, a small municipality in Bavaria, southern Germany. But when I met them, in late August 2025, they were over 2,000 miles away in Babirah (Kurdish: Babîrê), a village in Iraqi Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous region of Iraq.

Madlin and Milisia’s family are not ordinary returnees. They are Yazidis (also spelled Yezidis or Ezidis), a non-Muslim religious minority native to northern Iraq. In 2014, Islamic State (IS) unleashed a campaign of mass killings, abductions, enslavement, sexual violence, and forced indoctrination against Yazidis – a horror that made international headlines and forced thousands to flee.

Multiple international bodies and western states, including Germany and the UK, have officially recognised IS atrocities against the Yazidis as genocide.

Germany, home to the largest Yazidi diaspora outside Iraq, initially granted protection to those fleeing IS. But in recent years, asylum approval rates have plummeted. Following an informal readmission agreement with Iraq in 2023, Germany began deporting Yazidis back to the country they had fled.

This situation has drawn my attention as a refugee and human rights scholar, leading me to explore how genocide, displacement, and European refugee law intersect. In Iraqi Kurdistan, I met Yazidis deported from Germany to document their experiences and witness the human consequences of Germany’s approach as part of my ongoing research.

Milisia’s family is among the people recently deported. They had lived in Germany for nearly six years. The children went to school, learned the language, and for Milisia, life meant responsibilities far beyond her age – translating, interpreting, and advocating for her family. Now, she feels a deep sense of betrayal by the country she once called home, whose language she speaks and whose values she embraced.

Milisia remembers the deportation date; it is etched in her memory: October 5, 2024. Her voice trembles with anger as she recounts, in German, what happened:

It was 5 am. We were sleeping when men in police uniforms surrounded the house. The social worker opened the door – she had a key. We will never forget it, we were so scared … It was really terrible … We have rights too.

The police separated them. The mother and the girls in one car, the father with the boys in another, and drove straight to the airport. Milisia described the helplessness and disbelief: “We couldn’t even pack our things. If they had sent us a letter beforehand, we could have gotten a lawyer, we could have asked our teachers at school. But they didn’t even send us a letter.”

What happened in 2014

The Yazidis are a small, predominantly Kurdish-speaking non-Muslim religious minority. For centuries they have faced persecution, misrepresentation of their ancient faith, and were often stigmatised as “infidels” or “devil worshippers.”

Nothing in their history, however, matches the scale of the IS attack in 2014. Estimates suggest that around 5,000 Yazidis were murdered; some 7,000 women and girls were abducted, many subjected to enslavement and abuse. More than 2,500 people remain missing.

The assault in August 2014 forced over 350,000 Yazidis to flee their homes in Sinjar (Kurdish: Shingal), a mountainous district in north-western Iraq near the Syrian border and the historic centre of the community.

More than a decade on, an anticipated large-scale return has not happened. As of 2025, fewer than half of those displaced have gone back. Around 100,000 still live in IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camps in the Kurdistan Region, which is not their place of origin.

Tens of thousands have made their way to Europe and other western countries, often through dangerous routes in the absence of legal alternatives.

A broken promise

The Yazidi case has become a clear illustration of the limits of European refugee protection frameworks when applied to a community targeted for genocide. Asylum law is geared toward proving individual persecution, not addressing the collective and structural harms that follow mass atrocities.

This gap is particularly visible in Germany, home to the world’s largest Yazidi diaspora – over 230,000 people, including earlier migrant generations. About 100,000 Iraqi Yazidis have sought asylum in Germany since 2014.

In the immediate aftermath of the IS attacks, Germany responded generously: between 2014 and 2017, more than 90% of Iraqi Yazidi asylum claims were approved. In addition, a number of federal states introduced targeted reception programmes to support Yazidi women and children who were especially at risk. Among these efforts, the Baden-Württemberg special contingent stood out, providing a pathway for roughly 1,100 survivors of IS captivity to relocate to Germany.

But after IS lost territorial control in 2017, the German approach shifted. Authorities concluded that group-specific persecution had ended, in practice setting a legal cut-off for the genocide.

Approval rates declined sharply. In 2023, fewer than 40% of the roughly 3,400 applications from Iraqi Yazidis were accepted, while about 40% were outright rejected. Another 7.5% resulted in temporary suspensions of deportation, offering no long-term security. The remaining cases were dismissed as inadmissible under the Dublin Regulation, which assigns responsibility for an asylum claim to another EU member state.

This shift has created a hierarchy of protection within the same minority: those who arrived before 2018 typically retain refugee status, while later arrivals – often from the same camps and with identical experiences of displacement – are rejected.

At the same time, conditions in Iraq remain shaped by the consequences of genocide. Sinjar is still devastated and reconstruction is slow. Infrastructure is largely destroyed, armed groups continue to operate, the security situation remains volatile. The district’s status is disputed and large areas are contaminated with landmines. Whole neighbourhoods lie abandoned and basic services are minimal. Mass graves continue to mark the terrain.

In the Kurdistan Region, displaced Yazidis face discrimination in accessing employment and social marginalisation. Tens of thousands have lived in IDP camps for more than a decade, with no viable path to return or integration – conditions that, for many, are an ongoing legacy of genocidal violence.

In January 2023, the German parliament formally recognised Yazidi genocide. Lawmakers acknowledged that its effects remained “omnipresent,” that tens of thousands of Yazidis still lived in camps, and that return to Sinjar was “hardly possible”.

Yet, the recognition remains largely symbolic. It has no influence on asylum decisions, a disconnect that is seen by members of the Yazidi community as a “broken promise”. Between January 2024 and June 2025, more than 1,000 Iraqis were deported. Although the government does not publish disaggregated data, Yazidis are frequently reported to be among them.

Those deported include families with school-age children whose lives were abruptly interrupted. Milisia’s family is not an isolated case. In summer 2025, German media reported on the Qasim family of six, who were returned to Sinjar on the very day their legal appeal succeeded – though the decision arrived only after their plane had taken off.

‘We cannot even go to school in Iraq. Everything is gone.’

Most Yazidis in Iraq come from Sinjar, but others – like Milisia’s family – have lived in villages in the Nineveh Plains closer to Duhok, the third largest city in the Kurdistan Region. Babirah, where they now live, sits amid a patchwork of communities and is surrounded by Arab-majority villages. To reach it, I drove past settlements marked by Arabic signs and men in traditional dishdashas.

Babirah lies about 80 miles north-east of Sinjar. In August 2014, as IS pushed into Sinjar and advanced toward their villages, Milisia’s family fled. Their own village was not occupied, but IS destroyed Yazidi temples as it moved through the area. The family escaped to a site near Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Region, and spent four months in an IDP camp. When they eventually returned, their home had been looted.

A Yazidi village in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, August 2025. Aleksandra Ancite-Jepifánova

The sense of insecurity never fully lifted. “We were always scared … always thinking we would be forced to leave again. That feeling never went away,” Najwa, 35, the children’s mother, recalls. By then, several of her siblings already lived in Germany, and her parents had been sponsored there in 2016. Two years later, she and her husband decided to join them. “We sold our car, household belongings, and some sheep, and spent our savings to pay smugglers and take our children somewhere safe.”

In late 2018, they began the journey to Germany via Turkey. Their youngest child was two. They crossed waterways in plastic boats and continued on foot. “The smugglers put us in a black car,” Najwa says, “and hid us the whole way until we reached Germany.”

After arriving, they applied for asylum. They first stayed in a reception centre near Nuremberg, then in shared housing, before moving into a small two-room apartment covered by state assistance. The father worked part-time in a restaurant; Najwa cared for the children and took them to school. The children integrated quickly – speaking German, making friends, and settling into school and kindergarten.

But because they arrived in Germany in 2018, their asylum claim was rejected. Authorities argued there was no longer group-based persecution of Yazidis in Iraq. Their appeal was dismissed in May 2022, and in October 2023 their request to suspend deportation was denied. While officials noted that the children were enrolled in school, the decision made no reference to their formative years in Germany, their fluency in German, or educational prospects in Iraq.

“When we came to Germany, I was seven and my sister was six,” Milisia says. “My brothers were very small. Now we’re 14 and 13.”

The deportation uprooted them entirely. Since October 2024, the children have not attended school, as schools in the area require prior instruction in the local curriculum – a system they have never been part of. They cannot read or write Kurdish or Arabic. “We only speak German with each other,” Milisia explains. “In Germany I was in seventh grade. Only two more years and I could start vocational training. But they sent us back. Now everything is gone.” Her sister adds quietly, “Sometimes children in the village make fun of us because we don’t go to school.”

The family now rents a single room with grey, faded walls, furnished only with a cupboard and an old ceiling fan. The father does casual day labour, earning roughly 10,000 Iraqi dinars (around £6) per day. He suffers ongoing health problems following surgery in Germany and was in hospital during the interview.

A single room in which Milisia’s family lives after their deportation from Germany, August 2025. Aleksandra Ancite-Jepifánova

“I don’t know how we are going to build a life here,” Najwa said. “The money my husband earns is barely enough to survive. We don’t feel we belong in Iraq. We have nothing here … I just want a decent life for my children. I don’t want to live in Iraq.”

She adds that living in a village surrounded by Arab communities with a complex history of conflict only heightens the family’s sense of vulnerability.

Trapped in limbo, the family still holds on to the hope of returning to Germany, even if it means taking irregular and dangerous routes. “Even if we don’t find any legal way to go back, we will try other ways,” Najwa said. “But we don’t have money anymore to pay smugglers, and there are no options left now.”

A permanent state of limbo

Other Yazidis living in the Kurdistan Region are displaced from Sinjar. Saad, 24, recently deported from Germany, embodies the limbo many face – unable to return to their original homeland, yet unable to rebuild a stable life in Kurdistan.

I met Saad and his mother in Shekhka, another Yazidi village. We sat on floor cushions in the house they rent – the fifth since they fled Sinjar 11 years ago. Saad’s father was killed in 2007, when his mother was 25 and Saad was five. In August 2014, when IS advanced on Sinjar, Saad – then 12 - escaped with his mother and two younger brothers. They spent several days stranded on Mount Sinjar before reaching Syria and eventually the Kurdistan Region. His grandparents, unable to walk, were captured along with a young female relative. The family never learned what happened to them.

In the Kurdistan Region, they initially took shelter in a school building. Later, relatives of Saad’s mother who lived in the Shekhka village invited them to stay. Over the years, they moved between five different houses as owners reclaimed the properties. “We had nothing permanent,” Saad’s mother says. The family survived on menial labour—harvesting vegetables, cleaning gardens.

Saad never received proper schooling. He attended school for only half a year after displacement. “After what we saw – running from IS, hearing gunshots, people crying – the children couldn’t focus,” his mother said. “They were too traumatised.”

In 2021, Saad heard about the Belarus–Poland route to Europe. The family sold land belonging to his grandfather in Sinjar to pay a smuggler. In October that year, he flew from Baghdad to Damascus and then to Minsk, before moving through forests to the Polish border.

Saad during his time working at McDonalds in Germany. Saad Nawaf Abdo

He endured cold, rain and repeated pushbacks. “One time Polish guards threw away our belongings, even our passports, and humiliated us,” Saad recalls. Eventually, he made his way to Germany, driven from Poland by a Ukrainian smuggler.

In Germany, he applied for asylum, but his claim and appeals were rejected. He completed an integration course, worked at McDonald’s, lived in a shared apartment and sent money home for his mother’s surgery and basic needs.

“At least I could provide for myself and help my family,” he says. Then, one night, police came to his door.

They were banging so hard I thought it would break. They gave me 40 minutes to pack and took me straight to the airport.

Saad said he received no prior notice of the deportation. Today, he and his family rent a house owned by a Yazidi woman who lives in Australia. “Once she told us to leave because she was coming for two months,” his mother recalls. “We begged her – we had nowhere else to go. She finally let us stay.”

Returning to Sinjar is not an option. Their home in their native village is destroyed, there is no reliable electricity or water, and Saad’s mother suffers from chronic health problems requiring regular treatment. Above all, the trauma of 2014 remains close. “When we go to Sinjar, we remember everything – how IS attacked us, burned our houses,” she says. They visit only occasionally to see relatives or Saad’s father’s grave.

Saad during a visit to Sinjar in October 2025 after his deportation from Germany. Saad Nawaf Abdo

German authorities often argue that Yazidis can find work in the Kurdistan Region. Saad, who speaks the Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish like most Yazidis, shakes his head. “They don’t understand. I didn’t finish school. I don’t speak Arabic or Sorani (the main dialect in Iraqi Kurdistan). How can I work?”

He and his mother are also affected by instances of misrepresentation and online hate speech from segments of the local Muslim Kurdish population. “People post insults about Yazidis. No one stops them. We are treated as the lowest,” Saad’s mother says.

Since his return, Saad and his brothers, now 19 and 20, work seasonal agricultural jobs – harvesting vegetables from 3am until late morning for about 14,000 Iraqi dinars each (around £8) a day. This work is available only for several months each year, leaving the family’s total income around or below the poverty line in the Kurdistan Region. “When Saad went to Germany, we hoped he could take us there legally,” his mother says. “But nothing happened.”

Saad’s passport now carries a deportation stamp, barring legal re-entry. “I want to go to Germany again, but I cannot legally enter,” he says. He remembers Germany with longing: “There, I could work. I didn’t have to wake up before dawn to dig potatoes under the sun…Now even that work here has stopped – the season is over.”

His mother added, quietly: “When Saad came back, he was in a very bad state. I had to be both mother and father. I tried to calm him – otherwise he might have taken his own life.”

‘I’ve always lived in the camp’

While Milisia’s and Saad’s families live in Yazidi villages, over 100,000 Yazidis remain displaced in IDP camps near Duhok. Eleven years after IS’s initial attack, these camps – originally intended as temporary shelters – have become a lasting part of Kurdistan’s landscape, permanent settlements of waiting and uncertainty. For many, moving abroad is the only thing that offers hope.

Even being returned to an IDP camp does not protect Yazidis from deportation from Germany. Authorities and courts have adopted a narrow interpretation, arguing that basic needs will be met in the camp. This approach has led to cases where people are sent back to the very camps they once fled, undoing years of integration in Germany and reinforcing the cycle of displacement and despair.

Khanke IDP camp in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in August 2025. Aleksandra Ancite-Jepifánova

Saber, 27, is one such example. German media reported on his case after he was deported to Sharya IDP camp in the Kurdistan Region, where he now lives in a tent after four years in Germany. He had worked full time, spoke fluent German and had been well integrated into daily life.

Others with precarious residence status in Germany face similar risks, often separated from family members who remain in the camps. German restrictions on family reunification have kept many families apart for years: wives run households alone, children grow up without fathers, and men in Germany wait in legal limbo, while families survive in tents. For these families, Germany represents the only hope for a durable solution.

Layla, 40, and her children have lived in Khanke IDP camp since fleeing Sinjar in 2014. As I walked through the camp, tents stretched in neat rows, children played on dusty paths – a generation that has never seen life outside the camp. After repeated fires in standard tents, residents were permitted to rebuild their shelters using concrete blocks, while the roofs remain temporary. Layla’s family now occupies a single small room, furnished with a few plastic chairs, a sofa, a TV and a refrigerator.

Layla’s children at Khanke IDP camp, where they have lived for most of their lives, August 2025. Aleksandra Ancite-Jepifánova

Layla’s husband left for Germany in 2017, travelling irregularly. His asylum application was initially rejected, but he later received a Duldung – a temporary suspension of deportation. This status did not allow family reunification, leaving the family stranded in the camp. He now works at McDonald’s in Hanover and has obtained a residence permit, which would allow family reunification – but too late for Layla’s two sons, who also live in the camp and are now young adults. Only Layla and her daughter remain eligible, provided the father earns a sufficient income. Their eldest son, in his early twenties, who migrated irregularly in 2021, now faces deportation back to the same camp. Layla’s daughter, 13, explained:

I don’t remember my father. I only speak with him on the phone.

Layla added: “It’s very difficult to live without a husband. The children should have their father. I handle everything alone – the hospital, shopping. All the burden is on me.”

Returning to Sinjar is not an option. Their home is destroyed, the area abandoned. “No one from our village lives there anymore,” Layla said. For her daughter, the camp has become permanent: “I don’t remember Sinjar. I’ve always lived in this camp.” Her mother echoes this: “Even when people ask where we are from, we say, ‘We are from the camps.’”

Germany represents hope. “In Germany, there is safety, human rights and work,” Layla said. “I left school young. If I were in Germany, I would go back and finish. Women can work and have a life. Here, there is nothing.” Both mother and daughter are learning German. The daughter studies online and can now introduce herself in German: “If I go to Germany, I want to study. I want to become a doctor and help sick people.”

Layla expressed frustration at Germany’s shift in policy. “We were hoping Germany would continue helping us. At first, we felt supported, that people were standing behind us, but then they stopped. We have survived so many genocides. Every time it happens, we survive, and then it happens again.” Her message to Germany is simple:

We don’t want much. Just stop deporting Yazidis. Give them permanent residence and reunite the families.

‘We ran from monsters’

Nearby in the same camp, Majida, 38, lives with her six children in a small room; the camp has been their home since 2014. Her husband, Kamal, left for Germany in 2017, hoping to secure protection and eventually reunite the family, following the path of a friend who had managed to do so.

Majida and her six children, aged between 11 and 18, in Khanke camp, in August 2025. Aleksandra Ancite-Jepifánova

Instead, his asylum claims were repeatedly rejected, leaving him in a precarious legal status and unable to bring them. “We haven’t seen him for eight years,” Majida says.

Before 2014, Kamal had worked for years to build their house in their Sinjar village. “It was our dream,” Majida recalls. “We moved in and lived there only one year before IS came. Then we fled, and the house was destroyed.”

When they first arrived at the camp, they believed it would be temporary. “At first, we thought this would last only a few days. But year after year, we realised no one is going to do anything for us.”

“We don’t see any future here – not in the camp, not in Sinjar,” she said. The family recently returned to Sinjar to process ID cards, their first visit since fleeing over a decade ago. “I didn’t want to go,” Majida says.

When I went there, I remembered everything – my childhood, our neighbours, those who were killed, how we escaped. I cried. But I was grateful I could save my children. We ran from monsters.

The Iraqi government offers four million Iraqi dinars (around £2,300) to each displaced Yazidi household willing to return and rebuild. Yazidis and rights groups say the amount is far too small. Majida’s family spent around 30 million dinars (around £17,000) to build their house.

Majida said she does not feel accepted in the Kurdistan Region either. Life in the camp is largely isolated, and the family has little interaction with Muslim Kurds, the dominant group in the area, which contributes to feelings of insecurity. Majida believes Yazidis are not seen as part of the wider community.

Fear and mistrust run deep. Even if new houses were built in the Kurdistan Region, Majida said she would still prefer the camp among other Yazidis over a two-storey home in a Muslim-majority area.

I don’t trust the government. I’m afraid everything that happened to me will happen to my children too. Even when I take them to the playground in the neighbouring town, I don’t feel safe.

Discrimination in employment adds to these sentiments. Yazidis are often excluded from jobs in the food industry because their non-Muslim faith is seen as incompatible with handling “halal” food.

Majida’s six children are now aged between 11 and 18. Raising them alone has been exhausting. Majida cries as she recalls the early years without her husband.

We have been through so many difficulties. At the beginning, the children were selling beans on the street. My husband was hiding in Germany, unable to work, unable to send money. NGOs later trained me in sewing, so I opened a small tailoring business. But the money is never enough. I spent so much on hospitals and doctors, and to send the children to school. It was still not enough.

In desperation, and tired of waiting for a legal path to family reunification, Majida and her children attempted to reach Europe irregularly through Turkey in 2023. They were caught and returned to Iraq.

One of her sons, now 18, added: “In Germany, you can build your future – go to school, work. Here, we don’t know what will happen.” Another son said: “Once we finish school, we’ll try to find a way to go to Germany. That’s our only hope.”

Majida’s husband, Kamal, 45, lives in the German city of Braunschweig, near Hanover. I interviewed him separately via video call. Kamal lives in refugee accommodation, sharing a small room with another man, and works shifts at warehouses.

After eight years marked by asylum rejections, periods of irregular status and hundreds of euros spent on legal fees, Kamal has recently been granted a temporary two-year residence permit. While the permit may lead to permanent residency, it allows family reunification only in exceptional humanitarian cases – a threshold so high that reunification with his family remains out of reach.

During the interview, Kamal broke down in tears. “We don’t have a future in Iraq. Yazidis have always been targeted, and I believe it will happen again,” he says.

I came to Germany hoping they would protect my family. Everyone talked about human rights here. But my life is on hold. Every night I cry because I miss my children. I haven’t seen them in years, and they no longer know me.

He added: “There is no humanity left for me, and I have lost hope in Germany. I don’t know what to do. Will I stay alone like this for the rest of my life? Sometimes I even think about ending my life. It’s too much.”

Sinjar will never be the same again

Instead of family reunification in Germany, many Yazidi men now face the risk of being deported back to the camps. This is what happened to Ali, 42. In autumn 2023, he joined protests in Berlin against the deportation of Yazidis, speaking to German media outside the parliament. Only weeks later, in December 2023, Ali himself was deported, after five years in Germany. He initially returned to the IDP camp in the Kurdistan Region where his wife and seven children had lived since 2014, after fleeing Sinjar.

Ali had arrived in Germany in late 2018, hoping eventually to bring his family. He paid around US $10,000 to smugglers – money borrowed from relatives and taken from his savings. His asylum claim and subsequent appeals were rejected. During his years in Germany, he worked in construction. In autumn 2023, he received a deportation notice.

The empty streets of a devastated Sinjar in December 2017. Shutterstock/Tomas Davidov

We spoke on the phone while I was in Duhok and he was in Sinjar, where he moved a few months ago after leaving the camp. His children, now aged between five and 18, barely knew him. “When I came back to the camp, they asked, ‘Who is this man?’” he says. “I tried to give them something; they wouldn’t take it because they didn’t know me. It took them about a year to get a little bit used to me. Even now, they don’t act normally around me. None of them sleep next to me – they always sleep with their mum. I always feel like a stranger to them. Even when I try to be close, to kiss them, they don’t return it. It’s a strange feeling.”

Ali and his family spent 11 months in the camp after his deportation. He struggled with his mental health and eventually decided to return to Sinjar.

Their house had been completely destroyed. Ali applied for the government compensation of four million Iraqi dinars, but the family has not yet received it. “We are living in someone else’s house,” he explains. “When the owners return, they’ll ask us to leave.” Much of their street remains destroyed or abandoned.

To survive, the family works in orchards planting vegetables, but the income is unstable and seasonal. As Ali puts it, “Here and the camp – both places are bad.”

What needs to change

Although the Islamic State was militarily defeated, the harm inflicted on the Yazidis did not end in 2017. For a small, historically persecuted minority rooted in a single region, prolonged displacement in undignified conditions perpetuates the long-term consequences of genocide. With no viable local solutions, relocation abroad has become the only realistic way for many Yazidis to rebuild their lives.

Crucially, the numbers involved are low. After a peak of around 37,000 applications in 2016, annual asylum claims by Iraqi Yazidis in Germany have recently fallen to around or below 4,000. Germany’s largest refugee support NGO, Pro Asyl, estimates that up to 10,000 Yazidis currently face the risk of deportation back to Iraq.

At a minimum, Germany should grant secure temporary residence to Yazidis who arrived after 2017, with the right to work and family reunification, alongside a clear path to permanent status. Children’s rights must be prioritised to prevent the loss of education and belonging seen in cases like Milisia’s.

A draft law proposed by the German Green Party would offer a three-year residence permit to Yazidis from Iraq who arrived by July 2025, recognising both ongoing instability in Iraq and Germany’s special responsibility after acknowledging the genocide. Whether it will pass remains uncertain.

Ultimately, addressing the Yazidi case requires a tailored approach that recognises genocide survivors as a distinct vulnerable group and provides durable solutions that prevent the continuation of displacement and harm.

Ali still believes the only viable long-term solution for Yazidis is to move abroad. He sees Germany as offering safety, freedom of religion and future opportunities.

There, nobody asks about our religion, nobody cares about that, and we would have a future. Here [Sinjar], it will never be like before 2014. We always have fear inside.

For you: more from our Insights series:

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Aleksandra Ancite-Jepifánova does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. The author would like to thank Ghazi Murad Ismael for assistance with fieldwork in Iraq.

‘We got lazy and complacent’: Swedish pensioners explain how abolishing the wealth tax changed their country

2026-01-19T12:59:56Z

'A country of rich people': a superyacht with helicopter on board heads into Stockholm's harbour. M-Production/Shutterstock

For much of the 20th century, Sweden enjoyed a justifiable reputation as one of Europe’s most egalitarian countries. Yet over the past two decades, it has transformed into what journalist and author Andreas Cervenka calls a “paradise for the super-rich”.

Today, Sweden has one of the world’s highest ratios of dollar billionaires, and is home to numerous “unicorn” startup companies worth at least US$1 billion (£742 million), including the payment platform Klarna and audio streaming service Spotify.

The abolition of the wealth tax (förmögenhetsskatten) 20 years ago is part of this story – along with, in the same year, the introduction of generous tax deductions for housework and home improvement projects. Two decades on, the number of Swedish homes that employ cleaners is one marker of it being an increasingly two-tier country.

As part of my anthropological research into the social relationships that different tax systems produce, I have been working with pensioners in the southern suburbs of Sweden’s capital, Stockholm, to learn how they feel about the decreasing levels of taxation in their later lives.

This trend has been coupled with a gradual shrinking of the welfare state. Many of my interviewees regret that Sweden no longer has a collective project to build a more cohesive society.

“Us pensioners can see the destruction of what we built, what was started when we were small children,” Kjerstin, 74, explained. “I was born after the end of the war and built this society through my life, together with my fellow citizens. [But] with taxes being lowered and the taking away of our social security … we’re not building anything together now.”

Sweden’s gini coefficient, the most common way to measure inequality, has reached 0.3 in recent years (with 0 reflecting total equality and 1 total inequality), up from around 0.2 in the 1980s. The EU as a whole is at 0.29. “There are now 42 billionaires in Sweden – it’s gone up a lot,” Bengt, 70, told me. “Where did they come from? This didn’t used to be a country where people could easily become this rich.”

But like other pensioners I met, Bengt acknowledged his peer group’s role in this shift. “I belong to a generation that remembers how we built Sweden to become a welfare state, but so much has changed. The thing is, we didn’t protest this. We didn’t realise we were becoming this country of rich people.”

Opposite of the American dream

Wealth taxation was introduced in Sweden in 1911, with the amount due based initially on a combination of wealth and income. Around the same time, some of the first moves towards the Swedish welfare state were made – notably, the introduction of the state pension in 1913.

The term used to describe this, folkemmet (“the people’s home”), denoted comfort and security for all in equal measure. It was arguably the ideological opposite of the American dream – its aims not exceptionalism but reasonable living standards and universal services.

After the second world war, the wealth tax – now separated from income – was raised again in several steps up to a historical high of a 4% marginal rate for wealthy individuals in the 1980s, although actual tax burden is is less clear due to complex exemption rules. But total revenues generated from the tax were still relatively low. As a share of Sweden’s annual GDP, it never exceeded 0.4% in the postwar period.

By the end of the 1980s, the political winds were starting to change in Sweden, in line with the shift to privatisation of public services and deregulation of financial markets in several European countries, including the UK under Margaret Thatcher, and the US.

One recurrent criticism of Sweden’s wealth tax was that it was regressive, taxing middle-class wealth (mainly housing and financial assets) while exempting the wealthiest people who owned large firms or held high-up positions in listed companies. Another criticism was that the wealth tax drove tax avoidance, especially in the form of capital flight to offshore tax havens.

While a wealth tax might appear to signal their country’s commitment to socioeconomic equality, my interviewees said it wasn’t something they really thought about much until it was abolished in 2006 by Sweden’s then-rightwing government, following the axing of inheritance tax a year earlier by the previous social democratic government.

“When the wealth tax was abolished,” Marianne, 77, told me, “I wasn’t thinking about millionaires being given a handout, because … we didn’t have lots of rich aristocrats who owned everything. Abolishing the wealth and inheritance tax seemed like a practical thing, not so political.”

Marianne and other pensioners I talked to all told a story of the welfare state having been built through communal effort, as opposed to it being a Robin Hood project – of taking from the rich to give to the poor. This notion of the Swedish welfare state as having been built by equals, by an initial largely rural and poor population, arguably distracted these pensioners from questions of wealth accumulation.

While Sweden still taxes property and various forms of capital income, in hindsight, many of my elderly interviewees now regard the abolition of the wealth tax “on their watch” as a crucial step in reshaping Swedish society away from a social democracy welfare state towards something new – a place of billionaires and increased social disintegration.

“I think about my children, my two daughters who are working and have young families,” Jan, 72, told me. “As children, they were provided for by the welfare state, they went to good schools and had access to football and drama class and the dentist – but now I worry that society is going to get worse for them.”

As with others I spoke to, Jan showed regret at his own role in this change. “I now think that is partly my fault,” he said. “We got lazy and complacent, thought the Swedish welfare state was secure, didn’t worry about abolishing the wealth tax, didn’t think it was going to change anything … but I think it has.”

‘A society that is more humane’

My research suggests the impacts of wealth taxes, or absence of them, are not only about fiscal revenue streams and wealth redistribution. They have wider social ramifications, and can be foundational to people’s vision of society.

Only three European countries currently levy a whole wealth tax: Norway, Spain and Switzerland. In addition, France, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands impose wealth taxes on selected assets, but not on an person’s overall wealth.

In Sweden at least, the question today isn’t just whether wealth taxes work or not, but about what kind of society they project – one of folkhemmet, or a paradise for the rich.

“Tax was just natural [when] I grew up in the 1950s,” Kjerstin recalled. “I remember thinking when I was in second grade, that I will always be taken care of, that I didn’t ever have to worry.”

Reflecting on how different living in Sweden feels today, she said: “Now people don’t want to pay tax – sometimes even I don’t want to pay tax. Everyone is thinking about what they get back and how to get rich, instead of about building something together.”

“I don’t think you can say: ‘I pay this much in taxes and therefore I should get the same back.’ Instead, you should pay attention to the fact that you live in a society that is more humane, where everyone knows from second grade they’ll be taken care of.”

Names of research participants have been changed.

Miranda Sheild Johansson receives funding from UK Research And Innovation.

Elderly men sentenced to life in prison reflect on the reality of ‘hope’ and growing old behind bars

2026-01-14T17:18:49Z

shutterstock/DANAI KHAMPIRANON

We were standing by a large white board in one of the prison’s educational areas, debriefing how our study on hope had gone when the man slipped into the room without a sound. Like the other participants he was over 60, and serving a life sentence. He had grey hair, and was very tall and slim.

He slowly picked up a chair before slamming it down. I invited him to join us, but he stayed still while the others watched. Then he dragged the chair across the floor with a piercing scrape. I could hear my own pulse.

As I began to speak I noticed he was crying. At first, it sounded like a whisper of sobs, but then it got louder. He rose abruptly, and came up close to me. I wrote in my fieldwork notes from that day:

My heart is racing. He asks, towering over me: ‘How dare you ask us about hope.’ The alarm blares. Guards escort him out. The others sit in stunned silence, eyes locked on us, waiting for a reaction.

In the months that followed, I would meet many other men for whom hope was not necessarily a lifeline as is so commonly assumed, but a burden that they had to carry, sometimes painfully.

Hope is not a soft word in prison. It shapes how people cope with their sentence and it determines whether – and how – they engage with staff and other prisoners. It shapes whether they commit to vocational and educational activities, and it sustains connections with people on the outside.

For older life-sentenced prisoners specifically, hope becomes interlinked with accelerated ageing, with bullying from younger prisoners, and with the fear of release into an unknown world.

Some people may think these men do not deserve hope. But the places that extinguish it do not produce safer prisons. Instead, they produce people who are damaged, isolated, and less capable of reintegrating into society.

The hope project

My project (In search of Hope: the case of elderly life-sentenced prisoners) began in August 2022. We were investigating how the “right to hope” – as defined by Judge Ann Power-Forde in her concurring opinion to the European Court of Human Rights judgment Vinter and others v the UK (2013)– translates behind prison walls for older people serving life sentences, many of whom face slim prospects of release due to their advanced age and the length of their prison sentence.

The research was carried out across three English prisons over 12 months by myself and research associate, Helen Gair, with a small team of research assistants. We conducted fieldwork in a Category A prison (reserved for people presenting the highest levels of risk), a Category C (mid-security level prison, often aimed at training and resettlement), and a Category D (open prison or the last stage before release).

Each facility had its own smell and sound. The spatial layout and daily rhythm varied too. For instance, the high security site was an old red brick Victorian building, and the wings were arranged in a half panopticon (circular) design. Outside the main block, guard dogs were walked on a strip of green that ran along a ten-metre-high wall. Inside it was loud; lockdowns were frequent, and it smelled of sweat and mould.

What is hope? shutterstock/CeltStudio

In the open prison, the smell of cannabis drifted through the grounds. Men greeted us in grey tracksuits, often carrying disposable cups of tea. There were ducks and a pond and a RAF plane on display.

In the Category C prison, we often got lost. The alphabetical alignment of buildings made little sense to us. We had our own set of keys which meant we could move around independently. However, rusty locks slowed us down often, and every gate and door had to be opened and closed behind us.

Men aged 50 and above and serving life sentences were invited to participate. We collected diaries, completed ethnographic prison observations, and ran one-to-one interviews with each participant.

Additionally, interviews were conducted with prison staff, both working in frontline and office-based roles, to get a sense of how those who work closest to ageing life-sentenced prisoners perceived hope and whether prison practices preserved or restrained it. Overall, we wanted to find out how hope was experienced by prisoners and how it was handled as a prison practice.

Idealised hope v prison reality

In the 2010s, a case was brought before the European Court of Human Rights by Jeremy Bamber, Douglas Vinter and Peter Moor. They had each been convicted of murder in the UK and been given whole-life orders – the most severe form of life sentence.

This means that by law, they were sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison with no minimum term set for parole or release. Only a small percentage of people get such severe sentences: Myra Hindley and the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe being two examples.

On July 9, 2013, the human rights court ruled that whole-life orders which do not include any prospect of release or review would amount to inhuman or degrading treatment, contrary to Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The notion of a “right to hope” was first mentioned by Judge Ann Power-Forde’s concurring judgment:

… Even those who commit the most abhorrent and egregious of acts … nevertheless retain their essential humanity and carry within themselves the capacity to change. Long and deserved though their prison sentences may be, they retain the right to hope that, someday, they may have atoned for the wrongs which they have committed. They ought not to be deprived entirely of such hope. To deny them the experience of hope would be to deny a fundamental aspect of their humanity and to do that would be degrading.

The right to hope is thus vested in a possibility of release and review. What this means is that there must be a realistic possibility that any prisoner sentenced to life imprisonment be considered, at some point in time, for release or that the justification for their continued detention needs to be reviewed.

But how does the right to hope account for the fact of ageing in prison?

The rapid and global “greying” of the prison population indeed complicates the human rights jurisprudencial understanding of a right to hope. As of March 2025, there were 87,919 people in prison in England and Wales, with nearly one in five (18%) aged 50 or older, according to the Ministry of Justice.

Compounding matters, life-sentenced prisoners now make up around 10% of the sentenced population, and this group is ageing rapidly. Almost a third of “lifers” are over 50. As a result, old, life-sentenced prisoners are the fastest-growing subgroup in the system.

This phenomenon combined with the current overcrowding crisis produces a range of managerial and ethical challenges: bed spaces are tied up for decades, healthcare and social care demands are on a steep rise, and the pressures on ill-equipped prison staff increase.

The myth of prison release

One important finding from our project is that parole and the possibility of release during a prisoner’s life span becomes somewhat of a myth for those serving life sentences at an advanced age. Usually, life-sentenced prisoners are given a minimum tariff, which is a period when they are not eligible for parole. This legal principle does not account for age however. Dean, 62 , was a life-sentenced prisoner at the Category A prison who had served six years. He told us how unrealistic parole felt in light of his age:

I will be 80 years old before my first parole hearing and in all honesty I don’t know if I will reach that milestone. Although my health is reasonable, I’m on all kinds of medication to keep me going but incarceration has a way of dragging you down so I am not optimistic.

Trevor was 73 when we interviewed him in the Category C prison and had been inside for 27 years. He was sat in a wheelchair and had an elastic band wrapped around his middle finger and thumb. He explained to us that it helped him hold a pen.

He described years of postponed parole hearings, medical delays, and transfers to lower security prisons being denied because his health needs could not be met in open prison conditions. He asked us simply:

If you were in my situation would you live in hope or would you resign yourself to your future?

The experience of no longer believing in release is supported by official data that shows that few prisoners sentenced to life get released during their lifetime.

One in five lifers are now beyond their tariff, often by several years with age-related barriers to parole contributing to prolonged incarceration. What we noticed during fieldwork was that older prisoners often struggled to access or complete accredited programmes because of mobility issues and cognitive impairment, but also due to managerial prioritisation of younger prisoners or those convicted of shorter sentences.

Rising deaths in England and Wales among older prisoners further underscores the illusory prospect of release.

Nearly nine in ten of the 192 deaths from natural causes in the year 2025 involved older prisoners and the number of people in prison requiring palliative care continues to grow.

From 2016 to 2020, hospitals recorded 190 admissions of older male prisoners with a palliative care diagnosis. In roughly 40% of those cases, cancer was the main condition on entry. The charity, Inquest, reported in 2020 that many of the deaths in prison were neither inevitable nor unforeseeable, pointing instead to systemic failings in healthcare provision, communication, emergency intervention, and medication management.

Inside, looking out. shutterstock/fran_kie

Building on this, academic scholars Philippa Tomczak and Ròisìn Mulgrew argued that classifying deaths in custody as “natural” obscure the ways in which prison environments contribute to deaths that might otherwise have been avoided.

Additionally, research has repeatedly linked self-harm and suicide patterns to experiences of hopelessness and social isolation. The participants in our study similarly tied the removal of hope to suicides, citing examples they had witnessed in prison.

In his prison diary, a participant with thick rectangular glasses called Ian, 65, who had served 33 years of his life sentence and was now held in a Category C prison, wrote:

With the absent (sic) of hope you have despair. I have known prisoners who have committed suicide, they had no hope or expectations only misery and despair.

So there appears to be a contradiction between the legal possibility of release and its practical improbability in the context of old and ageing, life-sentenced prisoners.

The fear of release

Beyond the practical improbability of release, many participants described how much they feared the world they would hypothetically re-enter one day. Several participants in their 60s and 70s reflected on how they no longer recognised the world outside.

For them, the time spent in prison combined with their physical and cognitive decline has institutionalised them. They felt they could not fare alone outside prison rules and environments. One man named Roy, who had spent decades in various Category A prisons wrote in his diary:

I have no hope of, or real wish to leave prison, where I am now completely institutionalised, I have no responsibilities other than abiding by prison rules, and few expenses.

Another frail-looking man named Russell, 68, described in his diary (which he completed from his Category C cell) how the very idea of a future had become hollow: “It’s difficult really because like I say, I haven’t got any hope of getting out of prison as far as I’m concerned. That is it. I’m in prison and that’s as far as it will go.”

Practical matters such as technological advances and housing also made the very thought of release overwhelming. Gary, 63, who had served 24 years, wrote poignantly about his fears of release, saying: “Release frightens me because of the label that has been firmly given to me and that brings its own problems. Where will I live? How will I live?”

A 73-year-old participant named Kevin, who was transferred during the project from a Category C to an open prison, spoke about how, after 21 years in prison, things will have changed too much on the outside for him to deal with. As he stood on the doorstep of freedom, he worried about getting his head around new technology and accessing simple things like his pension. He said: “Technology has moved on at a phenomenal pace, seems very scary to me … I should stay here in prison where everything is regulated and structured rather than going out to something that is quite alien to me.”

These feelings are exacerbated by the erosion of social networks, the death of family and friends, and the disappearance of any meaningful horizon. Social isolation means that the world they would be reintegrating into has become alien and they will have to navigate it mostly alone. Kevin added:

People that I used to call friends no longer want to know me or have died. One thing for sure that I can [say] is true, you certainly find out who your true friends are … when you come to prison and especially if you come to prison for a long time.

This sense of destroyed horizons, where release holds no promise and the outside world has become even more terrifying than the cell, has been dramatised in popular culture.

In The Shawshank Redemption (1994) the character Brooks, released after 50 years inside, finds himself unable to cope with the pace and impersonality of the modern world. His suicide becomes a haunting metaphor for the crushing effect of institutionalisation that hollows out the self and the possibility of meaningful social reintegration.

When hoping becomes harmful

Other prisoners we spoke to seemingly decided it was more beneficial for them to give up on hope altogether. Some – like Barry -– wondered if giving up on hope of release would be less torturous.

Barry was 65 when we spoke to him and has spent over four decades in prison on a life sentence. He’s tall and slim. When he walked in, we noticed he had a limp and used a cane. The first time we met, he sat with his hands clasped, speaking in a measured voice that occasionally broke into a laugh, not from humour but more from what I felt like was exhaustion. Though parole is technically available to him, he has come to see the pursuit of release not as hopeful but as harmful.

Over years of disappointments, Barry wondered if living with no hope would be less painful and felt it had become “pointless” to hope. He wrote in his diary:

Hope is when I want something to happen or something to be true … I often ask myself would it be kinder to live with no hope and just live with a ‘wait and see’ kind of attitude.

Indeed, every parole hearing postponed, every dashed expectation had eroded the value of hoping. Ultimately, giving up on hope is captured as something that eventually preserves mental health. As Barry added:

An empty case of hope is healthy, I say that because of the amount of men I have seen become ill; disappointment becomes despair, becomes depression, becomes mental ill health … then when you stop hoping, you start to recover and you no longer feel hopeless, as you are not hoping for anything. So hope is a paradox, it can disappoint or make you feel there is a real possibility of things to come.

He recalled reading about an American woman sentenced to life without parole who had begged for the death penalty instead. Her explanation (“I don’t just want to be alive, I want to be able to live”) resonated with him so powerfully that he said it, “almost knocked me off my chair”. He recognised in her plea the same cruel paradox he faced: that to prolong his existence in hopeless conditions was no life at all. His conclusion was irrevocable:

I understand more than most the need for hope, but all the years that I have been in prison and all the hopes I have had destroyed, I see hope as an enemy.

But then Barry equally admitted that he still hoped, no matter what. His hope was like a human natural reflex, over which he had no control, it just happened. He said: “We all hope … I hope I’ll get out on my next parole.”

What then, is hope in prison? Is it cruel and torturous or is it a human feature that brings relief and drive?

Recalibrating hope

We found hope meant different things to different people. It is not just about release. Some needed detailed plans, others focused on the day to day. Sometimes hope shifted towards modest goals that are tied to imagined places outside prison: a quiet retirement, a chance to study, to garden.

Terry was 65 and had served 38 years in category A prison. He told us that all he hoped for was “a quiet life in retirement”, while Russell, who was about the same age but had served over 12 years and was in a Category C when he wrote his diary, said that he hoped to, “… someday be released and to live the remaining years I have left in a small bungalow with a small garden in a village miles away from my old area of England. Have a pet cat.”

Green shoots: can hope recover from life in prison? shutterstock/GetmanecInna

Others cast their hopes in more detailed and concrete plans about what the future would look like. Carl, 60, who enjoyed cooking and working out, for example, said he hoped to move in with his daughter and grandchildren for a while in an area where his ambition is to build his own house. He added: “I designed and roughly costed the development plan that helped to reinforce the hope that these plans were achievable.”

In the moment

But other participants recalibrated hope to more immediate aspirations set in the present, and in day-to-day encounters.

Barry said: “My hope is that I continue to live in the moment … You know, cause right now I’m in this office with you two guys, it’s calm. It’s nice. It’s peaceful. It’s a nice moment. But I’m not gonna think about what it’s gonna be like at 4pm because I might walk out that door and straight into a prison riot.”

Russell agreed, adding: “Looking for the future, I just go from one day to the next. It’s no good planning too far ahead.”

This shift of hope raises questions about how prisons shape and even limit the ways people can access and imagine their futures.

Another participant, Craig, who was 66 and had only served just over five years in the Category A prison when we met him wrote: “… you personalise hope to suit the circumstances.”

For the institution and those working in prison, these attitudes towards hope could be perceived as successful because prisoners sentenced to the longest sentences demonstrated a commitment to live a crime-free life, set in the present moment, focused on small menial things that will not raise any risk for management.

But when hope becomes so short-termist and bland, we are able to capture a shift in the very logic of imprisonment – one which is less about nourishing transformation aimed at resocialisation, and more about the life-long containment of decaying and dying bodies.

Hope matters

This article opened with a man telling my colleagues and I: “How dare you ask us about hope?” That moment has echoed throughout this study, both as an outburst that shows how prison research can be fraught with complexity but can also propel further and deeper reflection on humanitarian ideals such as hope.

When people in prison speak of the cruelty and fallacy of hope, you begin to wonder how much beauty and promise hope really holds in spaces of high control and constraint.

When transposed to prisons, hope no longer seems to be attached to an open horizon, evocative of lightness and liberty found anew. Instead, it represents dissociation from the outside world, and the cause of frustration, mistrust and a sense of abandonment.

Hope in prison exposes a disconnect between abstract legal humanitarian ideals and the empirical realities of ageing while incarcerated for long periods of time. And this claim could probably be extended to other settings of heightened regulation and tight monitoring, such as care homes, immigration detention centres, or even youth justice facilities.

The decision to depart from hope’s conventional, perhaps slightly romanticised meaning, and to recalibrate it towards real, daily conditions could nonetheless illustrate new ways for how older life-sentenced prisoners (and others under constraint) regain agency and keep going.

Ultimately, hope matters – not only for the people I met and interviewed – but also for broader society.

Imprisonment marked by hopelessness is linked to deteriorating mental and physical health, increasing pressure on prison healthcare and, upon release, on community health and social care services.

This is exacerbated for older prisoners released after decades inside. Hope is not a sentimental indulgence, but a condition that shapes whether imprisonment prepares people to live safely beyond prison or releases them with profound unmet needs. Regimes that erode hope risk merely displacing, rather than resolving, social harm.

For you: more from our Insights series:

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Marion Vannier receives funding from the UK Research and Innovation Future Leader Fellowship.

Why the mad artistic genius trope doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny

2026-01-12T13:13:53Z

Vincent van Gogh sliced off his ear with a knife during a psychotic episode. Ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky developed schizophrenia and spent the last 30 years of his life in hospital. Virginia Woolf lived with bipolar disorder, eventually taking her own life as she felt another deep depression beginning.

Many famous creative artists have lived with severe mental illness. Catherine Zeta-Jones, Mariah Carey, Demi Lovato, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Mel Gibson have all reported diagnoses of bipolar disorder. Yayoi Kusama, Sylvia Plath, Kurt Cobain and Syd Barrett spoke about experiences of psychosis. Speculation abounds about whether Amy Winehouse, Marilyn Monroe and Ernest Hemingway lived with borderline personality disorder.

The concept of the “mad creative genius” harks back to antiquity. Artists in the Renaissance and Romantic periods would sometimes assume eccentric personalities to distinguish themselves as extraordinary individuals who had made Faustian bargains for their talents.

Edvard Munch, the Norwegian painter, described his “sufferings” as “part of myself and my art … their destruction would destroy my art.” Poet Edith Sitwell, who experienced depression, reportedly used to lie in an open coffin to inspire her poetry.

In 1995, a study of 1,005 biographies written between 1960 and 1990 even proposed that people in the creative professions had a higher rate of severe psychopathology than the general population.

So how does this square with the fact that artistic expression is beneficial for our mental health? As I explain in my new book Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health, there is a wealth of scientific evidence on these benefits.

However, the reality for professional artists can be a bit different. While they tend to report enhanced overall wellbeing, the life of an artist can be psychologically challenging. They have to endure everything from precarious careers to professional competition.

Additionally, fame brings stress, challenging lifestyles, an increased risk of substance abuse, and an inevitable but unhealthy focus on oneself. In a 1997 study, scientists analysed the number of first-personal pronouns – I, me, my, mine and myself – in songs by Cobain and Cole Porter (who himself had bouts of severe depression). As their fame increased, both saw a statistically significant increase in their use of these pronouns.

Linking artistry and severe mental illness

But what about artists who developed mental illness before becoming famous, or even before becoming artists? Genetics research has uncovered some shared genes that may underlie severe mental illness and creativity.

A variation in the gene NRG1 is associated with both increased risk of psychosis and higher scores on questionnaires that measure people’s creative thinking. Variations in dopamine-receptor genes have been linked with both psychosis and various creative processes like novelty seeking and decreased inhibitions. It’s a mixed bag of findings, however – not all studies show such links.

Beyond genetics, there are also some personality traits that can be common both to mental illness and creativity, including openness to experience, novelty-seeking and sensitivity. It’s possible to see how such research could provide a lens for viewing artists like Van Gogh, Nijinsky and Woolf.

Yet creativity and mental health difficulties can act against one another. For instance, Woolf described her depressive episodes of bipolar disorder as a well: “Down there, I can’t write or read.” So while some people with severe mental illnesses may make art, not everyone can all the time.

What’s more, when we look for signs of a link between severe mental illness and creative pursuits at a population level, the evidence isn’t clear-cut. In 2013, a Swedish study tracked over 40 years of data from 1.2 million people in national patient registers, including medical records of diagnoses, mental health treatments and cause of death.

The researchers found that people with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, anxiety disorders and unipolar depression were actually less likely than the average person to be in creative professions. The only slight exception was bipolar disorder, where people had around 8% higher odds of being in a creative profession.

But this study also found something arguably more intriguing: the parents and siblings of people with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder and bipolar disorder were more likely to be in creative professions. It’s not hard to think of examples amongst famous artists: James Joyce’s daughter and David Bowie’s half-brother both had schizophrenia. Why might this pattern exist?

People who are genetically susceptible to severe mental illness but don’t develop the full conditions may instead have milder versions. Minor hypomania, for instance, involves elevated moods but not with the intensity of bipolar disorder. Schizotypy involves divergent thinking and heightened emotion without the severity of schizophrenia.

These conditions have been associated with creative processes like reduced inhibitions, defocused attention and neural hyperconnectivity (the ability to make cross-sensory associations like hearing colours or tasting musical notes).

Perhaps the siblings and parents of people with mental illness tend to be more likely to have such conditions, and this explains why they choose creative professions. Having said that, not all creative people work in a creative profession – for many, creative hobbies are their outlet away from work.

Essentially, the science suggests there may be some shared processes between severe mental illness and creative processes like the arts. But it’s not the clear linkage that anecdotes might lead us to believe. The myth of the “mad creative genius” is overly simplistic. It also risks perpetuating stigma rather than understanding, so it’s perhaps better put to bed.

It seems more productive to focus on the value that creative engagement can bring to support our mental health. Whether people have a mental illness or are just dealing with day-to-day moods and emotions, there are more studies emerging every week that are building our understanding of the tangible, meaningful benefits the arts can have. This research is revealing how artists, clinicians and communities can work together to build safe, accessible, inclusive opportunities to enjoy the arts.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and contains links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Daisy Fancourt receives funding from Wellcome, UK Research and Innovation, the Prudence Trust, and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

How I used AI to transform myself from a female dance artist to an all-male post-punk band – and what that means for other musicians

2026-01-05T17:16:10Z

Intelligent Band Machine. Real or AI generated? Priscilla Angelique-Page

When you click on the Spotify profile of Intelligent Band Machine you will see an image of three young men staring moodily back into the camera. Their profile confirms that they are a “British band”, “influenced by the post-punk scene” and trying to capture the spirit of bands like The Cure “while carving out their own unique sound”. When you listen to their music you might be reminded of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis.

If you dig a little deeper and read about them on their record label’s page you will find that Cameron is the lead singer and his musical tastes were shaped by the concerts he attended at Nottingham’s Rock City nightclub. Tyler, the drummer, was indeed inspired by The Cure, as well as U2, and The Smiths, while guitarist, Antonio, blends his Italian mother’s love of classic Italian folk songs with his British father’s passion for The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

What these profiles don’t say is that Intelligent Band Machine is not real, at least not in the human sense. And I should know, because I created them.

I used a range of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools, as well as my skills as a professional songwriter and sound engineer to make their debut album, Welcome to NTU, and I released it on my dedicated AI record label, XRMeta Records in May 2025.

You might ask why an independently releasing singer-songwriter and music producer like me would create an artificial band. As well as being a musician, I’m an academic with a background in computer science, carrying out research about how GenAI can be used for music.

I had reservations about these tools and how they might affect me as a musician. I had heard about various AI controversies like “fake” Drake, and artists like Grimes embracing GenAI in 2023. So, I was also intrigued by the possibilities.

Over 100 million people have tried Suno, an AI music generation platform that can create songs with vocals and instrumentation from simple text prompts. More than 100 million tracks have been created using the Mubert API, which allows streaming to platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Twitch and Instagram; and according to Deezer 28% of released music is fully AI-generated.

It was time for me to investigate what these tools could do. This is the story of how I experimented with GenAI and was transformed from a dance artist to a post-punk soft rock band.

GenAI has changed everything

In my early days of songwriting one of the first pieces of equipment I bought was a Panasonic RQ-2745, a small slim portable cassette tape recorder that allowed me to record rough drafts of vocals on an audio cassette tape.

When cheap products like the Sony cfs-w30 boombox began to incorporate double cassette decks, I could overdub songs and add choruses or instruments like flute or guitar at home. If I wanted a quality recording, I had to book a recording studio. I became an expert at splicing tape to remove vocal parts from the tape recording or to fix tape jams.

Cutting and taping, became cutting and pasting as I experimented with the very early free digital music sequencers that were included on a disk I found on the cover of a PC magazine. I felt liberated when sequencers like Cubase, Pro Tools, and Logic allowed high quality recordings to be produced at home. This, along with the significant reduction in the cost of studio equipment, led to the emergence of the bedroom producer and the proliferation of the 808 sound. This deep, booming, bassline can be heard in hits like It’s Tricky by RUN DMC, Emergency Room by Rihanna, and Drunk in Love by Beyoncé.

Digital distribution and social media then paved the way for self-releasing independent artists like me to communicate directly with fans, sell music, and bypass record labels.

An example of an early portable tape cassette recorder. Shutterstock/Dmitry Naumov

Yet during all of these changes musicians still needed the skills and knowledge to create their songs. Like many musicians I honed my skills over several years, learning to play the guitar, flute and piano, and developing sound engineering skills. Even when AI powered tools began to be incorporated into digital audio workstations, a musician’s skill and knowledge was still needed to use these tools effectively.

Being able to create music from text prompts changed this.

Not since the introduction of music streaming services in the late 1990s has there been such a dramatic shift in music composition and listening technologies. Now non-musicians can create studio quality music in minutes without the extensive training that I had, and without having to buy instruments or studio equipment.

Now anyone can do this. It was time for me to learn what these tools could do.

I typically produce RnB/neo soul, nu-jazz and dance music, although I can write songs for multiple genres of music. For the experiment, I wanted to try a genre that I do not usually produce music for.

I tested about 60 different GenAI tools and platforms. These included standalone tools that focus on one task, like MIDI generation (musical data that can be played back on a keyboard or music sequencer). I also tried AI music studios. These platforms have user friendly interfaces that combine a range of AI tools to support lyric, music, image and video creation.

Suno and Udio were two of the best platforms. They can generate songs with complex vocal melodies and harmonies across a range of genres, with the best outputs being difficult to distinguish from what human musicians can create. Both Telisha “Nikki” Jones and music mogul Timbaland are said to have used Suno to create music for their AI-generated artists.

In June 2025, Timbaland announced the signing of his AI artist TaTa to his dedicated AI record label, Stage Zero. In September 2025 Jones was reported to have signed a US$3 million (about £2.3 million) deal with Hallwood Media for her AI-generated artist Xania Monet.

At the time of my experiment in March/April 2025, both Suno and Udio had issues, such as silence gaps, tempo changes, inconsistent vocal quality, and variations in genre. Sometimes the voice might change within the song. There was limited control in terms of editing, and the audio quality could vary within a single track or across a series of songs.

After trying several GenAI music platforms I decided to use Udio due to the quality of its output and its favourable terms and conditions at that time. Taking inspiration from pop-rock and post-punk bands like Joy Division and The Cure, I started the journey towards creating a new persona.

Using GenAI to produce one or two good songs was quite simple. Producing an album of 14 songs that sounded as if they were played by the same band was more challenging, particularly generating the same male voice and musical style for each song.

The songs were either far too similar to each other or had other issues such as the voice changing, or the instruments sounding too different. A careful listen to the songs in Unfolded by the AI artist Xania Monet will reveal similar inconsistencies. For example, you can hear a difference in the voice that is generated for the first song, This Aint No Tryout, compared to Back When Love Was Real.

GenAI can’t write (decent) lyrics

My first task was to create the lyrics. I generated about 1,000 songs using Udio and found repeated words and phrases in the lyrics like “neon”, “whisper”, and “we are, we are, we are”, appearing both within and across the two user accounts I created. Themes like darkness, shadows, and light were also repeated within the lyrics for a significant number of songs.

GenAI just couldn’t write lyrics with the complexity or playfulness I needed, so I chose to write the lyrics for the album myself and used a semi-autobiographical narrative. This allowed me to maintain a story across the album; from arriving at Nottingham Trent University and settling into student accommodation, to experiencing university life, graduating and leaving.

I could interweave current affairs like the closure of Nottingham’s Victoria Centre Market in the song Goodbye Vicky Market. I included lines that referenced Nottingham’s historical figures like Alan Sillitoe, who wrote The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and the author D.H. Lawrence, in the song, Books.

After writing the lyrics I generated the music. There were issues with prompt adherence. I tested prompts of different lengths. In some cases, prompts were partly or wholly ignored. I might write a prompt asking for one genre and a different genre would be produced.

There were also issues with the synthetic voice pronouncing some of the lyrics. For example, it could not pronounce “NTU” or “Sillitoe” and I had to rewrite some of the lyrics phonetically or edit the audio to get the correct pronunciation for certain words.

I relied on my sound engineering skills; extending the outputs, editing, mixing, remixing, and manually recording vocals in Cubase to achieve a coherent final mix. This took a significant amount of time. In fact, editing the Udio outputs took so much time it would have been easier to recreate the music myself. I can write a song in ten minutes, and I sometimes record myself freestyling lyrics for an entire song directly in Cubase, so this was frustrating.

I encountered similar issues with prompt adherence when generating images and video. When using Kling AI to create images of the band members, I followed its prompt engineering guide. However, I had to generate hundreds of images and edit them with external tools to achieve the final band photos.

Generating video was equally tricky. One way to create a video is to upload a photo, which becomes the first frame. The rest of the video is generated based on the prompt. However, when I uploaded Cameron’s profile image to Kling AI, the initial frames of the ten-second video resembled him. But by the end of the video, Cameron often morphed into someone else, and this happened frequently when generating video.

Prompts for camera instructions, such as zoom and pan, were frequently ignored. I also had to edit out scenes with other problems, such as the appearance of extra fingers or an additional leg on the band members.

All this wasn’t cheap either. With 8,000 Kling AI credits at a cost of US$64.99 (about £50), I could generate about 40 ten-second videos, but many were unusable.

Music generation is cheaper. Paying between US$24 and US$30 (roughly £18-£24) for a monthly subscription might allow a user to create between 2,000 and 3,000 songs, depending on how the “credits” are used. I was very surprised to discover how quickly these song credits can be consumed. Every error or song that didn’t suit my taste still cost credits.

Eventually, after generating thousands of songs, hundreds of images and video, using tools like Duck.ai to create the band’s biographies, and spending many hours editing the outputs; Cameron, Tyler and Antonio began to emerge as the band.

AI-generated band Intelligent Band Machine: Antonio, Cameron, and Tyler. Priscilla Angelique-Page

Something unexpected happened

I have always been passionate about creating my own music. As much as I love writing songs, the poor royalty payouts I was receiving had become disheartening. A song I recorded in 2001 and released in 2011 called Only Heaven Can Compare was streamed about 1 million times in France during 2024 but I only received about £21 in royalties.

Prior to streaming, had my song been downloaded by just 10,000 people, I would have been paid about £6,900 (69p per download). Artists like Kate Nash have raised concerns about the poor royalty payouts to musicians, citing her £500,000 payout for over 100 million plays of her song “Foundations”.

But as I created the band’s album something unexpected started to happen. I began to enjoy creating music again. The frustrations with using GenAI was balanced by wonder and curiosity.

At times Udio was able to generate vocals that were so realistic I could hardly believe they were created by an AI model. There were moments when I laughed, when I was really moved, and even had chills when I heard some of the songs.

Lyrics that once lay dormant in multiple lever arch files on my bookshelf began to find new life through these generative tools, allowing me to rapidly test them across multiple genres.

I decided to take this experiment further.

After carefully selecting a set of songs I had written many years ago, I created a new persona, Jake Davy Smith. For his 14 track album, called I’ll Be Right Here, which was released on November 22, 2025, I used Suno’s v5 model to generate studio quality music that matched my original vision.

Suno’s extensive editing tools allow users to upload vocals, create a cover song, and edit the music, lyrics, or voice with greater precision than their earlier models. This helped me nearly recreate my original songs. The track Calling is an example of a rock ballad I wrote years ago, recorded and didn’t release.

Conflicting emotions

Reflecting on this experiment, I found myself with conflicting views about using GenAI. These tools are fast and affordable (in some cases, completely free). They can produce instant results. I now have tools that I can use to quickly reimagine my old songs.

I can use multiple personas to bring my lyrics to life. I am Priscilla Angelique. I am Intelligent Band Machine. I am Jake Davy Smith. I am Moombahtman 25, a male African American moombahton artist who combines hip hop with Latin American beats, and I have many more personas.

I am a “multiple persona musician” or MPM, a term I’ve created to define my new musical identity. Musicians having alter egos isn’t new, but GenAI has completely changed how this is done.

However, there’s another side to this. Human musicians are now having to compete with algorithms capable of producing high quality music at scale – as well as with each other.

These tools are improving rapidly, and the issues I experienced when using Udio to create the album for Intelligent Band Machine in March/April 2025 have already been addressed in Suno’s v5 model. It is now easier to create a persona with a consistent voice. Users can upload their own songs and also create cover versions of their songs.

Creating the album for Intelligent Band Machine took about one month and there were multiple issues with trying to create consistently sounding high quality AI-generated songs. I spent hours reviewing thousands of outputs and then more time editing the final set of curated songs in Cubase.

My experience was very different when I created the album for Jake Davy Smith. I used lyrics I had already written, generated between five and 20 versions of each song, and spent far less time editing them. The process was faster, however, there were still some issues. Changes in Jake’s voice occurred, though they were less frequent and easier to correct. There were also problems with pronunciation, but I could now quickly regenerate the audio. In essence, what had previously taken a month now took only a week.

Ethical issues and data collection

Yet beneath this lies a further internal conflict related to the data used to train these AI models or, as music journalist Richard Smirke describes it, “the largest IP theft in human history”. It is this issue that has made a technology that ought to have been celebrated as one of the biggest technological achievements in decades, one of the most contested instead.

Chatbots like ChatGPT, estimated to have 1 billion users worldwide, have been described by the linguist and activist Noam Chomsky as both “marvels of machine learning” and the “banality of evil”. Image generators like OpenAI’s DALL-E have also come under fire. Critics like Ted Chiang challenge whether AI can make art and other commentators have criticised the lack of cultural diversity in image generation.

In addition to this, in 2024 the UK government announced it was considering an exception to copyright law that would allow industry to use copyrighted works for AI training without compensating the creators. This led to protests. More than 1,000 musicians released a silent album called Is This What We Want in protest against unauthorised AI training. The artists included Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn, and The Clash.

Elton John and Paul McCartney also voiced their opposition to changes in copyright law that would benefit AI companies. The mystery about whether a band called The Velvet Sundown was AI-generated added fuel to the fire and sparked further debate during the summer of 2025.

Yet AI companies have been winning, or at least partially winning, court cases. In November 2025 Getty Images “lost its claim for secondary infringement of copyright” against Stability AI. Other AI companies are making deals, and this includes Udio and Suno’s recent deals with music companies. However, more alternative platforms are emerging. Klay.vision is negotiating with the big labels prior to launching, and Soundraw only uses music created in-house for AI training.

So GenAI is here to stay, and musicians will need to adapt. Library music, background music, and music for social media or film can easily be created with AI. However, there are risks. The risk that similar music may be generated for other users; the risk that any uploaded songs may be used for training data. Then there’s the risk that these tools may inadvertently generate something that breaches someone else’s IP.

One way for musicians to safely use GenAI is by training models using their own data, as YACHT did when they used their back catalogue of songs as training data for a new album. In this way musicians can have full control over the outputs. This is something I will be exploring for the next stage of my research.

What AI can’t do

My transformation has been anything but straightforward. It has been marked by the deep frustration I encountered when initially using these tools, an ongoing conflict about how these tools are trained, and moments of genuine amazement. The albums I created may be imperfect, but they are a clear departure from my usual style and show how GenAI can support musical creativity.

Priscilla Angelique-Page aka Priscilla Angelique, wearing an AI-generated jacket and shirt. Priscilla Angelique-Page

Financially, the albums are unlikely to recoup the cost of creating them, as independent musicians may need hundreds of millions of streams to earn a decent income from music. Even a few million streams of the songs will barely cover the various fees for music, image and video generation of around £140. Merchandise, licensing, sync deals and other revenue streams will likely remain important sources of income for musicians, whether they are human or AI-generated.

On the legal side, one possible way forward is for AI companies to make open-source versions of their models freely available for offline use. Some already have, but for those that haven’t, it seems fair that if they have used our data to build these systems, they should allow broader access to the models themselves.

New technologies might change how music is produced. We have gone from clapping to drumming, and from using drum machines in recording studios to generating “new” sounds with AI. Yet now that I have completed these experiments, I realise that one thing remains the same.

Whether I am cutting tape using scissors, cutting and pasting in a sequencer like Cubase, or regenerating parts in an AI music studio like Suno, human creativity is still an essential part of the process. Using GenAI was transformative, yet it was my creative decisions that shaped the songs, the albums, the avatars for my personas, their biographies, and the overall vision. This is something that AI cannot do – at least, not for now.

For you: more from our Insights series:

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Priscilla Angelique-Page does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Meet today’s hunt saboteurs – ‘doctors, teachers, even farmers’ working with police to bring illegal fox hunts to justice

2025-12-22T17:53:27Z

Pseudonyms are used throughout this article. The authors’ interviews with hunt saboteurs and police officers were carried out on condition of anonymity.

Alison joined her local hunt saboteur group in her late 30s after seeing an anti-fox hunting stall at a local festival. At that time she had “no idea” that fox hunting was still taking place across the UK, despite it having been illegal in England and Wales since 2005 – and earlier in Scotland.

Alison has since made strong friendships through “sabbing” which, she admits, has become “close to almost an obsession” for her:

It’s normally a Saturday … We dress up. We make sure our camera batteries are charged, all the equipment is ready. We get into the sabotage cars, go to the location … and basically follow them in the field. The name of the game is to keep an eye on the hunt at all times with cameras, and observe what they are doing.

Numerous hunt saboteurs across the UK follow this routine throughout each fox hunting season, which runs from September to May. Time spent in the field following the hunt can be strained and perilous. “We drag each other out of the mud … and keep each other’s back,” Alison says.

Saboteurs deliberately attempt to disrupt the hunt, placing themselves in dangerous situations, often on foot as they run after hunters on horseback. As tensions run high, threats and physical assaults can come from both sides of this long-standing argument. With some hunts now regularly employing private security, the levels of violence have reportedly escalated.

Our research on the changing nature of hunt sabotage is part of a broader study of “citizen-led policing”. We see this as a contemporary phenomenon in many different walks of life – from antisocial behaviour in neighbourhoods to acquisitive retail crime – whereby concerned citizens take action against what they regard as security issues which are not being adequately addressed. In some instances, the boundaries between concerned citizens acting with good intentions and vigilantism can become blurred.

In our conversations with saboteurs spanning the last three hunting seasons, many have reported being threatened by hunt members and supporters, physically assaulted, vehicles damaged, followed home, doxxed online and dead animals left at their properties. But what keeps them coming back, according to Stuart, is a unifying commitment to ending the “cruelty” of fox hunting: “Everything stems from that, and we must never lose sight of that.”

‘The law needs revisiting’

Lizzie is a middle-class professional working full-time in a demanding job. But she spends much of her spare time roaming farmland in the south of England, disrupting fox hunts and gathering evidence of law breaking.

In this sense, Lizzie is typical of many hunt saboteurs we have encountered in our research. She reflects a move away from hunt sabotage as an activity often seen as a clash of classes – a working-class struggle against upper-class hunt groups. She explains:

For a long time, hunt sabs were just seen as hippies that don’t work; just these nutty animal rights extremists. [But] there’s nurses, there’s social workers, there’s an electrician – we’re all working, we’re all in responsible jobs … I think the police are coming around to thinking this isn’t a class issue. [We] are just looking for the law to be upheld.

‘This isn’t a class issue’: saboteurs follow a fox hunt in Monmouthshire, January 2020. pwmedia/Shutterstock

Twenty years after Tony Blair’s government brought in the initial ban on hunting wild mammals with dogs under the Hunting Act (2004), Labour’s 2024 election manifesto included a promise to ban trail hunting in England and Wales, in order to end the “smokescreen” that both police and saboteurs claim allows illegal hunting to continue.

This has been followed through as part of the government’s new animal welfare strategy, launched on December 22. A public consultation will be held at the start of 2026 to seek views on the precise details of the ban, with the government yet to give a timeline for its introduction.

The existing powers afforded to the police regarding fox hunting have been described by senior police officer Matt Longman as a “leaky sieve”. In 2023, Longman, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead on fox hunting crime, described the current Hunting Act as “not working effectively”, and claimed that “the simplest reason for the lack of prosecution is that the law needs revisiting”.

History of hunt saboteurs

The origins of hunt sabotage in the UK are not clear. There is some evidence that a group called Band of Mercy sabotaged shooting rifles in 1883. Around the same time, members of the Humanitarian League are said to have followed hunts to expose cruel practices.

According to the Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA), the first documented saboteur in England was a man called Harrison who disrupted a grouse shoot on the Duke of Rutland’s land in 1893 and was arrested for trespassing. The first modern hunt sabotage took place in 1958, when members of the League Against Cruel Sports laid false trails to disrupt a stag hunt in the Devon and Somerset area.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, hunt saboteur groups were associated with anarchist movements and the punk music scene, as well as anti-vivisectionists. But according to Kat, that image of hunt saboteurs is a far cry from today’s saboteurs:

[Hunt supporters] push this theory that sabs are uneducated, unemployed, unwashed hippies. But it’s really interesting, the diverse group of people that belong to anti-hunting campaigning. You can have anyone from doctors, nurses, veterinary professionals, teachers – even farmers. I just don’t think [the hunters] would ever in a million years believe that I’m in a high-powered role in my industry.

Stuart, a member of a sabotage group in the south of England, is quick to distinguish the highly organised approach his group takes from some others operating today:

Some saboteur groups aren’t very organised. They’ve got these anarchic principles they work to … I believe in having large numbers, well trained, a structured training programme – and everyone knowing what they’re doing. It just seems to work.

Stuart raises concerns about new recruits being overly motivated by political concerns – people he describes as “class warriors” interested only in violence against an upper-class enemy:

I like to meet people to make sure they want to be in the group for all the right reasons, because sometimes you do get class warriors … It’s happened in some groups before. It’s not nice: someone’s turned up, gone out on their first or second hit, they’ve just gone up and whacked a huntsman and pulled him off his horse … You can’t do that.

A legacy of mistrust

The history of hunt sabotage is beset by violence against saboteurs by hunt members and supporters. Incidents of serious violence against saboteurs are perceived within the movement as going largely unpunished, with instances of saboteurs being killed or seriously injured having led to short custodial or suspended sentences – or, often, no prosecutions against hunt members and supporters at all.

Some of the most high-profile and controversial forms of protest on the issue of fox hunting have arguably been perpetrated by hunt supporters. In 2004, eight supporters stormed the House of Commons during a debate on hunting, disguising themselves as builders before confronting MPs. They received an 18-month custodial discharge, with the judge finding no evidence that their actions had resulted in either harassment or distress. In 2009, Lush Cosmetics stores were vandalised and staff verbally abused after the company worked alongside the HSA as part of an anti-fox hunting campaign.

Hunt saboteurs’ mistrust of the state was cemented further when the full scale of the undercover infiltration of saboteur groups by police officers was revealed during the spy cops scandal, which emerged in 2010. Several officers who infiltrated saboteur groups have been accused of inciting others to commit crimes and forming romantic relationships with saboteurs, all the while concealing their real identity. Saboteurs largely retain a deep mistrust of the state, as Stuart explains:

There is distrust … the Old Bill haven’t always helped themselves. In the '90s, they were infiltrating groups like ours – committing statutory rape [on some] female activists [and we] haven’t forgotten about that … It’s diabolical, absolutely sick. So that’s the sort of thing that lingers on.

This deeply embedded sense of suspicion and antipathy from hunt saboteurs towards the police continues to affect relationships between the two – despite the fact they share, in theory at least, a common pursuit of holding fox hunters accountable to the law. Where positive relationships have been forged, the role of individual police officers has been key – overcoming decades of saboteur-police antipathy to build new alliances.

Reflecting on the support provided by saboteurs during prosecutions of hunts flouting the law, Dan, a police wildlife crime officer, tells us simply: “Without [saboteur] involvement, we’d have no chance.”

Forging unlikely alliances

At first, Kat is reluctant to meet us. We had been put in touch with her by James, a police wildlife crime officer with whom Kat had worked to bring about a hunt prosecution. When she finally agrees to meet us with her partner Carl, also a saboteur, they recount experiencing years of mistreatment at the hands of police officers, and of police protecting hunts while still treating saboteurs as the ones breaking the law.

After one particularly bad experience with the police – when they reported being threatened and having damage done to their vehicle – a friend and former saboteur put them in contact with James. Kat says he “really had his work cut out” with regards to building any sort of relationship with her and Carl.

James asked if they could share any footage of the hunting they had witnessed that season. With low expectations, they agreed to share what they had gathered and James drew on this footage to pursue and ultimately secure the conviction of hunt members. This success was a significant turning point for Kat in recognising there might be mutual benefits in working with the police. She calls James “the first police officer I’ve ever had anything positive to say about”, explaining:

He’s the first police officer that’s actually taken the time to very neutrally listen to what we have to say and look at the footage we’ve had. I have very low standards for the police … but he’s the first cop that’s ever done that.

At the time of the prosecution against the hunt, Kat had preferred to hide her saboteur identity in order to separate this from her professional life – particularly as she worked in a role which brought her into contact with rural businesses. Acknowledging these concerns, James agreed to put measures in place to make Kat and Carl feel safe at home. Kat explains:

James gave us personal protection alarms and alarms for the home, so that if we pressed the button we got an instant response, with the knowledge that we were witnesses.

Ultimately, the prosecution succeeded, giving Kat a sense that times really are changing. “Seeing the actual hunts coming to justice,” she says, “it does feel that maybe the tides are changing.”

Carl echoes this sentiment: “I’m not a fan of the police but I do feel that getting convictions against hunts is the way forward. It makes it very, very visible to the public, and to the government.”

Both Kat and Carl still view James as “one in a million” within the police. As Carl puts it: “If it had been any other copper, it wouldn’t have even got to court. They wouldn’t have wanted the evidence.”

And while Kat continues to bear the psychological scars of having been let down and mistreated by the police, she does sound slightly more hopeful about the potential for future collaboration with like-minded police officers:

If there are more officers like James out there who actually want to do their job, then hopefully we can play a key part in closing multiple hunts down or getting more and more convictions.

The 'smokescreen’

Many police officers told us that collaborating with saboteurs is the only path towards enforcing the law against fox hunting. A combination of low investigatory resources, the difficulties of meeting evidential thresholds, and the resources that hunt members and supporters can bring to bear during court proceedings reduces the prospect of successful prosecution at every stage. As James put it:

I honestly think there is a need for [the saboteurs]. The hunts wouldn’t like me to say that – my boss probably wouldn’t like me to say that – but if the hunts were [only] trail hunting, there would be no need for the sabs at all.

The formulation of the UK’s current Hunting Act (2004) is also challenging. The legislation contains exemptions which allow for trail hunting – a practice only introduced after the act was passed. Using pre-laid scent trails which simulate real hunting is considered a compromise to allow the foxhound packs to be kept and traditions to continue in a way that is legally compliant. The law, however, does not make any provision for the accidental killing of a fox by hounds, making it difficult to prove a kill during a trail hunt was not accidental.

Anti-hunt groups have long accused trail hunting of being a legal loophole used to hide continued fox hunting. In 2020, a leaked webinar held by The Hunting Office, the sport’s now-defunct governing body, saw leading huntsman Mark Hankinson explaining: “It’s a lot easier to create a smokescreen if you’ve got more than one trail layer operating. That is what it is all about – trying to portray to the people watching that you’re going about your legitimate business.”

Hankinson was initially convicted of encouraging people to hunt illegally in October 2021, receiving a £1,000 fine, but later won an appeal against his conviction. According to Hankinson, his leaked words had in fact been referring to the practice of laying dummy trails to fool saboteurs – and the appeal judge accepted that the Hunting Office was committed to lawful hunting.

According to the police officers we spoke to, working alongside hunt saboteurs and using their evidence to build a case against any hunt that is breaching the law is critical to the likelihood of a successful prosecution.

According to James, the resources available to some saboteur groups can outstrip those available to the police when building up such evidence. “They use drones, they use cameras, they use bodycams,” he explained. “Their tactics obviously have worked because we’ve had quite a few convictions around the country.”

Saboteurs are not subject to the same legal stipulations as the police with regard to evidence capture. While the police must abide by the Regulations of Investigatory Powers Act (2000), which places a series of limits on the police’s capacity to carry out covert surveillance, saboteurs can operate with much more flexibility, including covert filming of illegal hunting. So long as saboteurs do not break the law in capturing their footage, their evidence can be used to support prosecutions.

Working with evidence captured by saboteurs also allows the police to pursue creative avenues for action. In some cases, they have been able to draw on measures designed to tackle antisocial behaviour as a mechanism to address issues linked to hunting – often referred to as “hunt havoc” – such as hounds running into private gardens or through school fields, as well as hunts blocking roads.

Police accused of bias by both sides

Police officers still find themselves navigating a complex terrain of suspicion, paranoia and sometimes outright hostility from saboteur groups. Even James, with successful prosecutions behind him and examples of productive collaborations with hunt saboteurs, reflected that:

Short of giving them a kidney, I don’t think they’ll ever fully [trust the police] … I think across the country it is changing and there are lots of prosecutions going through. But the past has tainted things with the sabs, unfortunately.

He admitted that some saboteurs will flatly refuse to work with him, despite repeatedly trying to explain to saboteur groups that their refusal to engage with police is counter-productive.

I’ve said to them: ‘If you don’t report it then it doesn’t look like it’s happened and then nothing’s going to ever happen.’ You can spend all your time slagging the police off and putting all over Facebook how rubbish the police are, but if you’re not reporting it to us, then it doesn’t look like an issue.

While these feelings are rooted in historical controversies, more recent scandals have reinforced accusations of police preferential treatment towards hunts. In 2024, senior officers in the Warwickshire police force were accused of agreeing a “secret deal” with the Warwickshire Hunt, after potential court proceedings against it were averted following a protocol agreed between senior officers and the hunt.

While an independent report later found that Warwickshire Police had acted with “clear operational independence” when dealing with the hunt, some rural crime officers were angry at what they alleged to Channel 4 reporters were senior officers in the force giving it preferential treatment and “deciding which laws to enforce and which ones not to”.

The contents of the protocol were only exposed after a campaign by saboteurs and local residents, who demanded that the policing of the hunt should be transparent. The protocol has since been dropped, and Warwickshire Police’s incoming chief constable, Alex Franklin-Smith, committed to seeking advice from other forces regarding trail hunting, which he said can be “a challenging area for policing”. But he added that when it comes to fox hunting: “Warwickshire Police will operate without fear or favour.”

Accusations of double standards are levelled at police from both sides of the hunt dispute. In recent years, hunt members and their supporters have frequently accused forces of lacking neutrality when policing fox hunting, with claims of biased practices levelled at some officers.

Matt Longman, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead on fox hunting, has been subject to regular criticism from hunt supporters, some of whom have described him as an “activist” who displays “blatant prejudice” against hunting. A number of politicians have called for his removal, with former defence secretary Sir Ben Wallace commenting in 2024: “[Longman] is supposed to police without fear or favour. If he can’t then he should be removed, because that is part of this debate about two-tier policing.”

In fact, both the Hunt Saboteurs Association and the British Hound Sports Association have accused the police of two-tier policing in their approach to fox hunting – but the police officers we spoke to refuted accusations of bias on either side. Wildlife crime officer Dan said that while his job is “to uphold the law without fear or favour … the hunt [lobby] obviously massively think that I am anti-hunt”. He explained:

I hate the term ‘two-tier policing’ for obvious reasons … The hunting fraternity believe they are more entitled than others, and that does remain an issue. You can see that in some of the complaints we get.

A 2020 report by campaign group Action Against Foxhunting found evidence of police officers regularly turning a blind eye to law-breaking by hunts. In a foreword to the report, former police officer and animal cruelty investigator Richard Barradale-Smith wrote:

The systemic failure in dealing with hunting crimes since the hunting act came into force has been deliberate. The legislation introduced was designed to make the act virtually unenforceable and successive chief constables and senior officers across the country have chosen to turn a blind eye to it ever since. This places many frontline officers sent to deal with those incidents in an impossible position.

James, Dan and the other officers we spoke to all acknowledge that the legacy of poor police practices has created a deep institutional mistrust of the police among hunt saboteurs. They also accept that some poor police practices continue, and that, as James puts it, saboteurs “don’t always get the best service from the police” – which can undermine relationships carefully built between individual officers and saboteur groups.

But they were unanimous in saying that police-saboteur collaboration is the foundation from which successful convictions of illegal fox hunting must be built, as saboteur evidence is almost always the trigger that starts an investigation. The HSA has recognised this, claiming that in the last five years, all convictions of hunt groups have been the result of evidence gathered by saboteurs.

Yet for all the successful convictions described to us in our research, many more examples were recounted of investigations being discontinued for a variety of reasons.

Meanwhile, the new fox hunting season is well under way. In the last season, there were a reported 411 incidents of foxes being chased or killed by hounds – a figure that some campaigners told us barely scratches the surface. This, inevitably, causes frustration for all involved and, at times, tests the fragile alliances between police and saboteurs.

Whatever happens while Labour is in power regarding the prospective ban on trail hunting, saboteurs tell us they will not leave the field until they are confident that no animal will be hunted and killed again. Continuing their complicated alliance with some police officers will be a key step in achieving this goal.

For you: more from our Insights series:

Amy Stevens receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust.

Keith Spiller receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust.

Xavier L'Hoiry receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust.

In this age of global uncertainty, where in the world can we look for guidance?

2025-12-15T12:20:48Z

Sunil Prajapati/Shutterstock

When Donald Trump stood on the White House lawn in April 2025 holding a large, laminated poster announcing the first round of trade tariffs to be imposed on different countries, the Trade Policy Uncertainty Index shot through the roof.

Every month, this index, which is overseen by five board members of the Federal Reserve (America’s central bank), crosschecks the frequency of usage of terms relating to trade policy and uncertainty in seven leading newspapers including the New York Times and the Guardian. Here’s the chart since 1960:

US Trade Policy Uncertainty Index:

TPU graph. Graph shows the Trade Policy Uncertainty Index value on the first day of every month since 1960.

Trump’s so-called “liberation day” sparked volatile shifts in the value of financial products and currencies as governments across the world scrambled to respond. The levels of uncertainty were unprecedented – the outbreak of the COVID pandemic was nothing in comparison, according to the index.

In highly complex systems, conditions of uncertainty and even ignorance – where we don’t know what we don’t know – are extremely common. These conditions become even more likely when such systems, such as those which control global finance, are opaque and poorly regulated. Add in a maverick US president and an administration determined to overturn the status quo, and the old, orderly assumptions are thrown out of the window.

Uncertainty is where we don’t know the likelihood of different things happening: we can’t predict, we can’t manage, we can’t control. For many people, conditions of uncertainty result in precarious jobs, insecure housing and rising inequality. Vulnerabilities including mental illness can become even more exposed when life is so uncertain – only serving to accentuate these perceptions of uncertainty.

However, for a lucky few, uncertainty is an opportunity to make a fortune. Financial capitalism thrives off uncertainty and asymmetric information, which may be encouraged by some who can pocket the profit, betting on the unknowns.

In politics too, uncertainty is being capitalised on. Rising economic precarity in the wake of COVID-19 has been linked with increased support for populist parties in many European countries. And this nationalist politics sweeping much of the world reduces the possibilities of transnational collaboration and multilateral regulation.

There are real and present dangers in this age of uncertainty. But through my research at the Institute of Development Studies, I have witnessed inspiring innovations that I believe could be applied across other fields of work and life. My latest book, Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World, explores the strategies used to counter uncertainty in fields as seemingly different as corporate finance and pastoral farming, in settings stretching from southern Zimbabwe to the Midlands of England.

The book highlights some surprising commonalities between these different worlds in their use of diverse sources of knowledge, social networks and human interactions. Above all, I believe the loss of the central role of people in today’s complex systems is the greatest danger of all.

Uncertainties of global finance

The 2008 financial crisis can be explained in part by a lack of such human engagement, and the reliance on a trading system where the assumption of control turned out to be highly misleading.

The international financial system involves a multitude of players, each with different sorts of information about the future. In the build-up to the crisis, many new financial instruments were devised to extract profit. The investment banks – Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley – perfected the art of managing the huge amounts of cash generated in the financial system through a range of derivative instruments, including the fateful mortgage-backed securities that triggered the crash. But the bewildering array of acronyms and actors involved meant few actually understood the system and its dynamics.

Who was to blame for the 2008 financial crisis? Video: BBC News.

At the centre of this complex web of financial interactions were mathematical models designed to offset uncertainty and provide control. The notorious Black-Scholes-Merton equation helped manage the transactions that were occurring in ever greater volumes and super-fast speeds, with billions of dollars being exchanged in nanoseconds across high-speed internet links.

However, when you are overly confident in risk-based models within a narrowly defined regulatory system, uncertainties have the nasty habit of creeping up behind you and catching you by surprise. As Andy Haldane, then chief economist at the Bank of England, commented in the aftermath:

The financial cat’s-cradle became dense and opaque. As a result, the precise source and location of underlying claims became anyone’s guess. Follow-the-leader became blind-man’s buff. In short, diversification strategies by individual firms generated heightened uncertainty across the system as a whole.

The crisis was rooted in what Haldane called “an exaggerated sense of knowledge and control”. Since then, there has been much reflection on what went wrong and what to do about it. One response has been to add new layers of regulation, but many argue that this may just hide the underlying uncertainties, as happened before.

The financial system was ill-equipped to respond to the shocks that emerged from the sub-prime mortgage collapse, and precious little appears to have changed since – as was demonstrated so vividly following the announcement of Trump’s tariffs.

Today’s financial system is increasingly reliant on algorithmic models to make decisions, driven by even ever more sophisticated AI applications. The large language machine learning models take accumulated past data to predict the future – but as well as increasing opacity, there is a decrease in accountability. AI offers an illusion of control, and this can be very dangerous.

The reality is that conditions of uncertainty are not unusual, freak occurrences, but the normal consequences of complex systems. So what if the standard assumptions of modernity – planning, management, regulation, control – have to be radically rethought? Is it possible to embrace uncertainty for the benefit of all – rather than denying or ignoring it until it is too late?

Andy Haldane, former chief economist of the Bank of England, in 2013. Niccolò Caranti/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

For financial systems, Haldane and others have argued that this means rethinking financial network configurations and enabling new practices (requiring new skills) for those involved. A shift from reliance on opaque and highly complex risk-based model algorithms to allowing more human discretion and judgment. Active deliberation on the appropriate responses to inevitably incomplete information in a world where uncertainty, even ignorance, is not only accepted but embraced.

Where can we look for inspiration? I’d suggest that the pastoral systems of northern Kenya and Amdo Tibet in China are good places to start. In both settings, pastoralists – mobile livestock keepers – must manage highly variable climates, and volatile market conditions alongside conflict and political uncertainties to keep their animals healthy and provide for their families. Like the global financial system, pastoralists trade across borders, manage highly variable supply and demand, and interact across networks in real time.

During my research with Kenyan and Chinese colleagues in both places since 2018, we have been struck by how pastoralists expertly live with, and benefit from, uncertainties. I believe that this offers some important lessons for elsewhere in the world – including its centres of global finance.

Livestock markets in northern Kenya

Meet Mohamed Hassan, a livestock trader from Moyale in northern Kenya on the border of Ethiopia. He manages a large and fluctuating trade in livestock – cattle, camels, goats, sheep – buying from producers, dealing with brokers and transporters, and selling animals on to terminal markets in Nairobi and further afield. He explains:

I have connections all over this region and buy cattle from as far as Garissa and Moyale [in Kenya], even Somalia. I transport cattle on trucks and sell on to customers in Nairobi. I also buy up small stock in bush markets around here, and sell to other traders in nearby areas for sale in local towns.

The pastoral areas of the Horn of Africa – from Somalia to Ethiopia to Kenya and beyond – are the centre of a massive international market in livestock. Estimates vary, but each year around US$1 billion in trade in live animals passes through the ports along the Somali coast destined for the Gulf countries, notably Saudi Arabia.

This is an internationalised, cross-border market affected by multiple uncertainties. It requires considerable financing, sophisticated coordination and complex governance arrangements. It operates almost completely informally outside the grip of state regulation and taxation, yet in a highly sensitive geopolitical arena.

Central to this complex international market is a network of traders and brokers who source animals from diverse locations across pastoral regions and organise their transport to and subsequent sale in terminal markets. This requires a great deal of collective skill by traders like Hassan, galvanising different knowledge, connecting people and negotiating trade in real time.

This includes negotiating with border police, customs officials and veterinary officers. One of the key features is the willingness of all parties to accept that the entire system requires a deliberate maintenance of ambiguities around regulation to ensure the flexibility of movement when official rules would prevent it.

These pastoralists in northern Kenya are part of a complex network of traders and brokers. Ian Scoones, CC BY-NC-SA

Brokers – intermediaries in the system with knowledge of the whole network – are relied on by the traders for knowledge about conditions in production areas, prices in different places and connections to markets. They operate in multiple languages and can link producers and traders, measuring livestock weights, recommending prices and preventing fraud.

Connected across far-flung areas, they use kinship and cultural connections to build trust between market players, facilitating effective trade. By offering knowledge, credit and informal insurance, they smooth the operation of the market, reducing sources of uncertainty. Collective arrangements for trading animals also diminish risks and enhance capacities for financing and transportation.

Such markets are always social, connected by trust-based relationships frequently over long distances, but with the end result being an efficient, effective market that can respond to multiple shocks – whether trade bans, price volatility, insecurity or drought.

Unlike with global finance and its addiction to predictive algorithms, the web of interactions between actors in this market are based on close connections among kin and clan groups, rooted in sustained social relations. Facilitated by increasingly robust mobile-phone coverage enabling rapid and secure money transfers, the system is remarkably effective given the volume of exchanges in this informal cross-border trade.

In contrast to contemporary financial systems, this is a system where networks of people keep a close eye on any potential failure, and respond in real time. Uncertainty is accepted, not dismissed or ignored. Informality means that a rapid response to changing circumstances is possible, with everyone contributing to generating reliability. The “human touch” is always present, and there is no opportunity for the system to collapse.

Studies of these livestock markets have highlighted differences between “long” and “short” market chains. While the former are run mostly by men, short market chains are more local, more embedded in local social relations and involve more women, particularly in the sheep and goat trade.

As uncertainties increase, it is these shorter, more locally managed chains that can adjust most rapidly. A much more variegated pattern is emerging, replacing the “big man”-dominated long chains of the past. With more players connected in networks through more diverse and decentralised social relations, the capacity to respond to uncertain events increases.

All this may seem very far from the challenges of global finance, but I believe there are important lessons to be learned. Livestock markets are similarly non-linear and complex, operate internationally and have limited formal regulatory control – yet they remain firmly embedded in social settings. A more social basis for “the economy” and “the market”, rooted in collective, networked responses, is apparent, where responses to uncertainty are central. This contrasts with the idealised image of an individualised, risk management response promoted in mainstream finance and banking systems,

The livestock markets of northern Kenya are facilitated by personal, culturally imbued interactions, while also using technologies that support the efficient and rapid flows of money and information. It is the human touch, involving a range of networked social practices, that is central to grappling continuously with uncertainties.

Buddhist herders in Amdo Tibet

Next, meet Loba Tsering from Dreinag village in the north of Kokonor, in the high pastures of Amdo Tibet, China. Like Hassan, he and his family must navigate many uncertainties. Heavy snowfall and an extended winter can wreak havoc with herding arrangements as people move yaks and sheep from winter to summer pastures at altitudes in excess of 4,000 metres.

Access to land, particularly for winter grazing by Qinghai lake – China’s largest – is increasingly constrained, as land along the lakeshore is divided up, privatised and acquired for tourism development and conservation projects. Markets for yak meat, as well as milk, butter and cheese, are expanding in the lower altitude areas as towns grow and lakeside tourist resorts are established, but in this volatile context new market connections must be found.

Uncertainties are accepted as part-and-parcel of life. As Tsega Norbu, a 40-year-old herder and father of three from Darnama village in the south of Kokonor, explains: “What happened is already in the past, and what is going to happen is unpredictable. All we can depend on is the present, we deal with what is happening now.”

Access to land for winter grazing by Qinghai lake in Kokonor is increasingly constrained. Palden Tsering, CC BY-NC-SA

Uncertainty is central to a Buddhist sensibility governing life. The world cannot be stable and controlled, but is part of a cycle of ongoing change. According to Tibetan Buddhist teachings and practices, uncertainties from whatever source – climatic, economic, political – should never be feared. They are part of how knowledges and experiences are constructed.

Unlike the anxiety and stress that uncertainties may create amid the western ideal of an ordered, regular, stable world, for Loba Tsering and others, there is no such expectation of a linear path. The assumptions of western-style modernity are fundamentally challenged.

But this doesn’t mean that they reject the trappings of a modern life. Mobile phones and internet connectivity, reliable off-grid electricity, functioning transport infrastructure, good healthcare, education for children and commercial market interactions are all crucial for pastoralists living in Kokonor. But these are integrated within an outlook that makes use of ambiguity and embraces uncertainty as part of daily life.

This requires particular skills for generating reliability which, just like for Mohamed Hassan and his fellow Kenyan traders, involve relying on social relations and networks. But in contrast to northern Kenya, where state presence and regulation is limited, in areas such as Kokonor there is much more interaction with state officials and government investment projects. This has implications for how uncertainties are navigated.

Infrastructure development continues apace in Amdo Tibet, with the Chinese state investing in large settlement programmes alongside road and rail infrastructure and conservation projects to protect watersheds. While Amdo Tibet remains a largely rural and very mountainous area, land access is always contentious as different actors – local people, investors, the government – compete for control. This generates heightened uncertainties for pastoralists. However, despite the increasing state presence, whether through local county officials or national-level projects, there is always room for manoeuvre.

Loba Tsering and others make use of this latitude to navigate within often ambiguous, hybrid arrangements around market or land access. Policies coming from the centre are never specified in detail, but provide guidance around broad objectives set by the Chinese state.

This approach to navigating uncertainty is what the Singaporean political scientist and author Yuen Yuen Ang calls “directed improvisation”. It provides a route to responding to complexity and uncertainty that allows flexibility and the possibilities of adaptation, avoiding top-down imposition. It is a combination of central facilitation and local innovation – one that makes use of ambiguity and thrives off uncertainty.

Yuen Yuen Ang on the pros and cons of China’s economic approach. Video: New Economic Thinking.

So, for example, when Loba Tsering and other villagers wanted to secure land for winter grazing to fatten their animals for sale to nearby markets, they had to exploit this flexibility and navigate the uncertainties. Their original winter grazing sites had shrunk, both because of encroachment of urban areas and expansion of the lake, due to increasing snow melt thanks to climate change. This meant that land was scarce and their opportunities for livestock marketing had declined.

First, they approached the local township officials to put their case. They were already connected with some officials who came from the same village, so conversations could start easily. Working together with these representatives, they then approached the county officials.

Although there were limits imposed by central state policies due to environmental regulations and plans for a conservation area, a creative, improvised solution was found through dialogue and deliberation. A two-year compensation for the loss of the winter pasture was offered, and a new area allocated for the landless pastoralists in the village. This ensured their animals could be fed and fattened, allowing new marketing opportunities in the fast-growing nearby towns and tourist resorts.

This was “directed improvisation” in action, with solutions being found that responded to changing circumstances. It is not an isolated example but, as many have commented before, central to the style of centralised-yet-flexible, pragmatic policymaking that China has adopted – an approach that has been central to its rapid economic transformation and poverty reduction following the reform era.

In a highly complex system with many different requirements and operating across a vast geographic area, a singular, designed solution rolled out from the centre clearly will not work. Rather, an approach to economic change that is responsive to uncertain conditions is required, with flexible institutions and governance systems – very unlike the fixed regulatory protocols of global finance.

No standardised blueprint model of either design or regulation will work. Solutions must allow for experimentation and improvisation, and be built on social relations where trust is essential. Once again, it is the human touch that is key.

Rethinking an uncertain world

Despite the very different contexts, the experiences from northern Kenya and Amdo Tibet in China offer some important insights into how to navigate uncertainty in our turbulent times. Could such insights help us avoid the chaos and collapse we saw during the financial crash and following the imposition of Trump’s tariffs? Interestingly, the principles that emerge are similar to those suggested by Haldane and others following the 2007-08 financial crash.

What does this involve? The need to decentralise and rely on social interactions in localised networks. The need to avoid reliance on simple, centralised solutions, whether from algorithmic or state diktats. The need to be careful about relying on top-down imposition of regulations, and to seek adaptive, flexible solutions. The need to develop collective options based on trust-based relations – avoiding either an atomised, individualised response or one emerging from a centralised, dirigiste imposition.

Above all, it highlights the need for the human touch – the social, networked relations that are only possible to develop when people interact with each other and build trust.

What does this suggest for the future? A modernist vision of control – whether through markets or states – towards a singular understanding of progress is clearly inappropriate. Instead, a more flexible, adaptive path is required. This means opening up to alternatives, decentralising activities, facilitating experimentation and improvisation and accepting uncertainty.

Embracing uncertainty and encouraging democratic deliberation is also a route to avoiding the future being captured by those who seek to profit from uncertainty, or who seek to close down options through the populist rhetoric of “taking back control”.

Whether responding to a financial shock, new technologies, land use change, a pandemic or the climate crisis, this requires – as in citizen assemblies and other forms of deliberative democratic practice – diverse people interacting and building trust for collective responses. AI and predictive mathematical models are no replacement in our current age of uncertainty.

For you: more from our Insights series:

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Ian Scoones was a recipient of a European Research Council Advanced Grant for the PASTRES project - Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience: Global Lessons from the Margins (https://pastres.org/). He is the author of Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World (Polity Books, 2024, https://bit.ly/44f9sqe).

From Noah’s flood to Shakespeare’s storms, what literature reveals about our changing relationship with the weather

2025-12-04T16:27:58Z

Detail from the frontispiece of the 1607 flood pamphlet: A True Report of Certaine Wonderfull Ouerflowings of Waters. Cardiff University Special Collections, GW4 Treasures/Wikimedia, CC BY-NC-SA

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale is renowned for its salacious storyline of sexual misadventure. Set in 14th-century Oxford, it tells the tale of John the Carpenter, a husband so terrified that another “Noah’s flood” is coming to drown the world that he sleeps in a basket in the attic – freeing his wife to bed her lover downstairs.

Chaucer’s pilgrims all have a good laugh at John’s expense as they walk together from London towards Canterbury, echoing John’s neighbours who “gan laughen at his fantasye” of Noah’s flood and call John “wood” (mad). The pilgrims listen to this particular tale (one of 24 Canterbury Tales) as they walk along the south bank of the River Thames between Deptford and Greenwich.

That stretch of river was well-known to Chaucer. At the time of writing what remains one of English literature’s greatest works, he had been tasked, in March 1390, with repairing flood damage to the riverbank around Greenwich.

As a poet who swapped his pen for a spade to dig banks and defend the land around Greenwich from inundation, Chaucer knew from experience that flooding was no laughing matter. He – and later Shakespeare – lived through periods of weird weather not unlike what we are seeing today.

Their changing climate was triggered by falling rather than rising temperatures during what’s known as the little ice age. But the net effect was weather extremes like strong winds, storms and flooding – some of which were evoked in plays, prose and poems, offering valuable information on how communities were hit by, and responded to, these extreme events.

For the past two years, I have been scouring historical literature and performances for – now-often forgotten – experiences of living with water and flooding along the shorelines and estuaries of England’s coastlines. Whether in 15th-century “flood plays” in Hull or the “disaster pamphlets” (an early form of newsbook) that rose to popularity in Shakespeare’s lifetime, my research shows we do not only need to look to the future to understand the challenges posed by rising seas and more intense storms.

The River Thames and London borough of Southwark, starting point for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. From The Particuler Description of England by William Smith (1588). British Library via Wikimedia

Hull’s medieval flood play

Early in the new year of 1473, a crowd gathered outside Kingston-upon-Hull’s main church to watch the annual flood play performed. The play itself is now lost, but surviving records cast tantalising light on how the play was staged between 1461 and 1531. We know, for example, it was snowing in 1473 because of a payment that year for “makyng playne the way where snawe was”.

We also know from financial records that the play was performed on an actual ship, hauled through Hull’s streets on wheels and hung on ropes for the rest of the year in Holy Trinity church (now Hull Minster). We know from payments to “Noye and his wyff”, “Noyes children” and “the god in the ship” that the play must have told a very similar story to that of two medieval pageants still performed today in the neighbouring east coast city of York.

What is not immediately clear from Hull’s records is why the town’s guild of master mariners chose the snow and ice of early January as the annual date for their flood play’s performance, when biblical plays in York and other northern towns and cities were staged during the warmer months of Easter and midsummer. A payment for Noah’s “new myttens” in 1486 speaks to the challenges of performing outdoor theatre in January, typically the coldest time of year.

In fact, Hull’s flood play was always staged on Plough Monday, the first Monday after the Christian celebration of Epiphany on January 6. This date marked the traditional start of the new agricultural year, and a close reading of Hull’s records shows themes of farming woven into the flood play. The benefits of flooding for haymaking, for example, were signalled on stage through the purchase of agrarian items like a “mawnd” (grain basket) in 1487, “hay to the shype” (ship) in 1530, and plough hales (handles) “to the chylder” (children) in 1531.

Noah, A Mystery Play by Edward Henry Corbould (1858) depicts Hull’s medieval flood play performed outside Holy Trinity Church (now Hull Minster). Ferens Art Gallery via Wikimedia

The advantages of flooding meadows had long been recognised in the Humber villages surrounding Hull – and reflected in the layout of its medieval land. Grass grew well on the well-drained meadows along the River Humber’s banks, and the hay harvested from these floodplains provided winter feed for farm animals including the oxen that pulled ploughs through arable fields in January, at the start of the new agricultural year.

Writing and water management were once familiar bedfellows – and the wisdom of building raised flood banks and making hay on floodplains is reflected throughout medieval and early modern literature.

Writing of Runnymede, an ancient meadow on the banks of the River Thames, in his 1642 poem Coopers Hill, John Denham casts an approving glance on the “wealth” that the seasonal flooding of the Thames brings to the meadows on its river banks: “O’re which he kindly spreads his spacious wing / And hatches plenty for th’ensuing Spring.”

But Denham distinguishes between two types of flood: the benevolent, seasonal kind that brings wealth to the meadows, and the “unexpected Inundations” that “spoile the Mowers hopes” and “mock the Plough-mans toyle”. Floods can bring disaster if they are unexpected (for example, if they occur during the growing season in spring and summer) or out of place (flooding arable fields rather than meadow ground). But literature reminds us they can also bring benefits – if communities learn to live with water and adapt their lives to the rising tide.

Unfortunately, despite renewed interest in nature-based solutions to flood alleviation, floodplain meadows declined sharply in the 20th century and few exist today. Downstream of Runnymede, at Egham Hythe, is Thorpe Hay Meadow. Once part of a thriving medieval economy of haymaking on floodplains, its website announces it is now the “last surviving example of unimproved grassland on Thames Gravel in Surrey”.

Gone too are Hull’s meadows and its flood play, which once celebrated the benefits of flooding for farming in this stretch of north-east English coastline. Some of the meadows in the village of Drypool, directly to the east of Hull, were built on as early as the 1540s for Henry VIII’s new defensive fortifications. Much of the remainder was absorbed into this industrial city’s urban sprawl from the 17th century onwards. Today, the Humber’s banks in urban Hull are heavily defended by a £42 million concrete frontage, protecting all the homes and businesses on the floodplain beyond.

The Thames or the Triumph of Navigation by James Barry (1791) features a couplet from the poem Coopers Hill by John Denham. Royal Museums Greenwich via Wikimedia, CC BY-NC

Shakespeare’s storms

Shakespeare was born in 1564 into one of the coldest decades of the last millennium. Temperatures plunged across northern Europe in the 1560s, and the winter of 1564-5 was especially severe.

The little ice age brought shorter springs and longer winters to northern Europe. Reconstructed temperatures show the climate was on average between 1 and 1.5°C colder during Shakespeare’s lifetime than our own. But it was also an age of weather extremes, bringing heat and drought alongside snow and ice.

The weather diary of Shakespeare’s almost exact contemporary, Richard Shann (1561-1627), now housed in the British Library’s manuscripts department, is an invaluable witness to these fluctuating extremes. Writing from the village of Methley in West Yorkshire, Shann describes “a could and frostie winter” in 1607-8 “the like not seene of manie yeares before”. Indeed, the frost “was so extreame that the Rivers was in a manner dried up”.

At York, Shann writes, people “did playe at the bowles” on the river Ouse, and in London “did builde tentes upon the yse” (ice). Temperatures soared that summer, with July 1608 “so extreame hote that divers p[er]sonnes fainted in the feilde”. But the cold quickly returned. “A verie great froste” was reported as early as September 1608, with Shann reporting that the River Ouse “would have borne a swanne”.

The climate crisis has a communications problem. How do we tell stories that move people – not just to fear the future, but to imagine and build a better one? This article is part of Climate Storytelling, a series exploring how arts and science can join forces to spark understanding, hope and action.

As the weather became more variable, with hot and cold spells more extreme, so the late 16th and 17th centuries saw an increase in the frequency and intensity of storms – such that this era has been dubbed “an age of storms”.

On Christmas Eve 1601, Shann describes “such a monstrous great wynde” in Methley “that manie persons weare at theyr wittes ende for feare of blowinge downe theyre howses”. After the storm causes the River Aire at Methley to flood, he writes of his neighbours that the water “came into theyre howses so high, that it allmost did touch theyre chambers”.

In London, meanwhile, historian John Stow (1525-1605) records extremes of heat and cold leading to storms and floods throughout the 1590s. In his Annals of England to 1603, Stow reports “great lightning, thunder and haile” in March 1598, “raine and high waters the like of long time had not been seene” on Whitsunday 1599 – and in December 1599, “winde … boisterous and great” which blew down the tops of chimneys and roofs of churches. The following June, there were “frosts every morning”.

The storminess of this period also appears to seep into Shakespeare’s work. Several of his later plays use storms at sea as plot devices to shipwreck characters on islands (The Tempest) or distant shores (Twelfth Night). In Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Shakespeare (the co-author, with George Wilkins (died 1618)) tosses his hero relentlessly across the eastern Mediterranean in a play that features no fewer than three storms at sea.

While many of Shakespeare’s storms take place in distant locations and at sea, King Lear sets the storm which rages throughout its central scenes in Kent, on the English east coast. Lear describes “the roaring sea” and “curlèd waters” that threaten to inundate the land. It is a play shaped by the east coast’s long experience of living with the threat of flooding from the North Sea.

Disaster pamphlets

Surviving reports of coastal flooding caused by a series of North Sea surges in 1570-71 describe dramatic inundations in the coastal counties of Norfolk, where “people were constrained to get up to the highest partes of the house”, and Cambridgeshire, where several “townes and villages were ouerflowed”. Meanwhile, the Lincolnshire village of Bourne, on the edge of the Fens, “was ouerflowed to [the] midway of the height of the church”.

These colourful accounts of towns and churches under water were collected and printed in one of the first “disaster pamphlets” in London in 1571. It bore the lengthy title: A Declaration of Such Tempestious and Outragious Fluddes, as hath been in Diuers Places of England.

This pioneering form of news booklet rose to popularity in Shakespeare’s lifetime to cater for popular interest in the increasingly weird weather of those decades. Disaster pamphlets gathered nationwide news of floods, storms and lightning strikes into slim, pocket-sized booklets, printed in London under dramatic titles such as Feareful Newes of Thunder and Lightening (1606) and The Wonders of this Windie Winter (1613).

Of the London booksellers who sold these pamphlets and other “strange news” booklets, Shakespeare’s close contemporary, William Barley (1565-1614), was among the most prolific. Many pamphlets were accompanied by eye-catching illustrations of disaster scenes on their title pages and inside covers.

Natural disasters were by no means confined to the east coast. Two pamphlets – William Jones’s Gods Warning to his People of England, and the anonymous A True Report of Certaine Wonderfull Ouerflowings of Waters – reported on one of Britain’s worst natural disasters, the Bristol Channel flood of January 30 1607.

Their cover illustrations depicted scenes of suffering and survival, with submerged churches and steeples featuring prominently. Inside, writers knitted together statistics recording the number of miles of land flooded and cattle drowned with eyewitness accounts of local gentlemen and landowners, who described churches “hidden in the Waters”, the “tops of Churches and Steeples like to the tops of Rockes in the Sea”. Indeed, so high were the floodwaters, Jones wrote, that “some fled into the tops of Churches and Steeples to saue themselves”.

While newsbooks continued to grow in popularity, coming of age in the civil wars of the mid-1600s as a platform for reporting political news and views, disaster pamphlets focused specifically on storms and floods appear to have waned in popularity by the end of the 17th century. Their decline coincided with the rise in the later 1600s of the first local newspapers in England and Wales, which continued to feature news of floods and other weird weather events for centuries to come.

Nonetheless, references to disaster pamphlets lived on in poems such as Jean Ingelow’s High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire, 1571 – published in 1863 – which drew on the details of A Declaration to recreate the east coast floods of three centuries earlier from the point of view of a husband who loses his wife to the rising tide.

By focusing on the loss felt by one family, Ingelow draws attention to the human cost of these disasters which, then and now, can be buried beneath faceless figures of fatalities in news reports. The poem’s narrator notes that “manye more than mine and me” lost loved ones in that surge tide.

The concept of climate change was unknown to Shakespeare’s generation, yet the changing climate of the little ice age introduced anxieties into the reporting of weird weather in disaster pamphlets. Their authors would typically couch the causes of local floods as a national issue – as stirrings of divine anger at the sins of the English nation or of its Church.

Jones’s response to the Bristol Channel flood typified this approach. In Gods Warning, he describes the flood as a “watry punishment” – one of several “threatning Tokens of [God’s] heavy wrath extended towards us that had been experienced in recent years. How floods were represented in poems, pamphlets, newspapers and books have long reflected society’s wider anxieties over the question of what these weird, wild weather events might portend.

Lost communities

The English east coast possesses some of the fastest-eroding cliffs in Europe. In East Yorkshire, the Holderness cliffs from Bridlington to Spurn Point are eroding at an astonishing 1.8 metres per year. While erosion has been happening along this coastline since the end of the last (full) ice age approximately 11,700 years ago, it is today being accelerated by the rising seas and more frequent storms of climate change.

We can measure flooding or erosion in some very alarming numbers. According to the Flamborough Head to Gibraltar Point Shoreline Management Plan of 2010, the Holderness coast retreated by around two kilometres over the past thousand years. In the process, 26 villages named in the Domesday Book of 1086 disappeared under water.

An illustration of Old Kilnsea church in 1829, now swallowed up by the North Sea. Henry Gastineau

But literature goes further – revealing the experiences of those who lived on the edge of those crumbling clifftops, preserving fast-vanishing communities and coastlines for future generations.

In the early 20th century, histories of the Holderness coast’s lost villages were painstakingly pieced together from old photos, maps and archival records by Thomas Sheppard, whose Lost Towns of the Yorkshire Coast (1912) includes a map preserving the names and former locations of these shipwrecked villages: Cleton, Monkwell, Monkwike, Out Newton and Old Kilnsea, to name five. What must it have been like to live in these villages? How does their loss haunt today’s coastal communities, who are themselves facing a slow but sure retreat from the advancing sea?

Literature can provide what nature writer Helen MacDonald, in her collection of essays Vesper Flights (2020), calls the "qualitative texture” to enrich the statistics. It can reveal the ways of life and habits of thought of people who lived in these communities, and who adapted to the risks and benefits of living “on the edge”.

Juliet Blaxland’s The Easternmost House (2019) describes a year living in a “windblown house” in coastal Suffolk, “on the edge of an eroding clifftop at the easternmost end of a track that leads only into the sea”. The house – now demolished – was once Blaxland’s home. She wrote the book as “a memorial to this house and the lost village it represents, and to our ephemeral life here, so that something of it will remain once it has all gone”.

But Blaxland conjures more than bricks and mortar. She speaks to the mindset of coast-dwellers who pace out the distance between their houses and the advancing cliff edge, and who find solace, as well as sadness, in the inevitability of coastal loss. “Everyone has a cliff coming towards them, in the sense of our time being finite,” Blaxland writes. “The difference is that we can see ours, pegged out in front of us.”

From Noah to Now. Video by the University of Hull.

From Noah to now

Coastal communities have learnt over centuries to live with uncertainty, and to continue their ways of life despite the risks. This “living with water” mentality shapes east coast communities just as surely as banks, barriers and rock armour shape the east coast’s cliffs, river mouths and beaches. It is in literature that we see this inner life revealed, and hear the voices of the past singing out to the present.

Singing was how we engaged young people with the past on the Noah to Now project. Across six months in 2024-25, colleagues from the University of Hull’s Energy and Environment Institute worked with singers, musicians and more than 200 young people in Hull and north-east Lincolnshire to rehearse and perform Benjamin Britten’s mid-20th century children’s opera, Noye’s Fludde, at Hull and Grimsby minsters.

The opera tells the biblical story of Noah in song, using the text of one surviving medieval flood play from 15th-century Chester as its libretto. Our chorus of school children performed as the animals in the ark, and were joined by other young people who took on solo roles or played in the orchestra.

Children raise umbrellas during the finale of Britten’s Noye’s Fludde, performed in Hull Minster, March 2025. Anete Sooda, University of Hull., CC BY-NC-SA

Rooted in the medieval past, the opera introduced participating schools to the lost flood play from medieval Hull, and to that play’s connections with the longstanding culture of living with water in the Humber region. One of our venues, Hull Minster, was the church in which Hull’s medieval mariners used to hang the ship (or ark) that they hauled through Hull’s streets every January, some 500 years ago.

Britten’s opera also resonates with more recent histories of east coast flooding. Noye’s Fludde was first performed in 1958 near the composer’s coastal home of Aldeburgh in Suffolk – a town devastated five years earlier by the disastrous North Sea flood of 1953.

Water swept into more than 300 houses in Aldeburgh shortly before midnight on January 31 1953 – forcing Britten to abandon 4 Crabbe Street, his seafront home. It was days before he could return to the house to write letters declaring that “we expect to feel less damp to-morrow”, and that “I think we’re going to try sleeping here to-night”. It was another week before Britten could report that “most of the mud’s gone now, thank God!”

The events of 1953 affected the whole Aldeburgh community, and the opportunity for the town to come together five years later to sing and perform an opera about flooding must have seemed especially poignant to all involved.

It was in the spirit of that first Aldeburgh performance that we involved other east coast communities in Hull and north-east Lincolnshire – each with their own long histories of flooding – in the staging of an opera that folds medieval and mid-20th century stories of flooding to address themes rooted in the past that are still relevant today.

Teachers from the participating schools spoke of their children’s enthusiasm for learning through the medium of stories and songs about a serious topic like flooding.

“[They were] so enthralled and so wanting to pass the message on of what they’d learnt,” a teacher from north-east Lincolnshire recalled about the children’s enthusiasm on returning from one of the workshops. “They came back just full of it – and full of the stories they’d been told as well.”

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

For you: more from our Insights series:

Stewart Mottram receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, grant number AH/Y004779/1.

Racism never went away – it simply changed shape

2025-11-28T16:52:35Z

Prime Minister Keir Starmer thinks that racism is returning to British society. He has accused Nigel Farage’s Reform UK of sowing “toxic division” with its “racist rhetoric”.

Starmer’s comments follow a trend that has seen senior Labour party officials portray their political opponents on the far-right as sowing division with racist rhetoric.

Recently, Wes Streeting, the Labour health secretary, warned that an “ugly” racism is on the rise again, pointing to worrying figures showing an increase of race-based abuse of NHS staff.

And in October, senior Labour officials attacked Farage’s plans to strip millions of legal migrants of their Indefinite Leave to Remain status as a racist policy. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said that Farage’s plans sounded like a “very loud dog whistle to every racist in the country”.

Labour officials portray the rise in racist incidents and rhetoric as the return of attitudes that had all but disappeared from British society. Streeting expressed his worry that “1970s, 1980s-style racism has apparently become permissible again in this country”. Starmer similarly stated that “frankly I thought we had dealt with” the problem of racist abuse “decades ago”.

This is an appealing story because it conveys a neat and simple message: racism was defeated decades ago and it is now being revived by racist agitators. But in truth, the history of post-war racism is much more complex.

In my new book, I investigate how ideas of race and racism have changed since the second world war. History shows that racism never disappeared from public life. Rather, it assumed different shapes, some of which are harder to discern than others.

The experience of fascism

The defeat of Nazism in 1945 marked a key moment in the history of racism. Prior to the second world war, ideas of racial difference and even racial hierarchy were firmly entrenched in elite society.

In Victorian Britain, for example, a belief in the racial superiority of Europeans was decisive to maintaining colonial rule across large parts of central and east Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. This sentiment was famously captured in Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem, The White Man’s Burden, which depicted colonial rule as the moral duty of white nations.

Likewise, pseudosciences like eugenics and physical anthropology enjoyed significant prestige among British elites well into the 20th century. The British Eugenics Society, dedicated to improving the genetic stock of the British population, flourished in the interwar period. At this time the eugenics movement was an ideological broad church, appealing to progressive as much as conservative elites.

But the second world war irrevocably changed this landscape. The experience of fascism made it clear for all to see just how dangerous the concept of racial superiority was. Ideas of racial purity, racial hierarchy, and eugenics had driven the Nazis to commit genocide. It had led to a world war that many experienced as a straightforward conflict between good and evil.

At the same time, anti-colonial movements were gaining momentum all over the world. In south-east Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, there emerged powerful critiques of European colonialism and the racist views that supported it. Some of these critiques linked fascism to colonialism, arguing that Nazism represented the “boomerang effect” of colonial violence curving back onto the people of Europe.

The great sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois worded this view powerfully in 1947:

There was no Nazi atrocity – concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of childhood – which Christian civilization or Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world [sic].

Adolf Hitler on the third day of the Nazi party conference Nuremberg, Germany, in 1929. Shutterstock/Andreas Wolochow

The cumulative effect of these experiences was that ideas of racial superiority came to be seen an unscientific relic of the past.

Squashing ‘scientific racism’

This was exemplified by the United Nations, which in November of 1945 established Unesco (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) with the explicit aim of battling racism. Unesco’s constitution, adopted on November 16 of that year, drew a direct connection between racism and the second world war:

The great and terrible war which has now ended was a war made possible by the denial of the democratic principles of the dignity, equality and mutual respect of men, and by the propagation, in their place, through ignorance and prejudice, of the doctrine of the inequality of men and races.

In 1949, Unesco appointed a panel of prominent scientists to formulate a critique of scientific racism. Reporting in 1950, the panel concluded that there is no scientific basis for any claims of racial superiority of one group over another. As the panel wrote, “the likenesses among men are far greater than their differences”.

While a small number of academics remained committed to race science and eugenics, they were forced into the margins of the academic world. The Eugenics Society, though it continued to exist, lost much of its prestige.

Going forward, race science or political appeals to racial superiority were no longer deemed acceptable, even among ruling elites. The language of race lost the scientific legitimacy and political purchase it once had.

This did not mean that racism disappeared, however. Rather, it changed shape.

Immigration and culture

Explicit appeals to race remained politically unacceptable for many decades after the war. This forced intellectuals and politicians on the right, especially those with divisive views about racial and ethnic differences, to develop an alternative language in which to express their ideas.

In Britain, one such language crystallised in the 1960s. During this period, tensions grew over the number of migrants coming to Britain from Commonwealth countries. Migration from former colonial areas had been on the rise in preceding years, made possible by the 1948 British Nationality Act, which conferred citizenship on all former imperial subjects.

The backlash against these migration trends was exemplified by Enoch Powell, a Conservative MP and former Minister of Health. In the late 1960s, Powell developed a vocal critique of immigration numbers.

Powell’s rhetoric was inflammatory and racially charged. In his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, delivered in 1968 in Birmingham, Powell claimed that unless immigration was restricted, people of colour would soon have “the whip hand over the white man”. In another speech, from 1970, Powell complained that it was no longer politically acceptable to say that “the English are a white nation”.

Powell made no appeal to the idea of biological difference. Instead, his emphasis was on cultural difference. He claimed that migrants and white British people were culturally too dissimilar for assimilation to be possible in large numbers.

Powell’s speeches on immigration cost him his political career. He was dismissed from the Shadow Cabinet following his “Rivers of Blood” comments. Yet his views were soon echoed by other political figures.

In 1976, Ivor Stanbrook, a Conservative MP, said in the House of Commons: “Let there be no beating about the bush. The average coloured immigrant has a different culture, a different religion and a different language. That is what creates the problem.”

And in 1978, Margaret Thatcher said in a TV interview that British “people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture”. Migration was a threat to Britain’s national identity.

Thatcher added: “We are a British nation with British characteristics. Every country can take some small minorities and in many ways they add to the richness and variety of this country. The moment the minority threatens to become a big one, people get frightened.”

In the 1979 general election, which Thatcher won with a landslide, the Conservative party manifesto pledged to tighten immigration controls and restrict citizenship. This pledge was enacted in 1981.

The denial of racism

The rhetoric of people like Powell, Stanbrook, and Thatcher represented a new kind of racial vocabulary. What is striking about this rhetoric is that it pretended not to concern race at all. Each of them explicitly denied that their rhetoric appealed to racist sentiment.

Powell often distanced his critique of immigration from concerns over race. In a 1970 interview, Powell said:

I’m not talking about race at all. I am talking about those differences, some of which are related to race, between the members of different nations which make the assimilation of the members of one nation into another nation more difficult or less difficult.

Stanbrook also denied that his comments about “coloured immigrants” were racist. In a parliamentary debate, he insisted that to highlight problems with cultural integration “is not racialism, if by that one means, as I do, an active hostility to another race”. This was because, in his view, “a preference for one’s own race is as natural as a preference for one’s own family”. A dislike of immigration, therefore, is not based on racist animosity. “It is simply human nature,” Stanbrook added.

Even Thatcher complained that whenever she tried to address concerns about immigration she was “falsely accused of racial prejudice” by her political opponents. She claimed that because mainstream political parties were not willing to talk about immigration, voters were instead turning to the far-right National Front. “If we do not want people to go to extremes, and I do not, we ourselves must talk about this problem and we must show that we are prepared to deal with it,” she said.

These denials of racism indicate that during this period, the language of race itself remained socially unacceptable. Powell, Stanbrook and Thatcher all felt the need to distance themselves from it.

This helps to explain why they preferred to focus on ideas of cultural difference and national identity. These ideas did not carry the same negative connotations as race, yet could be used to convey a similar message – namely that some groups did not belong in Britain.

Researchers have called these ideas “cultural racism”. This is a form of racism that discriminates between groups on the basis of cultural or religious traditions rather than biological traits.

Though it can be harder to pin down, cultural racism can be just as harmful to marginalised groups.

Normalisation of racist rhetoric

The rise of inflammatory rhetoric surrounding immigration in the 1960s and 70s had an immediate impact on policy. During this period, successive governments responded to the growing clamour over immigration by selectively tightening migration controls and nationality legislation.

However, this rhetoric has also had a more gradual, long-term effect on racism’s place in society. Powell’s and Thatcher’s views on immigration have been echoed again and again, often framed in the same vocabulary. This continues to this day.

Last month, Katie Lam, the shadow home office minister, appeared to argue that Ukrainian and Gazan refugees should be treated differently because the former are better able to assimilate to British culture, as well as being more likely to go back to rebuild their country of origin.

And earlier this month, nationalist writer and academic Matthew Goodwin, who is formally linked to Reform, wrote in his personal newsletter that the “cultures that our hapless politicians are now importing into our country at speed are not just radically different and incompatible to our own; they are inferior, primitive, stuck in cultural codes and practices we moved on from centuries ago”.

Over time, public debate on immigration has soured, and dehumanising language has become more commonplace. In 2015, The Sun columnist Katie Hopkins compared migrants to “cockroaches”, while Farage refers to migration as a “flood”.

In 2022, the then home secretary Suella Braverman spoke of an “invasion” of Channel migrants, directly echoing Thatcher’s rhetoric 50 years earlier. Strikingly, again echoing Thatcher, Braverman also denies that her anti-immigration rhetoric is racist. Instead, she describes the word “racist” as a “slur” used by the left “to silence debate”.

The gradual normalisation of this kind of rhetoric has allowed it to re-enter mainstream public discourse. This has caused the erosion of the anti-racist norms established in the wake of the second world war. For many years after the war, these social norms meant that public figures who expressed views that were considered racist paid a high social or professional cost. Powell’s dismissal from the shadow cabinet following his Rivers of Blood speech is a forceful example of this.

Today, these anti-racist norms are under increasing pressure. To be sure, they have not fully disappeared. In recent years, anti-racist movements like the Black Lives Matter have enjoyed broad popular support in Britain and elsewhere.

Likewise, officials who express inflammatory rhetoric can still expect to be challenged. Politicians including Starmer, Robert Jenrick and Katie Lam have recently been met with criticism for divisive comments or policies on race, migration, and culture.

Starmer, for instance, was criticised for saying that migration numbers are turning Britain into an “island of strangers”. This comment was likened to Powell’s rhetoric on immigration, who also said that immigration left Britons feeling like “strangers in their own country”. When confronted with criticism, Starmer said he deeply regretted using that phrase.

Meanwhile, Farage has faced pressure to distance himself from racist comments he is alleged to have made in the past – allegations which he has strongly denied.

Yet, the prospect of a politician being dismissed from a cabinet role for racially inflammatory comments is very remote today. Neither Jenrick nor Lam has been dismissed from the shadow cabinet for their comments, with Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch expressly defending Jenrick.

More worryingly, on the fringes of public debate, the erosion of anti-racist norms has created conditions in which racist rhetoric can flourish. Researchers have shown that on online platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Parler, racist abuse has sharply increased in recent years. Under the ownership of Elon Musk, himself notorious for his right-wing views, X has systematically amplified right-wing messaging.

In some circles, racist rhetoric not only receives little to no challenge but is actively incentivised. Far-right groups constitute a lucrative market for racist ideas. Authors expressing right-wing ideas, for example English nationalist Tommy Robinson, have access to large speaker circuits, podcasts, digital publishers, and many other markets.

Even in academia, recent years have seen a resurgence in race theory and eugenics. While mostly restricted to fringe groups, some authors have been able to publish work with prestigious university presses admiring the ideas of Francis Galton – the man who has been called the “father of eugenics”.

Hiding in plain sight

Various forms of racism persist. Today, cultural racism is the most widespread and politically consequential kind. Derogatory and stereotyped views on cultural differences and national identity are now an everyday feature of public discourse, especially in debates over immigration.

Yet cultural racism remains poorly understood. In most media reporting and political discourse, the term “racism” continues to refer primarily to individual prejudice based on outward appearance or group belonging. When Streeting talks about “1970s, 1980s-style racism” he specifically means “abuse based on people’s skin colour”.

While it is undeniably a good thing that racist abuse is being vocally challenged by politicians, this narrow definition of racism obscures as much as it reveals. It fails to challenge forms of racism that do not appeal to physical traits but to cultural traditions. And it gives political agitators intent on sowing division on themes like immigration the opportunity to deflect criticism by denying that their ideas are racist.

Similarly, the notion that racism was already dealt with “decades ago”, in Starmer’s words, ignores the fact that racism never went away. It also downplays the extent to which the harm of past racism lives on in the present in structural issues like wealth and income gaps, uneven access to work or housing, unequal health outcomes, and police profiling.

To tackle racism, a widening of focus is needed. Our conception of racism cannot be restricted to instances of individual prejudice but must also include these structural effects.

At the structural level, racism causes certain individuals or communities to be more vulnerable to violence, exclusion, marginalisation, poverty, and other harmful outcomes on the basis of their membership of a particular racial, cultural, or religious group. Rhetoric that intensifies this vulnerability feeds racism, even when it is not expressed in the language of “race” or when there is no prejudicial intent.

So long as these structural factors are not taken into consideration, more subtle forms of racism will continue to hide in plain sight and exert a corrosive influence on the health and wellbeing of those it targets.

For you: more from our Insights series:

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Lars Cornelissen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

‘I have to talk about it so that the world can know what happened to women and girls in Sudan’ – rape and terror sparks mass migration

2025-11-26T18:20:23Z

I was in Khartoum when the conflict started. Armed soldiers of Arabs came to our house and they wanted to loot groundnuts, but my mother resisted opening the door. Immediately, one soldier shot her. I screamed but three of the soldiers surrounded me. They grabbed me and I was taken behind a building where ten soldiers raped me. Nobody came to rescue me because my mom was already shot dead and neighbours ran away. After two days, when my mom was buried, I joined others to come to South Sudan.

This girl’s story was shared with us near the Aweil border crossing between South Sudan and Sudan, and it mirrors what we heard from many others. In the sweltering heat of July 2024 – and with mud underfoot and rainwater pooling along the road – South Sudanese members of our international team asked people to share stories about experiences of women and girls making the perilous journey between the two countries. The accounts they shared were harrowing, urgent, and clear.

We spoke with nearly 700 returnees and forced migrants – women and men, girls and boys – many of whom shared similar experiences of being terrorised by soldiers and armed militias on both sides of the Sudan civil war. The war has been tearing the country apart since 2023 and has led to the deaths of more than 150,000 people.

The struggle for power between Sudan’s army and a powerful paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has led to a famine and claims of a genocide in the western Darfur region. The RSF was formed in 2013 and has its origins in the notorious Janjaweed militia that fought rebels in Darfur, where they were accused of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the region’s non-Arab population. New reports about massacres and atrocities continue to emerge.

As the crisis deepens, our research has revealed that sexual and gender-based violence is a major driver of migration to South Sudan. Over half of our participants said it was the main reason they sought sanctuary across the border, with adolescent girls, aged 13 to 17, being far more likely to state that sexual violence was the reason they had to migrate.

The research, which was recently published in Conflict and Health , uncovered multiple harrowing accounts of gang rapes and murder, some on children as young as 12.

What is happening in South Sudan and Sudan?

Since its independence in 2011, South Sudan has remained among the most fragile states globally, plagued by chronic political instability and humanitarian crises. Following internal divisions, a devastating civil war, fought largely along ethnic lines, erupted in 2013. This conflict resulted in nearly 400,000 deaths and an estimated 2.3 million people forcibly displaced, including 800,000 to Sudan. Another two million people were internally displaced within South Sudan, severely undermining state-building efforts. The country has remained on a knife-edge with the UN stating in October that it is on the brink of returning to all-out civil war.

The outbreak of war in Sudan in 2023 further exacerbated South Sudan’s fragilities and vulnerabilities, jeopardised peace efforts and worsened the existing humanitarian crisis. The Sudan conflict triggered a massive influx, this time with over 1.2 million refugees and returnees crossing into South Sudan – placing immense pressure on already overstretched resources and services.

As of 2024, over 9.3 million people in South Sudan – more than 70% of the population – required humanitarian assistance, with 7.8 million facing acute food insecurity. Over 2.3 million children were at risk of malnutrition, with some regions nearing famine conditions.

Even before 2023, South Sudan was among the highest-ranking countries for sexual and gender-based violence globally, having the second-highest rates in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The border between Sudan and South Sudan has long been a corridor of cyclical displacement, shaped by decades of war, famine, and political instability. However, the scale and complexity of the current crisis has intensified vulnerabilities, particularly for women and girls. The effects have manifested in rape, sexual abuse, trafficking, and forced prostitution – on both sides of the border.

Fleeing sexual violence and terror

We focused our study on that border and the people who were fleeing through it. We used “sensemaking” methodology (based on the principle that storytelling is an intuitive way to convey complex information and helps people make sense of their experiences) to document what happened to women on their journeys and the risks they faced in the South Sudanese settlements. We had adopted a similar approach when examining accounts of sexual exploitation by UN peacekeepers in Haiti and DRC.

The fieldwork team – three female and three male researchers from the not-for-profit STEWARDWOMEN – worked on the border of Aweil North for two weeks to collect these stories. STEWARDWOMEN is a women-led South Sudanese organisation which aims to address violence against women, including sexual violence.

Our team collected 695 stories from 671 people. The vast majority were South Sudanese returning to a country they had once fled (98%), and most were women of child-bearing age (88%). Over half of the stories were first-person accounts of their own migration, while others were shared by men about their female relatives.

The aim was to make sure people felt safe and empowered to speak openly. Josephine Chandiru Drama, a South Sudanese human rights lawyer and former director of STEWARDWOMEN, said:

By inviting women and girls to share their migration experiences in their own words, the data collectors honoured their agency and voice. This approach fostered trust, reduced retraumatisation, and yielded richer, more authentic narratives that reflect the lived realities of displacement.

‘They took the girls by force’

While violence is forcing families to flee Sudan, the risk is not shared equally. Our findings show how adolescent girls are disproportionately at the greatest risk.

Girls face acute danger that families often can’t easily prevent. Armed groups raid homes and camps, abducting girls or seizing them on roads and at checkpoints. Girls are singled out and subjected to sexual harassment and rape.

Parents may try to travel in groups, change routes, or hide their daughters, but when men with guns stop a bus or enter a village at night, their protection options are limited. These risks intensify as poverty deepens and safe transport is scarce. These conditions leave girls visible, isolated, and at risk. One woman told us how they were attacked:

… the rebel car came towards us. They took the girls by force and they raped us, the men could not do anything to protect us. What hurts is raping you in open even when the men are seeing us … what the Arabs did to women and girls was terrible and it is not only me going through it.

Another woman shared a desperately traumatic story about the rape and murder of her daughter. She said:

My 12-year-old daughter was raped by a group of soldiers and died instantly. This is a very sad story to tell but I have to talk about it so that the world can know what happened to women and girls in Sudan … The soldiers then raped all the five girls … Unfortunately, my raped little daughter died on the roadside … It was such a painful moment …

Our data confirmed this terrifying reality. When we looked at the responses by age, a statistically significant pattern emerged: adolescent girls, aged 13 to 17, were far more likely than older women to state that sexual violence was the reason they had to migrate.

We asked participants to place the experience they shared on a spectrum: was sexual violence the reason for migrating, or did it happen because of migrating? For adolescent girls, the answers clustered overwhelmingly at one end: sexual violence was the trigger, not a consequence of the journey.

It is possible that among older women sexual violence has become somewhat normalised after surviving previous conflicts in the region, compounded by the fact that younger, unmarried girls are specifically targeted for abduction and forced marriage. One girl explained what happened to her sister:

As we travelled to look for safety in our motherland of South Sudan … all the women and girls were ordered out of the car… and were raped by a group of five soldiers. As an innocent young girl, my 15-year-old sister tried to resist […] and she was beaten badly, raped by all the five soldiers and then killed … We were ordered to leave, and my sister was no more.

‘I came here … to change my life’

One young woman – barely out of her teens – reported feeling ashamed and embarrassed, as she told us about how they were attacked while fleeing to South Sudan.

… we were suddenly attacked by the militia and I was among the eight girls to be abducted. I was raped by four repeatedly for two days … The rape made me miscarry a three-month old baby and I contracted syphilis.

While violence is not unexpected in war, when we analysed the stories, a stark pattern emerged: overall 53% of participants specifically identified sexual and gender-based violence as a major reason to flee, and across every age group it was the primary driver. For many, it wasn’t simply a consequence of war – it was the final straw in the decision to leave Sudan.

The stories brought this data to life. A mother recounted the death of her child along the migration route, a direct result of the violence they were escaping. One man described how his wife and daughter were abducted along the route, leaving him to care for four other children and wondering whether they were still alive. He said:

It pains me a lot because I don’t know whether they are alive. Information circulates that most of the women and girls who were abducted were mob raped and many died. Maybe my wife and her daughter are victims.

These stories, like those of countless other women and their families, illustrate clearly that sexual violence was not a mere background noise to war – it was indeed the breaking point that sent them on the road. As one woman told us, the sexual violence she feared prompted her family to migrate to South Sudan:

My husband was taken by the Rapid Support Forces and I was stabbed when I refused to be raped by those men, I even still have the scar. I came here [to South Sudan] to change my life.

In the Aweil North temporary settlement, Kiir Adem, the team found shocking conditions. Designed as a short-term shelter, prior to resettlement by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), many people had been there for three months or longer. Some had been registered as refugees or returnees, others had not. All were struggling to survive without adequate food or shelter, and with no access to desperately needed healthcare.

Chandiru Drama said: “Due to rampant looting and robbery along the journey, countless individuals reached their destination stripped of essentials – no food, no clothing, no supplies.”

The reality after crossing

After crossing the border to relative safety in South Sudan, returnees and refugees were met with a new set of struggles: lack of infrastructure, limited access to medical care, and few humanitarian provisions.

Unlike in better established reception centres along the border, Kiir Adem had little in the way of support. The nearest health centre was over two hours away by car, an often impossible journey for exhausted, injured women and girls who had been robbed of any money or supplies they had carried. One woman told us:

It took me six days to reach South Sudan border. At the border, I reported the rape case but no treatment was given to me. The IOM officials referred me to health facilities in Gok Marchar which is about 50km but it was very far that I couldn’t travel and I didn’t have money for transport.

It is crucial for survivors of rape to receive prophylactic treatments and other emergency sexual and reproductive healthcare as soon as possible post-assault. Some participants detailed devastating physical injuries resulting from sexual violence, and still others were pregnant when raped or became pregnant as a result of rape. In these cases, the lack of medical care may result in dire outcomes.

Returnees were left, in many cases, to piece together their own makeshift shelters and to forage for food in the forests. The area was prone to flooding, with researchers having to wade through water to get to people. One woman said:

I travelled to South Sudan in April 2024 with two children. I am now stranded with my children because my husband ran away when the Arabs were rampantly sexually assaulting women … I never know whether he is alive or not. There were two girls who were also abducted during the migration to South Sudan. I am now in the returnees camp sleeping in grass thatched huts, a lot of rain, no tents, no food.

When asked how often they struggle to make ends meet, over 80% of women and girls responded, “all the time or most of the time”. Informal settlements, like the one where we collected data, have been developed along the length of the Sudan-South Sudan border.

The porousness of the border, regular movement across the border in times of relative peace, and the difficulties accessing formal crossing points make it near-impossible to effectively channel displaced peoples through formal crossing points and into comparatively well-serviced settlements. Improved services, including transports to official settlements and for medical care, are urgently needed in the border region to meet the high needs of returnees wherever they are located.

Urgent response needed

There must now be a shift in humanitarian response – from reactive service provision to proactive, survivor-centred protection strategies. For example, NGOs should increase activities along known migration routes and along the border and humanitarian aid funding must be increased by donor governments. The UN peacekeeping mission could also increase protection of civilian activities in South Sudanese border regions, in partnership with South Sudanese civil society organisations.

Sexual violence is not simply collateral damage of the war in Sudan. For many girls and their families, it is the primary catalyst for flight. The pervasive threat of abduction and rape is a key driver of migration, shaping who flees, when they flee, and compelling women and girls to take the unimaginable risks for a chance of safety in South Sudan.

Since our data collection in the summer of 2024, the situation in Sudan has not improved and the security context in South Sudan has worsened. On the southern side of the border, increased conflict between ethnically-based armed groups and an uptick in political tensions between President Salva Kiir and first Vice-President Riek Machar, including the house arrest and subsequent treason trial against Machar, have stoked fears of a possible return to war in South Sudan.

Combined with increased economic pressures and spillover effects from the war in Sudan, South Sudan’s political and security status is increasingly precarious. The risk of South Sudan returning to war increases the urgency with which returnees must be resettled and their immediate needs met. The risks of increased conflict and violence will disproportionately impact those who are already displaced and vulnerable. Legally trained NGO personnel could help here by advancing criminal investigations which in turn could inform service provision.

International law has also been very slow to react. It was only in October this year that judges at the International Criminal Court advanced the first conviction for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Darfur in 2003 and 2004. Victims and survivors of the current war should not have to wait more than 20 years for trials.

The international community should work with women’s organisations, Sudanese and South Sudanese lawyers and human rights defenders to advance justice now, in whatever way is possible.

This could include survivor-centred investigations and evidence gathering, community justice initiatives, and safe spaces for survivors to begin their healing.

Women-led civil society organisations are well placed to support the immediate needs of women and girls, but they need support. Funding cuts have hit these organisations hard around the world, with many at risk of shutting down.

Chandiru Drama added: “If civil society organisations are to continue performing their lifesaving work, they must be funded at scale. This is not just a funding issue – it’s a justice issue … Because in the face of unimaginable violence, these groups are not just service providers – they are lifelines.”

The women and girls we met were clear: sexual violence forced their decision to run. If they are to stop running, an urgent response is needed: resettlement, humanitarian support, and justice must be prioritised.

For you: more from our Insights series:

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Sabine Lee received funding from the XCEPT Cross-Border Research and the Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy and Trends (XCEPT) research programme, which funded the research detailed herein.

Heather Tasker receives funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), International Development Research Council (IDRC), and the XCEPT Cross-Border Research and the Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy and Trends (XCEPT) research programme. XCEPT funded the research detailed herein.

Susan Bartels received funding from the Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy and Trends (XCEPT) research programme, which funded the research presented in this article. She also receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).

What do trees remember?

2025-11-19T18:03:09Z

The mighty Feanedock Oak in Derbyshire has provided an anchor habitat for many lifeforms, including people, for more than 200 years. Lucy Neal, CC BY-NC-SA

The Feanedock Oak stands out so clearly in Derbyshire’s section of the National Forest, you’d think it was calling to you. Surrounded by open fields, hawthorn hedges and young beech forest, a majestic old oak like this anchors the English countryside.

As the highest expression of our woodlands, oaks support more life in the UK than any other native tree. At the foot of the Feanedock oak, you can hear and see – at a glance – wrens, blackbirds, spiders, squirrels, song thrush, hoverflies, butterflies, blackcaps, woodlouse, ants and chiffchaffs. For more than two centuries, it has provided an anchor habitat, including for humans – a tumbled-down dwelling lies under its shade.

Many people think of plants as nice-looking greens. Essential for clean air, yes, but simple organisms. A step change in research is shaking up the way scientists think about plants: they are far more complex and more like us than you might imagine. This blossoming field of science is too delightful to do it justice in one or two stories. This article is part of a series, Plant Curious, exploring scientific studies that challenge the way you view plantlife.

How well any English oak (Quercus robur) thrives affects everything living on and around it, from canopy to soil. In recent years of heat and drought, the Feanedock Oak has lost two large boughs.

In the summer of 2023, dendrochronologists – who research and date trees through their growth rings – took samples from the tree’s trunk to study its “healthy” and “poor” years of growth. They counted 195 rings but did not get to the centre of the tree – so it was probably seeded in the early 19th century, if not earlier. As a sapling, it would have greeted Derbyshire miners walking across the fields from nearby villages to work in the newly-dug coal shafts or the many industrial potteries in the area.

More than 200 years later, in July 2023, the Feanedock Oak (now measuring around 120 feet) played a central role in Ring of Truth. This creative collaboration between tree scientists and artists from the Walking Forest collective imagined a legal case set in the year 2030 between a claimant, the oak (in whose shadow the case was heard), and the UK government.

Ring of Truth’s imagined court case is heard at the Timber Festival, July 2023. RB Films, CC BY-NC-SA

The counsel for the claimant – real-life rights of nature lawyer Paul Powlesland – set out his argument to the judge and jury, claiming the government had breached legal obligations set out in the 2008 Climate Change Act. Scientists from the University of Birmingham – including one of us (Bruno) – acted as expert witnesses, bringing evidence of the threats posed to the tree from increased heat, atmospheric CO₂, soil damage and disease.

After hearing all the evidence, the assembled audience – in the role of jury – voted for their verdict. Many were acutely conscious that the claimant had been standing in this spot far longer than anyone else present – a silent witness to the damage done by humans on the environment and landscape. They ordered the secretary of state for climate and ecological breakdown (as the job is known in 2030) to cease breaching legal obligations to protect this and all “anchor oaks”, and the communities that thrive or suffer with them.

That powerful moment under the Feanedock Oak opened a door to a deeper question: how and what do trees remember?

Until recently, little was known about how memory might function in long-lived organisms like trees which experience decades, even centuries, of shifting environmental pressures. So this is what our multidisciplinary research collaboration – featuring artworks, performances and even a musical composition as well as groundbreaking science – set out to discover.

On the Memory of Trees, by Scott Wilson, was composed using data collated by the Membra project.

How trees’ memories work

For trees, memory is not a metaphor but a biological reality, written into their cells. One of the most remarkable forms this takes is epigenetic memory: the ability of a tree to record its life experiences and allow those experiences to shape its future, without changing the sequence of its DNA.

As Membra (full name: Understanding Memory of UK Treescapes for Better Resilience and Adaptation), we’ve studied a number of ecologically vital and culturally significant UK species including oak, ash, hazel, beech and birch. Together, they have helped us understand how trees register and respond to environmental stress, offering a powerful glimpse into how their memories are carried through woodlands.

At the heart of this process is DNA methylation, where chemical tags known as methyl groups are added to the tree’s DNA over time. While not rewriting the genetic code, they do alter how it is read. These chemical signatures can turn genes on or off, dial responses up or down, and fundamentally shift how a tree grows, adapts, or defends itself. In oaks, for example, long-term drought exposure over decades is associated with changes in DNA methylation, suggesting that trees may adjust their gene expression in response to repeated stress.

These epigenetic memories may allow trees to respond more quickly to drought, disease or climate extremes, and could even be passed to the next generation. In some plant species, this kind of inheritance is well documented, but in long-lived trees, it remains an open question – one with critical implications for forest regeneration and resilience.

So far, our research has shown trees respond to stress in ways that can extend well beyond the immediate event. Exposure to drought or high CO₂, for example, can leave lasting marks on a tree’s growth and internal chemistry, and may shape how it responds to future conditions. But the strength of this memory appears to depend on the nature of the stress: it is more pronounced when the stress is particularly strong, such as disease, or when it occurs repeatedly over time, such as chronic drought.

A surprising result came from oak, where we observed that DNA methylation itself changes depending on the time of year – with methylation levels lowest in early spring, then increasing as the seasons progress. This suggests the imprinting of memory in trees may be far more dynamic than previously thought, and that the timing of stress events within the growing season could influence how strongly that memory is encoded.

All our studied species and associated environmental conditions have now been sequenced. In every case, we have found evidence of these memories of past stresses. In ash trees, for example, we’ve begun to detect methylation changes linked to ash dieback pressure, offering clues as to how trees regulate their defences over time as a disease progresses.

Trees are certainly resilient. They bend, adapt and endure, holding the memory of storms and seasons within their very bodies. But even their deep-rooted strength has limits. The challenges they now face are faster, more frequent and more severe than at any point in their evolutionary history.

This means what we are learning from their memories is not just a story of survival, but a warning. They are telling us there could come a point when they can no longer cope.

Even young trees remember

It is easy to be awed by a centuries-old oak. But what often goes unnoticed is the quiet crisis beneath the canopy. Across many UK woodlands, the next generation is missing.

Surveys show steep declines in most species of young trees (seedlings and saplings) due to a growing list of pressures: prolonged drought, warming temperatures, shifting herbivore populations, and an expanding wave of pests and pathogens. According to a study of nine sites in England and Scotland, co-authored by one of us (Bruno) and currently under review, the sapling mortality rate has increased from 16.2% in the period up to 2000 to 30.9% two decades later.

In some species such as elm and now ash, diseases have brought populations close to the point of lack of regeneration – when a woodland can no longer sustain itself. To counter this threat, young trees must be highly adaptable – not just in form, but at the molecular level. At Membra, scientists are exploring whether young trees imprint environmental stress more readily than older ones, and whether that memory, recorded through changes in DNA methylation, influences their survival.

One way we have tested such transgenerational changes is to expose trees (oak and hazel) to the elevated levels of CO₂ that are expected in the UK by 2050. This was done in the Birmingham Institute for Forest Research (Bifor) facility in a Staffordshire woodland – one of the world’s largest climate change experiments, where tree “arrays” (circular patches of woodland) are exposed to 150 parts per million (ppm) of CO₂ above ambient concentrations.

Membra’s research there has found that the offspring of trees exposed to these CO₂ levels respond very differently to further environmental stressors – in ways that can make them more resilient. For example, acorns from CO₂-exposed oaks were notably larger and their seedlings showed both faster growth and improved resistance to pathogens like powdery mildew – a strong sign that environmental conditions experienced by parent trees can shape offspring resilience.

To date, molecular analysis shows the inherited memory of this exposure is imprinted in the tree genes that are involved in defence mechanisms. The direct link with resilience should be identified in the next few years as our data analysis progresses.

Strikingly, these beneficial effects were most pronounced during “mast” years, when trees produce a bumper crop of seeds, suggesting that the reproductive cycles of mature oaks as well as resource availability are key to the oaks’ successful inheritance of stress-adaptive traits. Similarly, seedlings from oak trees that had undergone repeated drought exposure have shown increased drought tolerance – which suggests some trees may “prime” their offspring to be more resilient in the face of repeated climate stress.

Our work also shows that young trees can be artificially primed for resilience. For instance, early treatment with certain natural compounds enhances oak seedlings’ resistance to powdery mildew disease, triggering biochemical and transcriptional responses that allow them to mount a faster and stronger defence. This priming acts like a kind of immunological memory – in this case not inherited but induced – and could potentially open up new avenues for improving forest health and regeneration.

Importantly, species differ widely in how they pass on environmental experiences to their progeny. Hazel trees subjected to the same elevated CO₂ conditions in the Bifor woodland produced both smaller nuts and seedlings that often failed to thrive after germination. So, rather than assuming a one-size-fits-all strategy for seed sourcing, forestry managers may need to tailor decisions based on species-specific responses to past environmental stresses. Recognising the importance of parental environmental history, especially for stressors like drought, could shape how we select and prepare the next generation of trees.

This may also mean rethinking how and when we collect seeds. In species such as oak, collecting from mast years may improve the odds of transmitting beneficial adaptive traits. In all cases, understanding how trees’ memory works, not just within a tree’s lifetime but across generations, offers a crucial tool for building more adaptive, resilient treescapes in this rapidly changing world.

Tree rings sampled from the Feanedock Oak hold evidence of its response to climate change. Lucy Neal/Walking Forest, CC BY-NC-SA

Using trees’ memories to plant for the future

Tree rings such as those sampled from the Feanedock Oak record much more than just a tree’s age. They hold evidence of how trees respond to changing climates, rising carbon levels and extreme events.

Studies using these natural archives (the rings) have shown that rising atmospheric CO₂ is already changing how trees grow and photosynthesise. In some oaks, it has led to faster growth and more carbon being stored – a hopeful sign.

But this acceleration may come with hidden costs. Trees that grow quickly not only reach maturity sooner but may also die younger, potentially limiting the long-term stability of forest carbon storage.

And these shifts are not just a concern for the trees themselves – they ripple outward. Faster growth can alter forest structure, affecting biodiversity and resilience. In the UK and globally, trees face an escalating cascade of challenges including pollution, drought, storms and disease – and increasingly, these pressures overlap.

Understanding how different trees’ memories will mediate their responses to new, more stressful conditions is key to predicting which species will thrive, adapt or decline. Artificially priming young trees by exposing them early to stress may enhance their memory and survival.

In recent years, a wave of tree planting, often tied to carbon offsetting schemes, is rapidly reshaping landscapes across much of the UK. National and local governments have launched large-scale initiatives such as the England Tree Action Plan. These programmes aim to restore canopy cover, improve biodiversity and contribute to net-zero goals. Local authorities, environmental charities, landowners and corporate offsetting partners are among those overseeing the planting, with guidance and funding provided by the Forestry Commission and Defra.

However, the choice of species is often constrained by budget and availability, which can result in limited diversity and mismatches between trees and local ecological conditions. Fast-growing species like sycamore, alder, and hybrid poplar are frequently used, while slower-growing native species with deeper ecological value may be underrepresented.

Planting trees without understanding their long-term ecological roles – or their capacity to remember and adapt – also risks repeating old mistakes that could compromise long-term resilience. Selecting the right trees to face future climate threats requires more than just numbers. A forest full of fast-growing, short-lived trees may have a very different effect on the local ecosystem than one with long-lived, memory-bearing individuals. In the worst-case scenario, such woodlands will fail to regenerate and die out.

Climate models indicate a future of warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers in the UK, which will challenge many native species. Diseases such as ash dieback have already transformed landscapes, with over 80% of ash trees expected to be lost in many areas. This is not just a loss of a species but a loss of the biodiversity that depends on it.

Our work highlights the value of sourcing seed from trees that have survived historic drought and understanding how memory, resilience and adaptation are embedded in the biology of many older individuals. Future woodlands will need to blend ancient wisdom with modern science, combining genetic diversity, environmental memory and community stewardship to thrive.

Trees have rights

The idea that nature has rights is no longer just a philosophical concept. Legal recognition is growing globally, from Ecuador’s Constitutional Court ruling to protect the Los Cedros forest, to the Welsh National Assembly’s creation of the Well-being of Future Generations Act and UK-based cosmetics company, Faith in Nature, giving nature a legal position on its board.

This legal shift complements the scientific insight from Membra: that mature woodlands, with deep memory and biodiversity, are not replaceable. And as Ring of Truth’s imagined court case made clear, it is a travesty if trees such as the Feanedock Oak are thought of as little more than machines to extract human-created carbon from the atmosphere.

Their social, cultural and ecological roles are vast. Listening to Indigenous and local communities with long-held tree knowledge, and empowering tree guardians in cities and villages alike, is vital to fostering a meaningful public practice of tree stewardship.

As one Walking Forest participant put it, time spent with trees creates space and renewed agency for surviving the climate and nature crises: “We are like trees. The stronger we root and allow ourselves, like them, to be nurtured by those around us, the better we are at withstanding the strongest of storms”.

Another said: “I see the bigger picture now, of how we are related to the forest – at one with nature because we too are part of the ecosystem.”

By weaving together artistic performance, scientific insight and ancestral knowledge, the Walking Forest collective has sought to expand how we understand our relationship with woodlands – connecting women, trees and ecological justice across time.

One powerful example is the 107-year-old Monterey Pine planted by suffragette Rose Lamartine Yates, the last known survivor of a historic arboretum planted by women activists at Eagle House in Batheaston, Somerset. A place of recovery for women who were politically active as part of the suffrage movement, this was the home of the Blathwayt family – and known as the Suffragettes’ Retreat.

Suffragettes Adela Pankhurst and Annie Kenney at Eagle House in Batheaston, Somerset, in 1910. Linley Blathwayt/Wikimedia

Between April 1909 and July 1911, at least 47 trees were planted in the grounds of Eagle House to commemorate individual suffragists and suffragettes, many of whom had been imprisoned and tortured. The arboretum afforded the suffragettes an opportunity to imagine the future into which their young trees would grow.

The trees were all bulldozed in the late 1960s to make way for a housing estate – other than Lamartine Yates’s Monterey Pine, planted in 1909, which survives to this day, protected in a private garden. The seeds of this tree are a touchstone of Walking Forest: we have gathered and propagated them, shared them with communities, and created performances and ceremonies that honour the tree’s legacy – connecting past and future generations (of trees and people) in a project to create a woodland that mirrors the original Eagle House arboretum.

A seed from Rose Lamartine Yates’s tree. Walking Forest, CC BY-NC-SA

Since 2018, Walking Forest artists have travelled overland to UN climate talks to gift seeds from the Monterey Pine to women and youth activists, climate negotiators, Indigenous community leaders and environmental campaigners – connecting with them in this story of resilience and renewal.

In another act of collective mourning and protest, a 100-year-old silver birch cut down for the HS2 rail link was carried through Coventry by more than 40 women during Coventry’s year as City of Culture in 2021. The act made visible the loss of ancient woodland and connected it with human grief, resistance and care.

These stories are not isolated. Across the UK, trees have become flashpoints for protest and protection – from the Sycamore Gap tree at Hadrian’s Wall to Sheffield Council’s felling of more than 5,000 healthy street trees between 2014 and 2018 as part of road maintenance.

Walking Forest has collaborated with Membra not only to share scientific knowledge but to offer new ways of knowing through storytelling, ritual and creative action. As climate pressures grow, so too does public awareness of how irreplaceable mature trees are.

A 100-year-old silver birch cut down for the HS2 rail project is carried through the centre of Coventry by more than 40 women. Oana Catalina Necsulescu/Walking Forest, CC BY-NC-SA

What future research could reveal

We are still only beginning to uncover the complexity of tree memory. Future research may reveal exactly how memory is transferred between generations, how trees prepare for challenges they’ve never seen, and how entire forests might adapt together.

But our collaboration between scientists, artists and communities is already helping to shift how people think about trees, from passive backdrop to learning beings. Through this work, we understand that trees are not just survivors – they are storytellers, record keepers and even teachers.

As our understanding of their memory deepens, so too does our responsibility to listen, learn and act. The future of forests depends not just on what trees can remember, but on what we choose not to forget.

A recent return to the Feanedock Oak, two years after its case was argued in Ring of Truth, found the tree still standing but visibly altered. Its two large, fallen limbs lay cloaked in bramble and nettle. But under its canopy, foxes burrowed, birds sang and fruit trees flowered.

Though imbalanced, this grand old oak holds its ground – a tree of memory and now a symbol of care. We will return again and again to honour its survival, and admire its provision for so many other species in the natural world. The tree reminds us that people need ways to anchor ourselves too, as we navigate uncertain times ahead.

For you: more from our Insights series:

Estrella Luna-Diez receives funding from UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

Anne-Marie Culhane receives funding from UKRI and the NERC.

Bruno Barcante Ladvocat Cintra receives funding from the NERC. Additional thanks to Lucy Neal, member of the Walking Forest collective, for her written and photographic contributions to this article. Lucy was the creator of Ring of Truth, performed at the Timber Festival in July 2023.

Forensic linguistics: how dark web criminals give themselves away with their language

2025-11-14T16:59:39Z

Shutterstock/nomad-photo.eu

Shannon McCoole ran one of the world’s largest dark web child abuse forums for around three years in the early 2010s. The forum provided a secure online space in which those interested in abusing children could exchange images, advice and support. It had around 45,000 users and was fortified with layers of online encryption that ensured near-complete anonymity for its users. In other words, it was a large and flourishing community for paedophiles.

McCoole eventually became the subject of an international investigation led by Taskforce Argos – a specialist unit in Australia’s Queensland Police Service dedicated to tackling online child abuse networks.

Key to the investigation – and McCoole’s eventual arrest and conviction – was a piece of linguistic evidence: his frequent use of an unusual greeting term, “hiyas”, as noticed by an investigating officer.

Investigators began searching relevant “clear web” sites (those openly accessible through mainstream search engines) for any markers of a similar linguistic style. They knew the kinds of websites to search because McCoole would speak about his outside interests on the forum, including basketball and vintage cars.

A man was discovered using the giveaway greeting on a four-wheel drive discussion forum. He lived in Adelaide and used a similar handle to the paedophile forum’s anonymous chief administrator. Another similarly named user – also using “hiyas” as a preferred greeting term – was discovered on a basketball forum. Suddenly, the police had their man.

This linguistic evidence contributed to the identification, arrest and eventual conviction of McCoole. But it didn’t end there. After McCoole’s arrest, Taskforce Argos took over his account and continued to run the forum, as him, for another six months. Police were able to gather vital intelligence that led to the prosecution of hundreds of offenders and to the rescue of at least 85 child victims.

McCoole’s case is breathtaking, and it offers a compelling demonstration of the power of language in identifying anonymous individuals.

The power of language

My journey into forensic linguistics began in 2014 at Aston University, where I began learning about the various methods and approaches to analysing language across different contexts in the criminal justice system.

A forensic linguist might be called upon to identify the most likely author of an anonymously written threatening text message, based on its language features; or they might assist the courts in interpreting the meaning of a particular slang word or phrase.

Forensic linguists also analyse the language of police interviews, courtroom processes and complex legal documents, pointing out potential barriers to access to understanding, especially for the most vulnerable groups in society. Without thoughtful consideration of the linguistic processes that occur in legal settings and the communication needs of the population, these processes can (and do) result in serious miscarriages of justice.

A particularly egregious example of this occurred when Gene Gibson was wrongly imprisoned for five years in Australia after being advised to plead guilty to manslaughter. Gibson was an Aboriginal man with a cognitive impairment and for whom English was a third language. The conviction was overturned when the court of appeal heard Gibson had not understood the court process, nor the instructions he was given by his appointed interpreter.

So forensic linguistics is not just about catching criminals, it’s also about finding ways to better support vulnerable groups who find themselves, in whatever capacity, having to interact with legal systems. This is an attempt to improve the delivery of justice through language analysis.

Something that struck me in the earliest days of my research was the relative lack of work exploring the language of online child sexual abuse and grooming. The topic had long received attention from criminologists and psychologists, but almost never linguists – despite online grooming and other forms of online child sexual offending being almost exclusively done through language.

There is no doubt that researching this dark side of humanity is difficult in all sorts of ways, and it can certainly take its toll.

Nonetheless, I found the decision to do so straightforward. If we don’t know much about how these offenders talk to victims, or indeed each other, then we are missing a vital perspective on how these criminals operate – along with potential new routes to catching them.

These questions became the central themes of both my MA and PhD theses, and led to my ongoing interest in the language that most people never see: real conversations between criminal groups on the dark web.

Anonymity and the dark web

The dark web originated in the mid-1990s as a covert communication tool for the US federal government. It is best described as a portion of the internet that is unindexed by mainstream search engines. It can only be accessed through specialist browsers, such as Tor, that disguise the user’s IP address.

This enables users to interact in these environments virtually anonymously, making them ideal for hidden conversations between people with shared deviant interests. These interests aren’t necessarily criminal or even morally objectionable – consider the act of whistleblowing, or of expressing political dissent in a country without free speech. The notion of deviance depends on local and cultural context.

Nonetheless, the dark web has become all but synonymous with the most egregious and morally abhorrent crimes, including child abuse, fraud, and the trafficking of drugs, weapons and people.

Combating dark web crime centres around the problem of anonymity. It is anonymity that makes these spaces difficult to police. But when all markers of identity – names, faces, voices – are stripped away, what remains is language.

And language expresses identity.

Through our conscious and unconscious selections of sounds, words, phrases, viewpoints and interactional styles, we tell people who we are – or at least, who we are being from moment to moment.

Language is also the primary means by which much (if not most) dark web crime is committed. It is through (written) linguistic interaction that criminal offences are planned, illicit advice exchanged, deals negotiated, goals accomplished.

For linguists, the records and messages documenting the exact processes by which crimes are planned and executed become data for analysis. Armed with theory and methods for understanding how people express (or betray) aspects of their identity online, linguists are uniquely placed to address questions of identity in these highly anonymous spaces.

What kind of person wrote this text?

The task of linguistic profiling is well demonstrated by the case of Matthew Falder. Falder pleaded guilty to 137 charges relating to child sexual exploitation, abuse and blackmail in 2018. The case was dubbed by the National Crime Agency (NCA) as its first ever “hurt-core” prosecution, due to Falder’s prolific use of “hidden dark web forums dedicated to the discussion and image and video sharing of rape, murder, sadism, torture, paedophilia, blackmail, humiliation and degradation”.

As part of the international investigation to identify this once-anonymous offender, police sought out the expertise of Tim Grant, former director of the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, and Jack Grieve from the University of Birmingham. Both are world-leading experts in authorship analysis, the identification of unknown or disputed authors and speakers through their language. The pair were tasked with ascertaining any information they could about a suspect of high interest, based on a set of dark web communications and encrypted emails.

Where McCoole’s case was an example of authorship analysis (who wrote this text?), Falder’s demanded the slightly different task of authorship profiling (what kind of person wrote this text?).

When police need to identify an anonymous person of interest but have no real-world identity with which to connect them, the linguist’s job is to derive any possible identifying demographic information. This includes age, gender, geographical background, socioeconomic status and profession. But they can only glean this information about an author from whatever emails, texts or forum discussions might be available. This then helps them narrow the pool of potential suspects.

Grant and Grieve set to work reading through Falder’s dark web forum contributions and encrypted emails, looking for linguistic cues that might point to identifying information.

They were able to link the encrypted emails to the forum posts through some uncommon word strings that appeared in both datasets. Examples included phrases like “stack of ideas ready” and “there are always the odd exception”.

They then identified features that offered demographic clues to Falder’s identity. For example, the use of both “dish-soap” and “washing-up liquid” (synonymous terms from US and British English) within the same few lines of text. Grant and Grieve interpreted the use of these terms as either potential US influence on a British English-speaker, or as a deliberate attempt by the author to disguise his language background.

Ultimately, the linguists developed a profile that described a highly educated, native British English-speaking older man. This “substantially correct” linguistic profile formed part of a larger intelligence pack that eventually led to Falder’s identification, arrest and conviction. Grant’s and Grieve’s contribution earned them Director’s Commendations from the NCA.

Linguistic strategies

The cases of McCoole and Falder represent some of the most abhorrent crimes that can be imagined. But they also helped usher into public consciousness a broader understanding of the kinds of criminals that use the dark web. These online communities of offenders gather around certain types of illicit and criminal interests, trading goods and services, exchanging information, issuing advice and seeking support.

For example, it is not uncommon to find forums dedicated to the exchange of child abuse images, or advice on methods and approaches to carrying out various types of fraud.

In research, we often refer to such groups as communities of practice – that is, people brought together by a particular interest or endeavour. The concept can apply to a wide range of different communities, whether professional-, political- or hobby-based. What unites them is a shared interest or purpose.

But when communities of practice convene around criminal or harmful interests, providing spaces for people to share advice, collaborate and “upskill”, ultimately they enable people to become more dangerous and more prolific offenders.

The emerging branch of research in forensic linguistics of which I am part explores such criminal communities on the dark web, with the overarching aim of assisting the policing and disrupting of them.

Work on child abuse communities has shown the linguistic strategies by which new users attempt to join and ingratiate themselves. These include explicit references to their new status (“I am new to the forums”), commitments to offering abuse material (“I will post a lot more stuff”), and their awareness of the community’s rules and behavioural norms (“I know what’s expected of me”).

Research has also highlighted the social nature of some groups focused on the exchange of indecent images. In a study on the language of a dark website dedicated to the exchange of child abuse images, I found that a quarter of all conversational turns contributed to rapport-building between members – through, for example, friendly greetings (“hello friends”), well-wishing (“hope you’re all well”) and politeness (“sorry, haven’t got those pics”).

Dark web criminals have to abide by strict social rules. Shutterstock/Zuyeu Uladzimir

This demonstrates the perhaps surprising importance of social politeness and community bonding within groups whose central purpose is to trade in child abuse material.

Linguistic research on dark web criminal communities makes two things clear. First, despite the shared interest that brings them together, they do not necessarily attract the same kinds of people. More often than not they are diverse, comprising users with varied moral and ideological stances.

Some child abuse communities, for example, see sexual activity with children as a form of love, protesting against others who engage in violent abuse. Other groups openly (as far as is possible in dark web settings) seem to relish in the violent abuse itself.

Likewise, fraud communities tend to comprise people of highly varied motivations and morality. Some claim to be seeking a way out of desperate financial circumstances, while others proudly discuss their crimes as a way of seeking retribution over “a corporate elite”. Some are looking for a small side hustle that won’t attract “too many questions”, while a small proportion of self-identifying “real fraudsters” brag about their high status while denigrating those less experienced.

A common practice in these groups is to float ideas for new schemes – for example, the use of a fake COVID pass to falsely demonstrate vaccination status, or the use of counterfeit cash to pay sex workers. That the morality of such schemes provokes strong debate among users is evidence that fraud communities comprise different types of people, with a range of motivations and moral stances.

Community rules – even in abuse forums

Perhaps another surprising fact is that rules are king in these secret groups. As with many clear web forums, criminal dark web forums are typically governed by “community rules” which are upheld by site moderators. In the contexts of online fraud – and to an even greater extent, child abuse – these rules do not just govern behaviour and define the nature of these groups, they are essential to their survival.

Rules of child sexual exploitation and abuse forums are often extremely specific, laying out behaviour which are encouraged (often relating to friendliness and support among users) as well those which will see a user banished immediately and indefinitely. These reflect the nature of the community in question, and often differ between forums. For instance, some forums ban explicitly violent images, whereas others do not.

Rules around site and user security highlight users’ awareness of potential law enforcement infiltration of these forums. Rules banning the disclosure of personal information are ubiquitous and crucial to the survival and longevity of these groups.

Dark web sites often survive only days or weeks. The successful ones are those in which users understand the importance of the rules that govern them.

The rise of AI

Researching the language of dark web communities provides operationally useful intelligence for investigators. As in most areas of research, the newest issue we are facing in forensic linguistics is to try and understand the challenges and opportunities posed by increasingly sophisticated AI technologies.

At a time when criminal groups are already using AI tools for malicious purposes like generating abuse imagery to extort children, or creating deepfakes to impersonate public figures to scam victims, it is more important than ever that we understand how criminal groups communicate, build trust, and share knowledge and ideas.

By doing this, we can assist law enforcement with new investigative strategies for offender prioritisation and undercover policing that work to protect the most vulnerable victims.

As we stand at this technological crossroads, the collaboration between linguists, technology and security companies, and law enforcement has become more crucial than ever. The criminals are already adapting. Our methods for understanding and disrupting their communications must evolve just as quickly.

For you: more from our Insights series:

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Emily Chiang has received funding from UKRI - Innovate UK.

Bad wealth made good: how to tackle Britain’s twin faultlines of low growth and rising inequality

2025-11-11T17:20:13Z

In the run-up to the 2024 election, future prime minister Keir Starmer labelled wealth creation Labour’s number one mission. “It’s the only way our country can go forward,” he declared. “We should nourish and encourage that – not just individuals but businesses.”

Starmer was right, in theory. But wealth creation is a slippery concept. Essential for economic and social progress, it can also work against both. It’s therefore vital to distinguish between “good” and “bad” wealth.

According to one definition, increases in “good” wealth come from innovation, investment and more productive business methods. Such activity boosts economic resilience, social strength and the size of the economic cake.

Examples include investment in medical and scientific technology – but also, crucially, in the activities that provide vital everyday services and goods to sustain our daily lives. Improvements in the quality of local shops, transport, services for children, adult care and decent hospitality all expand a country’s resources in ways that see the gains shared widely across society.

However, over the past half-century, a rising share of economic activity in the UK and other rich countries has been connected with “bad” wealth accumulation, which actively hampers and harms a country’s prospects.

The Conversation and LSE’s International Inequalities Institute have teamed up for a special online event on Tuesday, November 18 from 5pm-6.30pm. Join experts from the worlds of business, taxation and government policy as they discuss the difficult choices facing Chancellor Rachel Reeves in her budget. Sign up for free here

Bad wealth is especially associated with non-productive or low social-value activities geared to personal enrichment. In Britain and elsewhere, decades of privatisation and wider tax, benefit and monetary economic policies have fuelled rising inequality while handing much of the command over resources to corporate boardrooms, top bankers and the very rich – with damaging effects for societies and economies alike.

A central source of bad wealth has been a rise in the level of economic “extraction” or “appropriation”. This occurs when capital owners use their power to capture excessive shares of economic gains through activity which weakens economic strength and social resilience. Examples include the rigging of financial markets and manipulation of corporate balance sheets, a range of anti-competitive devices such as the rise in aggressive acquisitions and mergers, and the skimming of returns from financial transactions – a process City of London traders like to call “the croupier’s take”.

Bad wealth is also the product of passive activity unrelated to merit, skill or prescient risk-taking. Over half of the increase in household wealth in the UK since 2010 has come from rising asset prices – in particular relating to property – rather than from more productive activity. This means a huge amount of that wealth is trapped in property and other assets which are not available for reinvestment in the economy.

Britain’s economic record since the 2008 financial crisis has been dismal, with a collapse in the rate of economic growth amid much hand-wringing about its “productivity puzzle”. Yet over the same period, private wealth holdings have surged. In total, UK wealth – comprising property, physical and financial assets – is now more than six times the size of the country’s economy, up from three times in the 1970s. Other rich countries have seen similar trends.

UK wealth in comparison to size of its economy:

UK wealth as a ratio of GDP, 1880-2020. World Inequality Report 2022, CC BY-NC-SA

This surge in levels of personal wealth is not the product of more dynamic and innovative economies and record rates of investment. As an editorial in UK financial investment magazine MoneyWeek argued in 2019, too much personal wealth is the result of “mismanaged monetary policy, politically unacceptable rent-seeking, corruption, asset bubbles, a failure of anti-trust laws, or some miserable mixture of the lot”.

It is these activities which account for the burgeoning bank accounts of the already super-rich. Around the world, from the mid-1990s to 2021, the top 1% of wealth holders captured 38% of the growth in personal wealth, while the bottom 50% received just 2%. In the UK, the average wealth of the richest 200 people grew from 6,000 times the average person in 1989 to 18,000 times in 2023.

One of the most important outcomes of the rise of bad accumulation, and the associated surge in the concentration of personal wealth, has been the way opulence and plenty sit beside social scarcity and growing impoverishment. It has brought a significant shift in how national resources are used – away from meeting basic needs to serving the demands of corporate elites, a growing billionaire class, and private markets.

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much,” declared US president Franklin D. Roosevelt during his second inaugural address in January 1937. “It is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

By most metrics, Britain and many other wealthy countries are failing that test.

The second inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt as US president in January 1937. Smithsonian Institution/National Portrait Gallery via Wikimedia, CC BY

‘Money is like muck’

A key explanation for Britain’s low private investment, low productivity and slow growing economy is the disproportionate share of the rising profit levels of Britain’s biggest companies that has gone in payments to shareholders and executives in recent times. Dividend payments in the UK and globally have greatly outstripped wage rises over the last 40 years. In 2020, aggregate dividend payouts by the FTSE 350 companies made up some 90% of pre-tax profits.

Often, these heightened dividend payments have been financed through borrowing, thus undermining corporate strength. In the case of Thames Water – stripped of much of its value by an aggressive profit strategy by its overseas owners – this has brought near-bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, far from the promise of a property-owning society, large sections of the UK population have – outside of pension provision – no, or only a minimal, stake in the way the economy works. Those with few assets lose out from rising property prices and higher interest rates on savings.

How a nation’s productive resources – land, labour and raw materials plus physical, social and intellectual infrastructure – are owned and used is key to its productive power, social stability, and distribution of life chances. “Money is like muck – not good except it be spread,” wrote the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon in 1625.

In the UK, the more egalitarian politics after the second world war led to a more equal sharing of private wealth, and a much higher level of public ownership of key utilities and land. Then in 1979, newly elected prime minister Margaret Thatcher launched her drive for a “property owning democracy”. The windfall gains from council house sales and the selling of cut-price shares in her great privatisation bonanza initially benefited many ordinary people.

But today, the balance sheet looks markedly different. While the sale of council houses initially boosted levels of home ownership in the UK, the number of first-time home buyers is now less than half its mid-1990s rate. As a result, the rate of home ownership has shrunk from a peak of 71% in 2000 to 65% in 2024, with the most marked decline among those aged 25-34.

Getting on the housing ladder is now heavily dependent on having rich parents. The proportion of young people aged 18-34 living with their parents reached 28% in 2024 – a significant rise since the millennium.

At the same time, today’s much more heavily privatised economy has eroded Britain’s holdings of common wealth. Publicly owned assets as a share of GDP have fallen from around 30% in the 1970s to about a tenth. This is one of the principal causes of the deterioration in the UK’s public finances, while handing more control over the economy to private company owners.

How public ownership of UK assets has shrunk:

Proportion of UK assets held publicly and privately, 1970 vs 2018. Paying for a Decade of National Renewal (Compass), CC BY-NC-SA

Six ways to turn bad wealth into good

The French economist Thomas Piketty has argued that today’s model of corporate capitalism has a natural, inbuilt tendency to generate ever-growing levels of inequality – “a fundamental force for divergence”, as he termed it.

When the return on capital from dividends, interest, rents and capital gains exceeds the overall growth rate, asset holders accumulate wealth at a faster rate than that at which the economy expands, thereby securing an ever-greater slice of the pie – and leaving less and less for everyone else.

In his 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty offered an essentially pessimistic conclusion that breaking this inequality cycle has only happened across history through war or serious social conflict. In response to critics, he modified this position and now seems to accept that there are democratic mechanisms for delivering more equal societies – whatever the undoubted hurdles of implementation.

Suppressing the profiteering and excessive returns that have driven higher levels of inequality is one of the biggest challenges of our time. But such an alignment of growth and rates of return on capital was broadly achieved in the post-war era, and there are several routes for achieving such convergence again – even in today’s very different conditions.

1. Shift the tax focus from income to wealth

Despite the scale of today’s wealth boom, Britain’s tax system is still heavily biased to earnings. Income from work is taxed at an average of around 33% and wealth at less than 4%. Through political inertia, the UK tax system has failed to catch up with the growing importance of wealth over income in the way the economy operates, and does little to dent the growing concentration of wealth holdings at the top.

In her first budget in October 2024, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, took steps to raise revenue through changes to inheritance and capital gains tax (the profits made on selling shares or property other than your home). But these were too modest to alter the imbalance in the taxation of wealth and earnings.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves delivers her first budget in October 2024. Kirsty O'Connor/HM Treasury via Wikimedia

A more fundamental shift would be to reform the existing system of council tax with a larger number of tax bands at the top. Still based on 1991 property values, this is perhaps the least defensible tax in Britain. Households in poorer areas pay more than better off households in the richest.

In Burnley, the typical household pays some 1.1% of the value of their home in council tax every year. In a typical property in Kensington and Chelsea, it is 0.1%. The most effective alternative would be to replace council tax and stamp duty – the tax on the purchase of homes – with a single progressive or proportionate “property tax”. Any serious reform requires a long overdue property revaluation and an extension in the number of tax bands.

A modest and phased rise in capital taxation would also help to break up today’s wealth concentrations and reduce the passive – and often malign – role played by wealth holdings. Even small changes would release funds which could be used to improve social infrastructure from schools to hospitals.

One such change, as recommended by the Office for Tax Simplification, should be to raise the rates on capital gains tax so that they are equal to income tax rates. In 2024, 378,000 people paid UK capital gains tax worth a total of £12.1 billion – a decrease of 19% on the previous year.

Measures to limit asset inflation could include extending the Bank of England’s remit on inflation to limit rises in property prices, which have led to historically high rents and priced a rising proportion of young people out of home ownership.

2. Reduce how much wealth gets passed on

“A power to dispose of estates forever is manifestly absurd,” the Scottish economist Adam Smith declared 250 years ago. “The Earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural.”

Economist Adam Smith (1723-1790). Wikimedia

Despite Smith’s exhortations, birth and inheritance remain the most powerful indicators across most countries of where you end up in the wealth stakes and the pattern of life chances.

Importantly, inheritance does little to boost productive activity. Higher ratios of inheritance in wealth holdings – and recent decades have seen an upward shift – tend to be associated with reduced economic dynamism. Assets tied up in large wealth pools are often little more than “dead money”: idle resources that could be put to use funding public services or productive investment.

Yet, helped by light taxation, social privileges continue to be handed on in perpetuity. Only 4.6% of deaths in the UK resulted in an inheritance tax charge in the 2023 financial year, contributing a tiny 0.7% of all tax receipts.

Around 36% of all wealth is stored in property, and there is a strong public attachment to people retaining their inherited housing wealth – even among those who are not beneficiaries. In part, inheritance tax is widely perceived as unfair because of the way the richest are able to avoid it.

Of people born in the UK in the 1980s, those in the poorest fifth by wealth will enjoy an average 5% boost to their lifetime income through inheritance, compared with 29% for the top fifth. Clearly, those on the wrong side of this gap will be left even further behind by the end of their lives.

And the divide is widening sharply. The scale of intergenerational wealth transfer is on a steeply upward trend, with projected levels of inheritance set to dwarf all previous wealth transfers in the coming decade. Little of this process contributes to more productive activity, with one of its primary and malign effects being to fuel higher house prices.

3. Introduce a ‘whole wealth’ tax

Another much-debated option would be to levy a new tax on whole wealth holdings, rather than just the revenue these assets generate. An annual 1% tax on wealth over £2 million – affecting some 600,000 people in the UK – could raise around £16 billion a year, according to the 2020 Wealth Tax Commission report.

Such taxes would be easier to levy on immobile assets like buildings and land taxes than on liquid assets, such as financial holdings. But this complexity is not insurmountable – and nor is public opinion. Such a measure could be sold politically as a “solidarity tax” to help pay for key under-resourced but high social-value services – such as a proper social care system and improved services for children.

While many governments have been wary of the political reaction to higher taxes on wealth, YouGov’s most recent survey suggests around three-quarters of the public now support such a tax, with more than half strongly supporting it.

The Inequality Crisis – a talk by the article’s author, Stewart Lansley, in March 2013. Video: RSA.

4. Increase public ownership of utilities and services

Tackling inequality and profiteering also require a greater level of common and social ownership. Britain is a heavily privatised and marketised economy. Few other developed countries have handed over such control of key utilities to private firms.

Privatised in 1989, Britain’s water industry has been turned into a potent example of profiteering. Under private ownership, it has delivered leaky and unrepaired pipes, the illegal dumping of sewage spills into rivers and beaches, and two decades of under-investment in large part because of the disproportionate share of profits going in dividend payments to mostly overseas owners.

Another significant trend has been the private takeover of a range of public services – from social care to children’s services. According to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK has “sleepwalked” into a dysfunctional system with widespread profiteering in privately run children’s homes. It found operating profit margins averaging 22.6% from 2016-20, driven by escalating charges and cost-cutting.

These examples of bad accumulation have hollowed out some of the UK’s most vital industries. A mix of public and social ownership and much more effective regulation are necessary to turn these industries into effective service providers rather than cash machines for investors.

Regulatory reforms are also needed to moderate the way some markets work. The CMA suggests that anti-competitive behaviour and “oligopolistic structures” are hallmarks of a rising volume of business activity. For example, it has accused the UK’s seven largest housebuilders of collusion on issues from pricing to marketing.

Price gouging – when firms exploit emergencies such as the COVID pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to charge excessively high prices for essential goods – is another area ripe for tougher intervention.

5. Establish citizens’ wealth funds

Alongside greater social ownership, all citizens need to be given a more direct stake in the gains from economic activity. As one heckler put it during the Brexit referendum: “That’s your bloody GDP, not ours.”

One route would be to build models of “people’s capital” through a new strategy of asset redistribution to individuals. This would extend the principle of income redistribution that has been one of the main, if now much weakened, pro-equality instruments of the post-war era. A medium to long-term plan would be to create one or more national and local “citizens’ wealth funds”, owned collectively by all on an equal basis.

Originally advanced by the British economist and Nobel laureate James Meade, such funds would be created by the state but owned by society, with returns distributed either as universal dividends or as investment in public services. Such a fund could be financed from a mix of sources including long-term government bonds; the transfer of several highly commercial state-owned enterprises, such as the Land Registry, Ordnance Survey or Crown Estate; part of the proceeds from higher wealth taxes; and new equity stakes in large corporations.

Anchorage, capital of the US state of Alaska, which operates a permanent fund for its citizens. TripWalkers/Shutterstock

Perhaps the most notable example of citizen-owned capital is the Alaska Permanent Fund. This was created in 1976 from oil revenues and effectively owned by all of the US state’s citizens. It has since paid out a highly popular annual dividend which averages about US$1,150 (£875) a year.

The UK has its own example: also in 1976, the Shetland Islands Council established a charitable trust from “disturbance payments” paid by oil companies in return for operational access to the seas around the islands. The returns from this trust have been used to fund social projects, from leisure centres to support for the elderly.

Another possibility is to establish a national pension fund that would eventually pay for the cost of state pensions. Australia’s Future Fund, for example, is an independently managed sovereign wealth fund to meet future civil service pension obligations. Established in 2006 by receipts of AUS$50 billion (£20 billion) from the sale of Telstra, the national telecoms company, it has since been supplemented by direct government grants and is projected to reach a value of AUS$380 billion by 2033.

The UK government has launched the Community Wealth Fund, a £175 million initiative aiming to “transform neighbourhoods with long-term financing”. Working with local communities the initiative will fund projects in local communities across England. Despite its modest finances, this establishes the principle of collectively owned social funds. This is funded through the government’s Dormant Assets Scheme, which unlocks old bank accounts and other financial products that have been left untouched.

6. Spread access to the nation’s assets across society

Any meaningful redistribution of wealth across society requires a suite of deep structural reforms from improving access to affordable housing to reducing levels of corporate extraction.

One of the most important issues is finding ways of extending access to assets to all citizens as a condition of democratic opportunity. The Child Trust Fund, introduced by New Labour in 2005, was an ambitious attempt to address wealth inequality by giving every child a modest financial stake – a kind of citizen’s inheritance. Yet the scheme was abolished in 2010 by the incoming coalition government.

In the event, it only achieved a modest impact. Average payouts when children reached 18 were around £2,000, with a quarter of all accounts being forgotten or lost. The desired shift in household saving habits tended to be limited to more affluent parents paying extra into the trust funds, meaning the policy reinforced some of the inequalities it had aimed to challenge.

Bold decisions required

While recent years have seen a growing debate about the impact of ever higher concentrations of wealth in the UK, few proposals for real change – beyond a mere tampering at the edges of inheritance and capital gains tax – are yet on the political agenda. Some of these measures would take longer to achieve, and some, such as citizens’ wealth funds, are more ambitious and potentially transformative than others. All would require bold decisions by government.

In the run-up to her much-anticipated November 26 budget, the chancellor has hinted that higher taxes on the wealthy will be “part of the story” – although a manifesto-busting rise in the base rate of income tax is also on the cards.

Against this, Reeves has ruled out a standalone wealth tax, and there appear to be no plans for more radical measures to rein in excessive profiteering. This means that the wealth gap is probably set to widen.

Yet history suggests the idea of limiting high concentrations of wealth is far from utopian. Limits operated relatively effectively among nations including the UK and US in the post-war decades, through a combination of regulation, highly progressive taxation and changes in cultural norms.

The highest personal fortunes were more modest in part because of the destructive effect of war on the size of asset holdings. There was also a new social and cultural climate that would not have tolerated today’s towering fortunes, and which allowed the post-war progressive tax systems to be maintained for decades.

Restructuring the process of wealth accumulation is never going to be straightforward politically. The protests over the adjustment to inheritance tax in 2024, in particular its impact on farmers, demonstrates how sensitive these issues are – particularly when stoked by those seeking to make political capital out of pro-equality reforms.

But Britain stands at a historic moment. Failure to tackle mounting wealth-driven inequality will have harmful consequences for the social and economic stability of generations to come. Amid rising public anxiety about the future and a widespread sense that the economy is “rigged” against ordinary people, a more ambitious political agenda that addresses inequality and economic stagnation could win public backing, if any government is brave enough to try.

For you: more from our Insights series:

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Stewart Lansley is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. His latest book, The Richer, The Poorer: How Britain Enriched the Few and Failed the Poor, is published by Bristol University Press.

The UK’s wealth ‘timebomb’ – and how to defuse it

2025-11-05T14:09:10Z

When the full, unexpurgated diaries of the Conservative MP Sir Henry “Chips” Channon were published in 2021, these disarmingly frank accounts of his aristocratic life in mid-20th century Britain caused a stir. They revealed the inner thoughts of a renowned social climber and rightwing snob, whose political career never recovered from his record as an appeaser of Nazi Germany.

Having married into the Guinness family fortune, Channon revelled in the booty of landed wealth: the thrill at purchasing a country house, Kelvedon Hall in Essex; the glitter of cut glass in the lavish dinner parties he hosted; extravagant bejewelled gifts for his many lovers; the whirl of expensive European holidays and chauffeur-driven cars. One diary entry describes Channon and friends partying with Nazi leaders including Hermann Göring while in Berlin for the 1936 Olympics.

But there is an intriguing counterpoint to his naked love of wealth. During the later 1930s under a Conservative-led coalition government, taxes began to rise to pay for Britain’s rearmament in preparation for war. Writing about then-chancellor Sir John Simon’s “staggering” first war budget late in 1939, Channon recalled:

There was a gasp when he said that income tax would be 7/6 [37.5p] in the £. The crowded House [of Commons] was dumbfounded … Increased surtax, lower allowances, raised duties on wine, cigarettes and sugar, substantially increased death duties. It’s all so bad that one can only make the best of it, and reorganise one’s life accordingly.

This and subsequent tax increases had a massive effect on Channon’s lavish lifestyle. During the second world war, his Kelvedon estate was repurposed as a military hospital – part of the large-scale selling off of landed estates that changed the face of rural Britain (as evoked in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited). Yet Channon’s attitude to these privations was pragmatic: he would just have to pay the extra and get on with his life as best he could.

It is now widely recognised that our current times bear uncanny parallels with the 1930s – from the rise of authoritarian regimes to huge pressures on public spending in the context of volatile economic conditions. Yet unlike that pre-war period, today’s proposals to raise taxation on high incomes and wealth are being met with huge pushback – sometimes amounting to hysteria – from parts of society and the media.

Rather than the pragmatism that Channon and many of his wealthy contemporaries displayed, some public commentary implies that increasing tax on the wealthy is akin to infringing the natural order of things. The new Labour government’s adjustment of inheritance tax in autumn 2024 to bring farm property into line with other assets was met with protests on the streets.

The same year, reforms to end tax exemptions for “non-domiciled” UK residents (those who claim their permanent home is outside the UK) – initially announced by Conservative chancellor Jeremy Hunt – provoked a flurry of (mostly unsubstantiated) claims that the international super-rich would be leaving the UK for better pastures abroad.

Whatever happened to the stoicism of the rich, prepared to shoulder their responsibilities for social wellbeing in the face of pressing economic and political challenges?

Perhaps the key difference between Channon’s time and our own is revealed in two graphs which show dramatic changes in the distribution and degree of wealth held in Britain over the last century. At the time Channon was writing, wealth assets per head were vastly smaller than they are now – having declined since the early 20th century, mostly due to wartime depredation. However, from the 1950s on, they began a remarkable ascent.

From the dawn of human history, it took many millennia for the mean amount of wealth per Briton to equate to £50k – reached sometime in the 1970s. Yet a mere 40 years after that, this personal wealth figure had tripled:

UK personal wealth over time:

Average UK per-capita wealth, 1855-2024. World Inequality Database, CC BY-NC-SA

This dramatic rise in UK wealth ownership was matched by a change in who owned it. In Channon’s time, the top 1% wealthiest people owned an astonishing 50% of the UK’s total – which makes sense of his stoicism. He knew well enough that only a few upper-class people like him had substantial wealth, while large numbers of Britons lived in straitened conditions and could not realistically pay more tax. When the going got tough, there was little option but for people like him to cough up.

Since then, the wealth share held by the top 1% has more than halved, dropping to around 20% of the total. And the UK’s wealthiest 10% now owns just under 60% – down from 90% in Channon’s day:

UK wealth inequality over time:

UK wealth inequality, 1895-2023. World Inequality Database, CC BY-NC-SA

On the face of it, these two graphs appear to tell a cheerful and progressive story. The UK, like many rich countries, has become much wealthier, and these benefits are being more widely spread. What’s not to like?

In fact, many influential economists – including contributors to the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ influential Deaton Review – have identified the build-up of private wealth as a worrying trend for Britain. Where the vast increase in the nation’s wealth over the past 75 years could have been invested for the good of the nation, it has been largely squirrelled away into private hands, inflating the wealth of the UK’s upper and middle class to the detriment of society as a whole.

As a sociologist, I have long researched the impact of class inequalities on British society – and how class, gender, racial and regional divides are mutually reinforcing.

I am now increasingly concerned by the way the build-up of private wealth assets intensifies these inequalities – potentially to breaking point. Left unchecked, I believe Britain’s “wealth timebomb” will enlarge the current ruptures in society – already reflected in the rise of angry populist political movements – leaving a calamitous legacy for future generations.

As UK chancellor Rachel Reeves’s options for potential increases in wealth and other taxes are debated ahead of a highly anticipated budget on November 26, I’d argue that such discussions should not be framed purely in technical terms – of what is an efficient way of raising funds for the public purse without damaging UK prosperity.

There is a much broader cultural politics of wealth that needs addressing. In particular, it is time to stress-test the seemingly widespread view that wealth should be treated entirely as a private good, and does not come with any social obligations.

This idea leads to the deeply dysfunctional view that wealth assets are free to be amassed, spent and passed on by their owners with scant encroachment in the form of taxation. Chips Channon can be criticised for many things – but even he did not agree with that.

The collective effort of generations

The contemporary reluctance to tax wealth, in Britain and many other rich countries, is actually very unusual. Throughout history, most societies have seen this form of resource redistribution as utterly reasonable.

One of William the Conqueror’s first acts after the Norman invasion of 1066 was to commission the Domesday book to systematically record the landed assets of his newly conquered land. In poorer societies, wealth stocks were the most viable assets to tax.

Throughout British history, private wealth holders were often sanctioned for flouting common norms of “reciprocity” and fairness for the people who worked for them. In the aristocratic landed estates that made up Britain’s main form of wealth until the early 20th century, owners were still under strong moral pressure to operate them for the wider public good.

Similarly, in a strong manufacturing economy like Britain’s, it was uncontentious to regard wealth derived from owning factories and businesses as some kind of social product – the result of profits from the often gruelling lives of many workers. Those fortunate to possess large stocks of wealth were generally expected to take some kind of social responsibility for their workers.

A few 19th-century philanthropists were explicit about the public value of private wealth. Most famously, American steel magnate Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth inspired a radical liberal critique of wealth that influenced Britain’s Liberal government (1905-15) to champion the taxation of high levels of private wealth. This became a central tenet of new liberalism in the early 20th century, as described by Britain’s first ever sociology professor, Lionel Hobhouse:

The prosperous businessman who thinks that he has made his fortune entirely by self-help does not pause to consider what single step he could have taken on the road to his success but for the ordered tranquillity which has made commercial development possible: the security by road and rail and sea, the masses of skilled labour, and the sum of intelligence which civilisation has placed at his disposal … The inventions which he uses as a matter of course, and which have been built up by the collective effort of generations of men of science and organisers of industry.

Defending this idea of “common wealth” extended to Tory radicals too – including the Victorian cultural critic John Ruskin, who in 1860 famously wrote “there is no wealth but life” – declaring:

That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest numbers of noble and happy human beings. That man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has the widest helpful influence, both personal and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.

The period from the late 19th century, when Britain enjoyed global dominance through its combined industrial and military strength, also saw strong political currents at home. These emphasised the need for municipal ownership of amenities such as electricity, gas, water and many other public building projects – with the city of Birmingham providing one of the most influential models.

Such public-spirited benevolence emphatically did not extend to Britain’s colonial possessions – which were routinely treated as uncivilised territories to be raided, despoiled and exploited for the benefits of their colonial master. But at home, there was a clear understanding amid the rich elite of the need for their wealth to play a role in building a better-functioning society for all who lived in Britain – most of whom did not own any of it.

There were often religious and moral beliefs underlying these views. But as the case of Chips Channon suggests, there was also a self-interested recognition that the wealthy themselves benefited from recognising the social role of wealth, in its ability to help create an educated, ordered workforce and calm, respectful society. What, then, has happened to this collective vision of wealth?

The rise of ‘ordinary’ wealth

By the early 21st century, wealth was no longer the preserve of the gilded few in the UK. Inspired in particular by prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s 1979-90 Conservative government, the prospects of mass ownership of wealth assets – starting with your own home – was held out as a realistic possibility for most Britons.

This major shift was echoed in many rich countries. French economist Thomas Piketty regards today’s “proprietarian middle class”, who enjoy the benefits of wealth assets typically tied up in their homes and pension funds, as a key feature of contemporary capitalism.

In Britain, the proportion of owner-occupiers rose from around 38% of UK properties in 1958 to 70% by 2003 – propelled in large part by Thatcher’s cut-price “right to buy” council houses scheme. Yet this came at a cost for others. The thinktank Common Wealth has estimated this scheme cost British taxpayers £200 billion in terms of the wealth or income that would have been available to local councils had they had sold at full market value or retained the homes – equating to “one of the largest giveaways in UK history”.

A second major form of “ordinary” wealth is tied up in pension funds, offering future rewards for people enrolled in occupational or other kinds of pension schemes. Given that this wealth is only realisable from age 55 (rising to 57 in 2028), it can appear highly hypothetical for younger people. Nonetheless, The Resolution Foundation calculates that pension assets are now the single largest wealth stock across UK households.

Pensions and property have changed the cultural politics of private wealth. It is no longer seen as the prerequisite of the privileged few.

But at the same time, the nation’s “common” wealth has been stripped back due to privatisation, reduced welfare benefits, and the build-up of national debt – which (excluding public sector banks) has risen from less than 30% of UK GDP in 1993 to just under 100%.

This has created a public-to-private wealth cycle. Straitened public services – in part the result of national and local government cuts and a reduction in infrastructure investment – make ordinary private wealth seem much more important as a buffer against potential shocks such as ill health, redundancy and care needs. As a result, keeping hold of this private wealth feels critical to large numbers of people.

Its cultural appeal is also understandable. Private wealth can be seen as the product of personal endeavour like putting down a deposit to buy a house or paying into a pension scheme. For people who have grafted to acquire a modest wealth holding (or aspire to do so), the idea that wealth is a collective and social product can feel alien.

In reality, however, the Thatcherite, neoliberal model which championed the democratisation of wealth was never a sustainable vision – because it did not provide a viable, long-term way of establishing cultural norms of social reciprocity. Indeed, even before Thatcher’s reign as prime minister ended in 1990, the wealth shares of the top 1% and 10% had stopped declining – and they have been pretty much flatlining, possibly even edging up slightly, ever since.

Just as the UK’s total wealth began to rise at record rates, the democratisation of wealth reached its limits. Politically and economically, a new wall was established. Policies ever since have prioritised those people with wealth who typically also have the most political and cultural influence. And overwhelmingly, this does not include young people.

The UK’s wealth ‘timebomb’

While Britain’s private wealth is more widely shared among people than in the early 20th century, its distribution is still extremely unequal – far more so than income. The Resolution Foundation (RF) calculates that half of UK families have no net wealth at all, with debts outweighing assets for 40% of households.

Given the continuing upward trend in house prices, the prospects of getting on the property ladder for people in this “wealthless” half are remote. At the same time, private rents have climbed substantially, with the UK monthly average rising from £948 in January 2015 to £1,286 in August 2024 (in real terms this equates to an increase of just over 1%).

Meanwhile, since 2009, most of the benefits of quantitative easing – designed to boost the UK economy in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis and later COVID – have leached into the hands of the already wealthy, without percolating down to the rest of society. The RF’s sober summary is that wealth gains “flowed disproportionately to older, asset-rich households and homeowners in certain parts of the country (particularly London). The result is a wealth landscape that is both highly unequal and harder to climb.”

This proliferation of wealth also intensifies other inequality. A recent report I co-authored for the Runnymede Trust demonstrates the astonishing depth of the racial wealth divide. Black African and Bangladeshi households have only 10% of the wealth that white British households enjoy. There are also marked gender wealth divides, notably due to pension wealth – because men are more likely to be the beneficiaries of occupational pension schemes.

All this is in the context of a UK economy that is widely recognised as stagnating. Are the two linked? Almost certainly.

There is now an influential body of thought which emphasises the structural limitations of “asset economies” or “rentier capitalism”, in which economic returns are primarily driven by passive rent-seeking behaviour. For those with wealth, why invest in a risky new start-up scheme (their own or someone else’s) when they can enjoy risk-free “passive” returns on their existing assets?

According to the RF, 53% of the increase in UK household wealth between 2010-22 was due to the passive effects of asset price inflation (such as being beneficiaries of house price rises) rather than active investment – be that paying off debts or profiting from entrepreneurial graft.

This bias towards passive wealth helps explain both Britain’s stagnating economy and the static nature of private wealth. Together, they are storing up a massive challenge to any ideas of intergenerational fairness, as young people’s future prospects increasingly depend on which side of the wealth fence they were born on.

The work of sociologists such as Sam Friedman has demonstrated how the prospects of working-class children reaching the top levels of professional and managerial employment are limited by a pervasive “class ceiling”. Similarly, the prospects of young adults acquiring wealth depend increasingly on whether their own parents are wealthy.

As austerity politics has eroded collective public provision, people are forced back on to their own economic resources, if they have them. In a society where the acquisition of private wealth seems to be the social norm, it is understandable how a mentality of “pulling up the drawbridge” can take hold. In this era, the appeal of populist movements has taken hold – spawning a politics of distrust and hate.

It’s clear the UK has reached the limits of Thatcher’s “democratisation of wealth” agenda. It is unrealistic to expect the wealth net to spread any wider. And therefore, I believe it is now vital (and urgent) to challenge the historically anomalous, unsustainable view that the rewards of private wealth should only be enjoyed by those fortunate enough to possess it.

But what does this mean for the nuts and bolts of taxation policy?

The case for introducing a wealth tax. Video: Financial Times.

Why wealth should be taxed more

For Rachel Reeves and her successors at No.11 Downing Street, the financial room for manoeuvre is very restricted. When considering tax changes, chancellors must first scan the financial markets to consider how their budget and other policy decisions could affect the bond markets and broader financial stability of the UK economy.

Nonetheless, there are powerful technical reasons why wealth should be taxed more.

Given that substantial private income is based on returns to capital (in the form of rent, share dividends and so forth), it seems entirely logical to treat this as equivalent in taxation terms.

Yet whereas higher-rate taxpayers pay income tax 40% (rising to 45%), capital gains are taxed at between 24% and 32% (with some capital gains, notably those which accrue on a person’s primary property, not taxed at all). This is simply inconsistent.

It is widely recognised that the property tax system needs reforming, either through revaluing council tax or by modifying stamp duty on newly purchased properties. Ditto pension taxation – for example, by ditching the triple-lock system which increases the state pension each April by the highest of three measures: average earnings growth, inflation or 2.5%.

We are in the fortunate position that a great deal of background research has been done to demonstrate the feasibility of wealth taxation – and to dispel the common objections, from the supposed complexity of their collection to suggestions that many people will leave the country should a wealth tax be imposed on the very rich. (Behavioural analysis of how many wealthy people do actually leave a country after the introduction of tax reforms shows it is unusual to do so.) In all cases, the evidence against these taxes is thin and easily countered.

Meanwhile, around the world, an increasing number of mainstream economists such as Gabriel Zucman now champion arguments for taxing wealth head-on. In his proposals for an internationally coordinated standard taxation for ultra-high-net-worth individuals, the threshold for paying this tax is set very high: at 2% of the assets of dollar billionaires.

France debates the proposed ‘Zucman’ wealth tax. Video: France 24.

Defenders of private wealth sometimes portray wealth taxation as a socialist project, opening the door to some kind of full-blown communist revolution. But this kind of pigeonholing is simply wrong: the case for taxing wealth has historically come from the political mainstream.

Nonetheless, to make a convincing case in the current climate, it is important to extend the analysis beyond purely technical, economic arguments (which most critics of such taxes are reluctant to do). Ultimately, for wealth taxation to become politically palatable demands big cultural and social questions of the people who own it in very large quantities.

Extreme vs ordinary wealth

We are living in a remarkable period of human history. The total amount of private wealth has mushroomed in recent decades, in Britain and across the world. On the face of it, this appears to testify to some astonishing human progress in an incredibly short time period.

Yet I doubt many readers of this article are feeling this sense of personal advancement – even those who have benefited (directly or indirectly) from the democratisation of wealth since Channon gleefully revelled in his upper-class bubble in the mid-20th century.

Even many of those with “ordinary” levels of wealth don’t necessarily feel well off. Wealth sunk into expensive property or pension savings can radically eat into other living expenses. Which leads me to an important conclusion about the need to focus on taxing wealth itself – not just the income from wealth.

For many people, wealth is not simply about money. It evokes the possibility of leading a “good life” and being able to flourish in the future – not only yourself but your offspring and wider family. This is especially true, and understandable, when it comes to the idea of being able to live in owner-occupied property. Even in the UK’s most eyewatering property regions, many of these owners of ordinary wealth are still a world apart from those whose private wealth can be classified as “extreme”.

Taxing the latter via a “whole wealth” tax has a clear advantage in establishing the argument head-on that very large amounts of private wealth should have some public purpose. Even Channon recognised this.

But as exponents of limitarianism emphasise, only those whose wealth is above a certain threshold should be liable to such a tax. The 2020 Wealth Tax Commission calculated that setting a threshold at £500,000 per year would raise around £260 billion, if charged at 1% per year for five years. Setting the threshold much higher at £2 million, thus affecting roughly 2% of Britons, would still raise £80 billion.

These figures (though in need of updating) indicate the potential for raising public funds in a reasonable way, without descending into rancour and political name-calling. By setting an appropriate threshold, it can be clearly established that ordinary wealth need not be taxed – so as not to alienate the large numbers of people who understandably value the security their wealth stocks provide.

Perhaps most importantly, it would restore the vital principle that private wealth entails social responsibilities. When the augmentation of wealth is driven by passive processes such as asset price inflation – as so much of it is today – then it is surely a stretch to view this as down to your own efforts alone.

Even those who acquire their wealth by entrepreneurial drive and flair still need the support of the wider social infrastructure that educates, cures and supports their workers and customers. We need to revive the cultural politics of common wealth, before the timebomb explodes.

This article was updated to state that setting a wealth tax threshold at £2 million would raise £80 billion, not £80 million, over five years, according to the 2020 Wealth Tax Commission. A real-terms equivalent for the rise in UK monthly average rent over the past decade was also added.

For you: more from our Insights series:

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Mike Savage is affiliated with the LSE's International Inequalities Institute where he convenes a research group exploring the 'social impact of extreme wealth'. His work has been supported by various funders including the ESRC and UKRI.

The rise and fall of globalisation: why the world’s next financial meltdown could be much worse with the US on the sidelines

2025-10-29T17:05:16Z

Golden Dayz/Shutterstock

This is the second in a two-part series. Read part one here.

Globalisation has always had its critics – but until recently, they have come mainly from the left rather than the right.

In the wake of the second world war, as the world economy grew rapidly under US dominance, many on the left argued that the gains of globalisation were unequally distributed, increasing inequality in rich countries while forcing poorer countries to implement free-market policies such as opening up their financial markets, privatising their state industries and rejecting expansionary fiscal policies in favour of debt repayment – all of which mainly benefited US corporations and banks.

This was not a new concern. Back in 1841, German economist Friedrich List had argued that free trade was designed to keep Britain’s global dominance from being challenged, suggesting:

When anyone has obtained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he climbs up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him.

By the 1990s, critics of the US vision of a global world order such as the Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz argued that globalisation in its current form benefited the US at the expense of developing countries and workers – while author and activist Naomi Klein focused on the negative environmental and cultural consequences of the global expansion of multinational companies.

Mass left-led demonstrations broke out, disrupting global economic meetings including, most famously, the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999. During this “battle of Seattle”, violent exchanges between protesters and police prevented the launch of a new world trade round that had been backed by then US president, Bill Clinton. For a while, the mass mobilisation of a coalition of trade unionists, environmentalists and anti-capitalist protesters seemed set to challenge the path towards further globalisation – with anti-capitalism “Occupy” protests spreading around the world in the wake of the 2008 financial crash.

A documentary about the 1999 ‘batte of Seattle’, directed by Jill Friedberg and Rick Rowley.

In the US, a further critique of globalisation centred on its domestic consequences for American workers – namely, job losses and lower pay – and led to calls for greater protectionism. Although initially led by trade unions and some Democratic politicians, this critique gradually gained purchase in radical right circles who opposed giving any role to international organisations like the WTO, on the grounds that they impinged on American sovereignty. According to this view, only by stopping foreign competition whose low wages undercut American workers could prosperity be restored. Immigration was another target.

Under Donald Trump’s second term as US president, these criticisms have been transformed into radical, deeply disruptive economic and social policies – with tariffs and protectionism at their heart. In so doing, Trump – despite all his grandstanding on the world stage – has confirmed what has long been clear to close observers of US politics and business: that the American century of global dominance, with the dollar as unrivalled no.1 currency, is drawing rapidly to a close.

Even before Trump first took office in 2017, the US had begun to withdraw from its leadership role in international economic institutions such as the WTO. Now, the strongest part of its economy, the hi-tech sector, is under intense pressure from China, whose economy is already bigger than the US’s by one key measure of GDP. Meanwhile, the majority of US citizens are facing stagnant incomes, higher prices and more insecure jobs.

In previous centuries, when first France and then Great Britain reached the end of their eras of world domination, these transitions had painful impacts beyond their borders. This time, with the global economy more closely integrated than ever before and no single dominant power waiting in the wings to take over, the impacts could be felt even more widely – with very damaging, if not catastrophic, results.

Why no one is ready to take the US’s place

When it comes to taking over from the US as the world’s leading hegemonic power, the only viable candidates with big enough economies are the European Union and China. But there are strong reasons to doubt that either could take on this role – notwithstanding the fact that in 2022, then US president Joe Biden’s National Security Strategy called China: “The only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do so.”

At times Biden’s successor, President Trump, has sounded almost jealous of the control China’s leaders exert over their national economy, and the fact they do not face elections and limits on their terms in office. But a one-party, authoritarian political system which lacks legal checks and balances is a key reason China will find it hard to gain the cultural and political dominance among democratic nations that is part of achieving world no.1 status – despite the influence it already wields in large parts of Asia and Africa.

China still faces big economic challenges too. While it is already the global leader in manufactured goods (rapidly moving into hi-tech products) and the world’s largest exporter, its economy is still very unbalanced – with a much smaller consumer sector, a weak property market, many inefficient state industries that are highly indebted, and a relatively small financial sector restricted by state ownership. Nor does China possess a global currency, despite its (limited) attempts to make the renminbi a truly international currency.

As I found on a reporting trip to Shanghai in 2007 to investigate the effects of globalisation, there are also enormous differences between China’s prosperous coastal megacities – whose main thoroughfares rival New York and Paris – and the relative poverty in the interior, especially in rural areas. But nearly two decades on from that visit, with the country’s growth rate slowing, many university-educated young people are also finding it hard to find well-paid jobs now.

Meanwhile Europe – the only other contender to take the US’s place as global no.1 – is deeply politically divided, with smaller, weaker economies to the east and south far more sceptical about the benefits of globalisation, and increasingly divided on issues such as migration and the Ukraine war. The challenges of achieving broad policy agreement among all member states, and the problem of who can speak for Europe, make it unlikely that the EU as currently constituted could initiate and enforce a new global world order on its own.

The EU’s financial system also lacks the heft of the US’s. Although it has a common currency (the euro) managed by the European Central Bank, its financial system is far more fragmented. Banks are regulated nationally, and each country issues its own government bonds (although a few eurobonds now exist). This makes it hard for the euro to replace the dollar as a store of value, and reduces the incentive for foreigners to hold euros as an alternative reserve currency.

Meanwhile, any future prospects of a renewal of US global leadership look similarly unpromising. Trump’s policy of cutting taxes while increasing the size of the US government debt – which now stands at US$38 trillion, or 120% of GDP – threatens both the stability of the world economy and the ability of the US to finance this mind-boggling deficit.

US national debt hits record high. Video: The Economic Times.

Tellingly, the Trump administration shows no interest in reviving, or even engaging with, many of the international financial institutions which America once dominated, and which helped shape the world economic order – as US trade representative Jamieson Greer expressed disdainfully in the New York Times recently:

Our current, nameless global order, which is dominated by the WTO and is notionally designed to pursue economic efficiency and regulate the trade policies of its 166 member countries, is untenable and unsustainable. The US has paid for this system with the loss of industrial jobs and economic security, and the biggest winner has been China.

While the US is not, so far, withdrawing from the IMF, the Trump administration has urged it to call out China for running such a large trade surplus, while abandoning its concern about climate change. Greer concluded that the US has “subordinated our country’s economic and national security imperatives to a lowest common denominator of global consensus”.

World without a global no.1

To understand the potential dangers ahead, we must go back more than a century to the last time there was no global hegemon. By the time the first world war officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28 1919, the international economic order had collapsed. Britain, world leader over the previous century, no longer possessed the economic, political or military clout to enforce its version of globalisation.

The UK government, burdened by the huge debts it had taken out to finance the war effort, was forced to make major cuts in public spending. In 1931, it faced a sterling crisis: the pound had to be devalued as the UK exited from the gold standard for good, despite having yielded to the demands of international bankers to cut payments to the unemployed. This was a final sign that Britain had lost its dominant place in the world economic order.

The 1930s were a time of deep political unease and unrest in Britain and many other countries. In 1936, unemployed workers from Jarrow, a town in north-east England with 70% unemployment after its shipyards closed, organised a non-political “hunger march” to London which became known as the Jarrow crusade. More than 200 men, dressed in their Sunday best, marched peacefully in step for over 200 miles, gaining great support along the way. Yet when they reached London, prime minister Stanley Baldwin ignored their petition – and the men were informed their dole money would be docked because they had been unavailable for work over the past fortnight.

The Jarrow marchers en route to London in October 1936. National Media Museum/Wikimedia

Europe was also facing a severe economic crisis. After Germany’s government refused to pay the reparations agreed in the 1919 Versailles treaty, saying they would bankrupt its economy, the French army occupied the German industrial heartland of the Ruhr and German workers went on strike, supported by their government. The ensuing struggle fuelled hyperinflation in Germany. By November 1923, it took 200,000 million marks to buy a loaf of bread, and the savings and pensions of the German middle class were wiped out. That month, Adolf Hitler made his first attempt to seize power in the failed “Beer hall putsch” in Munich.

In contrast, across the Atlantic, the US was enjoying a period of postwar prosperity, with a booming stock market and explosive growth of new industries such as car manufacturing. But despite emerging as the world’s strongest economic power, having financed much of the Allied war effort, it was unwilling to grasp the reins of global economic leadership.

The Republican US Congress, having blocked President Woodrow Wilson’s plan for a League of Nations, instead embraced isolationism and washed its hands of Europe’s problems. The US refused to cancel or even reduce the war debts owed it by the Allied nations, who eventually repudiated their debts. In retaliation, the US Congress banned all American banks from lending money to these so-called allies.

Then, in 1929, the affluent American “jazz age” came to an abrupt halt with a stock market crash that wiped off half its value. The country’s largest manufacturer, Ford, closed its doors for a year and laid off all its workers. With a quarter of the nation unemployed, long lines for soup kitchens were seen in every city, while those who had been evicted camped out wherever they could – including in New York’s Central Park, renamed “Hooverville” after the hapless US president of that time, Herbert Hoover.

Hooverville in New York’s Central Park during the Great Depression. Hmalcolm03/Wikimedia, CC BY-NC-ND

In rural areas where the collapse in agricultural prices meant farmers could no longer make a living, armed farmers stopped food and milk trucks and destroyed their contents in a vain attempt to limit supply and raise prices. By March 1933, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office, the entire US banking system had ground to a standstill, with no one able to withdraw money from their bank account.

With its focus on this devastating Great Depression, the US refused to get involved in attempts at international economic cooperation. With no notice, Roosevelt withdrew from the 1933 London Conference which had been called to stabilise the world’s currencies – sending a message denouncing “the old fetishes of the so-called international bankers”.

With the US following the UK off the gold standard, the resulting currency wars exacerbated the crisis and further weakened European economies. As countries reverted to mercantilist policies of protectionism and trade wars, world trade shrank dramatically.

The situation became even worse in central Europe, where the collapse of the huge Credit-Anstalt bank in Austria in 1931 reverberated around the region. In Germany, as mass unemployment soared, centrist parties were squeezed and armed riots broke out between communist and fascist supporters. When the Nazis came to power, they introduced a policy of autarky, cutting economic ties with the west to build up their military machine.

The economic rivalries and antagonisms which weakened western economies paved the way for the rise of fascism in Germany. In some sense, Hitler – an admirer of the British empire – aspired to be the next hegemonic economic as well as military power, creating his own empire by conquering and ruthlessly exploiting the resources of the rest of Europe.

Troubled by rampant hyperinflation, Germans queue up with large bags to withdraw money from Berlin’s Reichsbank in 1923. Bundesarchiv/Wikimedia, CC BY-NC-SA

Nearly a century later, there are some disturbing parallels with that interwar period. Like America after the first world war, Trump insists that countries the US has supported militarily now owe it money for this protection. He wants to encourage currency wars by devaluing the dollar, and raise protectionist barriers to protect domestic industry. The 1920s was also a time when the US sharply limited immigration on eugenic grounds, only allowing it from northern European countries which (the eugenicists argued) would not “pollute the white race”.

Clearly, Trump does not view the lack of international cooperation that could amplify the damaging economic effects of a stock or bond market crash as a problem that should concern him. And in today’s unstable world, for all the US’s past failings as a global leader, that is a very worrying proposition.

How the US responded to the last financial crisis

Once again, the rules of the international order are breaking down. While it is possible that Trump’s approach will not be fully adopted by his successor in the White House, the direction of travel in the US will almost certainly remain sceptical about the benefits of globalisation, with limited support for any worldwide economic rules or initiatives.

We see similar scepticism about the benefits of globalisation emerging in other countries, amid the rise of rightwing populist parties in much of Europe and South America – many backed by Trump. Fuelling these parties’ support are growing concerns about income inequality, slow growth and immigration which are not being addressed by the current political system – and all of which would be exacerbated by the onset of a new global economic crisis.

With the global economy and financial system far bigger than ever before, a new crisis could be even more severe than the one that occurred in 2008, when the failure of the banking system left the world teetering on the brink of collapse.

The scale of this crisis was unprecedented, but key US and UK government officials moved boldly and swiftly. As a BBC reporter in Washington, I attended the House of Representatives’ Financial Services Committee hearing three days after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, paralysing the global financial system, to find out the administration’s response. I remember the stunned look on the face of the committee’s chairman, Barney Frank, when he asked US Treasury secretary Hank Paulson and US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke how much money they might need to stabilise the situation:

“Let’s start with US$1 trillion,” Bernanke replied coolly. “But we have another US$2 trillion on our balance sheet if we need it.”

Documentary on the collapse of Lehman Brothers bank in September 2008.

Shortly afterwards, the US Congress approved a US$700 billion rescue package. While the global economy has still not fully recovered from this crisis, it could have been far worse – possibly as bad as the 1930s – without such intervention.

Around the world, governments ended up pledging US$11 trillion to guarantee the solvency of their banking systems, with the UK government putting up a sum equivalent to the country’s entire yearly GDP. But it was not just governments. At the G20 summit in London in April 2009, a new US$1.1 trillion fund was set up by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to advance money to countries that were getting into financial difficulty.

The G20 also agreed to impose tougher regulatory standards for banks and other financial institutions that would apply globally, to replace the weak regulation of banks that had been one of the main causes of the crisis. As a reporter at this summit, I recall widespread excitement and optimism that the world was finally working together to tackle its global problems, with the host prime minister, Gordon Brown, briefly glowing in the limelight as organiser of that summit.

Behind the scenes, the US Federal Reserve had also been working to contain the crisis by quietly passing on to the world’s other leading central banks nearly US$600 billion in “currency swaps” to ensure they had the dollars they needed to bail out their own banking systems. The Bank of England secretly lent UK banks £100 billion to ensure they didn’t collapse, although two of the four major banks, Royal Bank of Scotland (now NatWest) and Lloyds, ultimately had to be nationalised (to different extents) to keep the financial system stable.

However, these rescue packages for banks, while much needed to stabilise the global economy, did not extend to many of the victims of the crash – such as the 12 million US households whose homes were now worth less than the mortgage they had taken out to pay for them, or the 40% of households who experienced financial distress during the 18 months after the crash. And the ramifications of the crisis were even greater for those living in developing countries.

A few months after the 2008 financial crisis began, I travelled to Zambia, an African country totally dependent on copper exports for its foreign exchange. I visited the Luanshya copper mine near Ndola in the country’s copper belt. With demand for copper (used mainly in construction and car manufacturing) collapsing, all the copper mines had closed. Their workers, in one of the few well-paid jobs in Zambia, were forced to leave their comfortable company homes and return to sharing with their relatives in Lusaka without pay.

Zambia’s government was forced to shut down its planned poverty reduction plan, which was to be funded by mining profits. The collapse in exports also damaged the Zambian currency, which dropped sharply. This hit the country’s poorest people hard as it raised the price of food, most of which was imported.

The ripple effects of the 2008 global financial crisis soon hit Luanshya copper mine in Zambia. Nerin Engineering Co., CC BY-SA

I also visited a flower farm near Lusaka, where Dutch expats Angelique and Watze Elsinga had been growing roses for export for over a decade – employing more than 200 workers who were given housing and education. As the market for Valentine’s Day roses collapsed, their bankers, Barclays South Africa, suddenly ordered them to immediately repay all their loans, forcing them to sell their farm and dismiss their workers. Ultimately, it took a US$3.9 billion loan from the IMF and World Bank to stabilise Zambia’s economy.

Should another global financial crisis hit, it is hard to see the Trump administration (and others that follow) being as sympathetic to the plight of developing countries, or allowing the Federal Reserve to lend major sums to foreign central banks – unless it is a country politically aligned with Trump, such as Argentina. Least likely of all is the idea of Trump working with other countries to develop a global trillion-dollar rescue package to help save the world economy.

Rather, there is a real worry that reckless actions by the Trump administration – and weak global regulation of financial markets – could trigger the next global financial crisis.

What happens if the US bond market collapses?

Economic historians agree that financial crises are endemic in the history of global capitalism, and they have been increasing in frequency since the “hyper-globalisation” of the 1970s. From Latin America’s debt crisis in the 1980s to the Asia currency crisis in the late 1990s and the US dotcom stock market collapse in the early 2000s, crises have regularly devastated economies and regions around the world.

Today, the greatest risk is the collapse of the US Treasury bond market, which underpins the global financial system and is involved in 70% of global financial transactions by banks and other financial institutions. Around the world, these institutions have long regarded the US bond market, worth over $30 trillion, as a safe haven, because these “debt securities” are backed by the US central bank, the Federal Reserve.

Increasingly, the unregulated “shadow banking system” – a sector now larger than regulated global banks – is deeply involved in the bond market. Non-bank financial institutions such as private equity, hedge funds, venture capital and pension funds are largely unregulated and, unlike banks, are not required to hold reserves.

Bond market jitters are already unnerving global financial markets, which fear its unravelling could precipitate a banking crisis on the scale of 2008 – with highly leveraged transactions by these non-bank financial institutions leaving them exposed.

US bonds play a key role in maintaining the stability of the global economy. Video: Wall Street Journal.

Buyers of US bonds are also troubled by the Trump administration’s plan to raise the US deficit even higher to pay for tax cuts – with the national debt now forecast to rise to 134% of US GDP by 2035, up from 120% in 2025. Should this lead to a widespread refusal to buy more US bonds among jittery investors, their value would collapse and interest rates – both in the US and globally – would soar.

The governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, recently warned that the situation has “worrying echoes of the 2008 financial crisis”, while the head of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, said her worries about the collapse of private credit markets sometimes keep her awake at night.

A bad situation would grow even worse if problems in the bond market precipitate a sharp decline in the value of the dollar. The world’s “anchor currency” would no longer be seen as a safe store of value – leading to more withdrawals of funds from the US Treasury bond market, where many foreign governments hold their reserves.

A weaker dollar would also make imported goods more expensive for US consumers, while potentially boosting the country’s exports. This is precisely the course of action advocated by Stephen Miran, chair of the US president’s Council of Economic Advisors – who Trump appears to want to be the next head of the Federal Reserve.

One example of what could happen if bond markets become destabilised occurred when the shortest-lived prime minister in UK history, Liz Truss, announced huge unfunded tax cuts in her 2022 budget, causing the value of UK gilts (the equivalent of US Treasury bonds) to plummet as interest rates spiked. Within days, the Bank of England was forced to put up an emergency £60 billion rescue fund to avoid major UK pension funds collapsing.

In the case of a US bond market crash, however, there are growing fears that the US government would be unable – and unwilling – to step in to mitigate such damage.

A new era of financial chaos

Just as worrying would be a crash of the US stock market – which, by historic standards, is currently vastly overvalued.

Huge recent increases in the US stock market’s overall value have been driven almost entirely by the “magnificent seven” hi-tech companies, which alone make up a third of its total value. If their big bet on artificial intelligence is not as lucrative as they claim, or is overshadowed by the success of China’s AI systems, a sharp downturn, similar to the dotcom crash of 2000-02, could well occur.

Jamie Dimon, head of the US’s biggest bank JPMorgan Chase, has said he is “far more worried than other [experts]” about a serious market correction, which he warned could come in the next six months to two years.

Big tech executives have been overoptimistic before. Reporting from Silicon Valley in 2001 as the dotcom bubble was bursting, I was struck by the unshakeable belief of internet startup CEOs that their share prices could only go up.

Furthermore, their companies’ high stock valuations had allowed them to take over their competitors, thus limiting competition – just as companies such as Google and Meta (Facebook) have since used their highly valued shares to purchase key assets and potential rivals including YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram and DeepMind. History suggests this is always bad for the economy in the long run.

With the business and financial worlds now ever more closely linked, not only has the frequency of financial crises increased in the last half-century, each crisis has become more interconnected. The 2008 global financial crisis showed how dangerous this can be: a global banking crisis triggered stock market falls, collapses in the value of weak currencies, a debt crisis in developing countries – and ultimately, a global recession that has taken years to recover from.

The IMF’s latest financial stability report summarised the situation in worrying terms, highlighting “elevated” stability risks as a result of “stretched asset valuations, growing pressure in sovereign bond markets, and the increasing role of non-bank financial institutions. Despite its deep liquidity, the global foreign exchange market remains vulnerable to macrofinancial uncertainty.”

The IMF has warned about instability in the global financial system. Video: CGTN America.

I believe we may be entering a new era of sustained financial chaos during which the seeds sown by the death of globalisation – and Trump’s response to it – finally shatter the world economic and political order established after the second world war.

Trump’s high and erratically applied tariffs – aimed most strongly at China – have already made it difficult to reconfigure global supply chains. Even more worrying could be the struggle over the control of key strategic raw materials like the rare earth minerals needed for hi-tech industries, with China banning their export and the US threatening 100% tariffs in return (as well as hoping to take over Greenland, with its as-yet-untapped supply of some of these minerals).

This conflict over rare earths, vital for the computer chips needed for AI, could also threaten the market value of high-flying tech stocks such as Nvidia, the first company to exceed US$4 trillion in value.

The battle for control of critical raw materials could escalate. There is a danger that in some cases, trade wars might become real wars – just as they did in the former era of mercantilism. Many recent and current regional conflicts, from the first Iraq war aimed at the conquest of the oilfields of Kuwait, to the civil war in Sudan over control of the country’s goldmines, are rooted in economic conflicts.

The history of globalisation over the past four centuries suggests that the presence of a global superpower – for all its negative sides – has brought a degree of economic stability in an uncertain world.

In contrast, a key lesson of history is that a return to policies of mercantilism – with countries struggling to seize key natural resources for themselves and deny them to their rivals – is most likely a recipe for perpetual conflict. But this time around, in a world full of 10,000 nuclear weapons, miscalculations could be fatal if trust and certainty are undermined.

The challenges ahead are immense – and the weakness of international institutions, the limited visions of most governments and the alienation of many of their citizens are not optimistic signs.

This is the second in a two-part series. In case you missed it, read part one here.

For you: more from our Insights series:

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Steve Schifferes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The rise and fall of globalisation: the battle to be top dog

2025-10-28T17:39:37Z

A world map showing the extent of the British Empire in 1886. Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, Boston Public Library/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

This is the first in a two-part series. Read part two here.

For nearly four centuries, the world economy has been on a path of ever-greater integration that even two world wars could not totally derail. This long march of globalisation was powered by rapidly increasing levels of international trade and investment, coupled with vast movements of people across national borders and dramatic changes in transportation and communication technology.

According to economic historian J. Bradford DeLong, the value of the world economy (measured at fixed 1990 prices) rose from US$81.7 billion (£61.5 billion) in 1650, when this story begins, to US$70.3 trillion (£53 trillion) in 2020 – an 860-fold increase. The most intensive periods of growth corresponded to the two periods when global trade was rising fastest: first during the “long 19th century” between the end of the French revolution and start of the first world war, and then as trade liberalisation expanded after the second world war, from the 1950s up to the 2008 global financial crisis.

Now, however, this grand project is on the retreat. Globalisation is not dead yet, but it is dying.

Is this a cause for celebration, or concern? And will the picture change again when Donald Trump and his tariffs of mass disruption leave the White House? As a longtime BBC economics correspondent who was based in Washington during the global financial crisis, I believe there are sound historical reasons to worry about our deglobalised future – even once Trump has left the building.

Trump’s tariffs have amplified the world’s economic problems, but he is not the root cause of them. Indeed, his approach reflects a truth that has been emerging for many decades but which previous US administrations – and other governments around the world – have been reluctant to admit: namely, the decline of the US as the world’s no.1 economic power and engine of world growth.

In each era of globalisation since the mid-17th century, a single country has sought to be the clear world leader – shaping the rules of the global economy for all. In each case, this hegemonic power had the military, political and financial power to enforce these rules – and to convince other countries that there was no preferable path to wealth and power.

But now, as the US under Trump slips into isolationism, there is no other power ready to take its place and carry the torch for the foreseeable future. Many people’s pick, China, faces too many economic challenges, including its lack of a truly international currency – and as a one-party state, nor does it possess the democratic mandate needed to gain acceptance as the world’s new dominant power.

While globalisation has always produced many losers as well as winners – from the slave trade of the 18th century to displaced factory workers in the American Midwest in the 20th century – history shows that a deglobalised world can be an even more dangerous and unstable place. The most recent example came during the interwar years, when the US refused to take up the mantle left by the decline of Britain as the 19th century’s hegemonic global power.

In the two decades from 1919, the world descended into economic and political chaos. Stock market crashes and global banking failures led to widespread unemployment and increasing political instability, creating the conditions for the rise of fascism. Global trade declined sharply as countries put up trade barriers and started self-defeating currency wars in the vain hope of giving their countries’ exports a boost. On the contrary, global growth ground to a halt.

A century on, our deglobalising world is vulnerable again. But to chart whether this means we are destined for a similarly chaotic and unstable future, we first need to explore the birth, growth and reasons behind the imminent demise of this extraordinary global project.

French model: mercantilism, money and war

By the mid-1600s, France had emerged as the strongest power in Europe – and it was the French who developed the first overarching theory of how the global economy could work in their favour. Nearly four centuries later, many aspects of “mercantilism” have been revived by Trump’s US playbook, which could be entitled How To Dominate the World Economy by Weakening Your Rivals.

France’s version of mercantilism was based on the idea that a country should put up trade barriers to limit how much other countries could sell to it, while boosting its own industries to ensure that more money (in the form of gold) came into the country than left it.

England and the Dutch Republic had already adopted some of these mercantilist policies, establishing colonies around the globe run by powerful monopolistic trading companies that aimed to challenge and weaken the Spanish empire, which had prospered on the gold and silver it seized in the Americas. In contrast to these “seaborne empires”, the much larger empires in the east such as China and India had the internal resources to generate their own revenue, meaning international trade – although widespread – was not critical to their prosperity.

French finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, architect of mercantilism. Metropolitan Museum of Art/Wikimedia

But it was France which first systematically applied mercantilism across the whole of government policy – led by the powerful finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1661-1683), who had been granted unprecedented powers to strengthen the financial might of the French state by King Louis XIV. Colbert believed trade would boost the coffers of the state and strengthen France’s economy while weakening its rivals, stating:

It is simply, and solely, the absence or abundance of money within a state [which] makes the difference in its grandeur and power.

In Colbert’s view, trade was a zero-sum game. The more France could run a trade surplus with other countries, the more gold bullion it could accumulate for the government and the weaker its rivals would become if deprived of gold. Under Colbert, France pioneered protectionism, tripling its import tariffs to make foreign goods prohibitively expensive.

At the same time, he strengthened France’s domestic industries by providing subsidies and granting them monopolies. Colonies and government trading companies were established to ensure France could benefit from the highly lucrative trade in goods such as spices, sugar – and slaves.

Colbert oversaw the expansion of French industries into areas like lace and glass-making, importing skilled craftsmen from Italy and granting these new companies state monopolies. He invested heavily in infrastructure such as the Canal du Midi, and dramatically increased the size of France’s navy and merchant marine to challenge its British and Dutch rivals.

Global trade at this time was highly exploitative, involving the forced seizure of gold and other raw materials from newly discovered lands (as Spain had been doing with its conquests in the New World from the late 15th century). It also meant benefiting from the trade in humans, with huge profits as slaves were seized and sent to the Caribbean and other colonies to produce sugar and other crops.

In this era of mercantilism, trade wars often led to real wars, fought across the globe to control trade routes and seize colonies. Following Colbert’s reforms, France began a long struggle to challenge the overseas empires of its maritime rivals, while also engaging in wars of conquest in continental Europe.

France initially enjoyed success in the 17th century both on land and sea against the Dutch. But ultimately, its state-run French Indies company was no rival to the ruthless, commercially driven activities of the Dutch and British East India companies, which delivered enormous profits to their shareholders and revenues for their governments.

Indeed, the huge profits made by the Dutch from the Far Eastern spice trade explains why they had no hesitation in handing over their small North American colony of New Amsterdam, in return for expelling the British from a small toehold of one of their spice islands in what is now Indonesia. In 1664, that Dutch outpost was renamed New York.

After a century of conflict, Britain gradually gained ascendancy over France, conquering India and forcing its great rival to cede Canada in 1763 after the Seven Years war. France never succeeded in fully countering Britain’s naval strength. Resounding defeats by fleets led by Horatio Nelson in the early 19th century, coupled with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo by a coalition of European powers, marked the end of France’s time as Europe’s hegemonic power.

The battle of Trafalgar, off southwestern Spain in October 1805, was decisive in ending France’s era of dominance. Yale Center for British Art/Wikimedia

But while the French model of globalisation ultimately failed in its attempt to dominate the world economy, that has not prevented other countries – and now President Trump – from embracing its principles.

France found that tariffs alone could not sufficiently fund its wars nor boost its industries. Its broad version of mercantilism led to endless wars that spread around the globe, as countries retaliated both economically and militarily and tried to seize territories.

More than two centuries later, there is an uncomfortable parallel with what the results of Trump’s endless tariff wars might bring, both in terms of ongoing conflict and the organisation of rival trade blocs. It also shows that more protectionism, as proposed by Trump, will not be enough to revive the US’s domestic industries.

British model: free trade and empire

The ideology of free trade was first spelled out by British economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the founding fathers of classical economics. They argued trade was not a zero-sum game, as Colbert had suggested, but that all countries could mutually benefit from it. According to Smith’s classic text, The Wealth of Nations (1776):

If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make, better buy it off them with some part of the produce of our own industry, employed in such a way that we have some advantages.

As the world’s first industrial nation, by the 1840s Britain had created an economic powerhouse based on the new technologies of steam power, the factory system, and railroads.

Smith and Ricardo argued against the creation of state monopolies to control trade, proposing minimal state intervention in industry. Ever since, Britain’s belief in the benefits of free trade has proved stronger and more long-lasting than any other major industrial power – more deeply embedded in both its politics and popular imagination.

This ironclad commitment was born out of a bitter political struggle in the 1840s between manufacturers and landowners over the protectionist Corn Laws. The landowners who had traditionally dominated British politics backed high tariffs, which benefited them but resulted in higher prices for staples like bread. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 upended British politics, signalling a shift of power to the manufacturing classes – and ultimately to their working-class allies once they gained the right to vote.

An Anti-Corn Law League meeting held in London’s Exeter Hall in 1846. Wikimedia

In time, Britain’s advocacy of free trade unleashed the power of its manufacturing to dominate global markets. Free trade was framed as the way to raise living standards for the poor (the exact opposite of President Trump’s claim that it harms workers) and had strong working-class support. When the Conservatives floated the idea of abandoning free trade in the 1906 general election, they suffered a devastating defeat – the party’s worst until 2024.

As well as trade, a central element in Britain’s role as the new global hegemonic power was the rise of the City of London as the world’s leading financial centre. The key was Britain’s embrace of the gold standard which put its currency, the pound, at the heart of the new global economic order by linking its value to a fixed amount of gold, ensuring its value would not fluctuate. Thus the pound became the worldwide medium of exchange.

This encouraged the development of a strong banking sector, underpinned by the Bank of England as a credible and trustworthy “lender of last resort” in a financial crisis. The result was a huge boom in international investment, opening access to overseas markets for British companies and individual investors.

In the late 19th century, the City of London dominated global finance, investing in everything from Argentinian railways and Malaysian rubber plantations to South African gold mines. The gold standard became a talisman of Britain’s power to dominate the world economy.

The pillars of Britain’s global economic dominance were a highly efficient manufacturing sector, a commitment to free trade to ensure its industry had access to global markets, and a highly developed financial sector which invested capital around the world and reaped the benefits of global economic development. But Britain also did not hesitate to use force to open up foreign markets – for example, during the Opium Wars of the 1840s, when China was compelled to open its markets to the lucrative trade in opium from British-owned India.

By the end of the 19th century, the British empire incorporated one quarter of the world’s population, providing a source of cheap labour and secure raw materials as well as a large market for Britain’s manufactured goods. But that was still not enough for its avaricious leaders: Britain also made sure that local industries did not threaten its interests – by undermining the Indian textile industry, for example, and manipulating the Indian currency.

In reality, globalisation in this era was about domination of the world economy by a few rich European powers, meaning that much global economic development was curtailed to protect their interests. Under British rule between 1750 and 1900, India’s share of world industrial output declined from 25% to 2%.

But for those at the centre of Britain’s global formal and informal empire, such as the middle-class residents of London, this was a halcyon time – as economist John Maynard Keynes would later recall:

For middle and upper classes … life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages. The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole Earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep.

US model: protectionism to neoliberalism

While Britain enjoyed its century of global dominance, the United States embraced protectionism for longer after its foundation in 1776 than all other major western economies.

The introduction of tariffs to protect and subsidise emerging US industries had first been articulated in 1791 by the fledgling nation’s first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton – Caribbean immigrant, founding father and future subject of a record-breaking musical. The Whig party under Henry Clay and its successor, the Republican Party, were both strong supporters of this policy for most of the 19th century. Even as US industry grew to overshadow all others, its government maintained some of the highest tariff barriers in the world.

Founding father Alexander Hamilton on the front of a US$10 note from 1934. Wikimedia

Tariff rates rose to 50% in the 1890s with the backing of future president William McKinley, both to help industrialists and pay for generous pensions for 2 million civil war veterans and their dependants – a key part of the Republican electorate. It is no accident that President Trump has festooned the White House with pictures of Hamilton, Clay and McKinley – all supporters of protectionism and high tariffs.

In part, the US’s enduring resistance to free trade was because it had access to an internal supply of seemingly limitless raw materials, while its rapidly growing population, fuelled by immigration, provided internal markets that fuelled its growth while keeping out foreign competition.

By the late 19th century, the US was the world’s biggest steel producer with the largest railroad system in the world and was moving rapidly to exploit the new technologies of the second industrial revolution – based on electricity, petrol engines and chemicals. Yet it was only after the second world war that the US assumed the role of global superpower – in part because it was the only country on either side of the war that had not suffered severe damage to its economy and infrastructure.

In the wake of global destruction in Europe and Asia, the US’s dominance was political, military and cultural, as well as financial – but the US vision of a globalised world had some important differences from its British predecessor.

The US took a much more universalist and rules-based approach, focusing on the creation of global organisations that would establish binding regulations – and open up global markets to unfettered American trade and investment. It also aimed to dominate the international economic order by replacing the pound sterling with the US dollar as the global medium of exchange.

Within a week of its entry in the second world war, plans were laid to establish US global financial hegemony. The US treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, began work on establishing an “inter-allied stabilisation fund” – a playbook for post-war monetary arrangements which would enshrine the US dollar at its heart.

This led to the creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank at the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire in 1944 – institutions dominated by the US, which encouraged other countries to adopt the same economic model both in terms of free trade and free enterprise. The Allied nations who were simultaneously meeting to establish the United Nations to try to ensure future world peace, having suffered the devastating effects of the Great Depression and war, welcomed the US’s commitment to shape a new, more stable economic order.

How the 1944 Bretton Woods deal ensured the US dollar would be the world’s dominant currrency. Video: Bloomberg TV.

As the world’s biggest and strongest economy, there was (initially) little resistance to this US plan for a new international economic order in its own image. The motive was as much political as economic: the US wanted to provide economic benefits to ensure the loyalty of its key allies and counter the perceived threat of a communist takeover – in complete contrast to Trump’s mercantilist view today that all other countries are out to “rip off” the US, and that its own military might means it has no real need for allies.

After the war finally ended, the US dollar, now linked to gold at a fixed rate of $35 per ounce to guarantee its stability, assumed the role as the free world’s principal currency. It was both used for global trade transactions and held by foreign central banks as their currency reserves – giving the US economy an “exorbitant privilege”. The stable value of the dollar also made it easier for the US government to sell Treasury bonds to foreign investors, enabling it to more easily borrow money and run up trade deficits with other countries.

The conditions were set for an era of US political, financial and cultural dominance, which saw the rise of globally admired brands such as McDonald’s and Coca Cola, as well as a powerful US marketing arm in the form of Hollywood. Perhaps even more significantly, the relaxed, well-funded campuses of California would prove a perfect petri dish for the development of new computer technologies – backed initially by cold war military investment – which, decades later, would lead to the birth of the big-tech companies that dominate the tech landscape today.

The US view of globalisation was broader and more interventionist than the British model of free trade and empire. Rather than having a formal empire, it wanted to open up access to the entire world economy, which would provide global markets for American products and services.

The US believed you needed global economic institutions to police these rules. But as in the British case, the benefits of globalisation were still unevenly shared. While countries that embraced export-led growth such as Japan, Korea and Germany prospered, other resource-rich but capital-poor countries such as Nigeria only fell further behind.

From dream to despair

Though the legend of the American dream grew and grew, by the 1970s the US economy was coming under increasing pressure – in particular from German and Japanese rivals, who by then had recovered from the war and modernised their industries.

Troubled by these perceived threats and a growing trade deficit, in 1971 President Richard Nixon stunned the world by announcing that the US was going off the gold standard – forcing other countries to bear the cost of adjustment for the US balance of payments crisis by making them revalue their currencies. This had a profound effect on the global financial system: within a decade, most major currencies had abandoned fixed exchange rates for a new system of floating rates, effectively ending the 1944 Bretton Woods settlement.

US president Richard Nixon announces the US is leaving the gold standard on August 15 1971.

The end of fixed exchange rates opened the door to the “financialisation” of the global economy, vastly expanding global investment and lending – much of it by US financial firms. This gave succour to the burgeoning neoliberal movement that sought to further rewrite the rules of the financial world order. In the 1980s and ’90s, these policy prescriptions became known as the Washington consensus: a set of rules – including opening markets to foreign investment, deregulation and privatisation – that was imposed on developing economies in crisis, in return for them receiving support from US-led organisations like the World Bank and IMF.

In the US, meanwhile, the increasing reliance on the finance and hi-tech sectors increased levels of inequality and fostered resentment in large parts of American society. Both Republicans and Democrats embraced this new world order, shaping US policy to favour their hi-tech and financial allies. Indeed, it was the Democrats who played a key role in deregulating the financial sector in the 1990s.

Meanwhile, the decline of US manufacturing industries accelerated, as did the gap between the incomes of those in the hinterland, where manufacturing was based, and residents of the large metropolitan cities.

By 2023, the lowest 50% of US citizens received just 13% of total personal income, while the top 10% received almost half (47%). The wealth gap was even greater, with the bottom 50% only having 6% of total wealth, while a third (36%) was held by just the top 1%. Since 1980, real incomes of the bottom 50% have barely grown for four decades.

The bottom half of the US population was suffering from a surge in “deaths of despair” – a term coined by the Nobel-winning economist Angus Deaton to describe high mortality rates from drug abuse, suicide and murder among younger working-class Americans. Rising costs of housing, medical care and university education all contributed to widespread indebtedness and growing financial insecurity. By 2019, a study found that two-thirds of people who filed for bankruptcy cited medical issues as a key reason.

The decline in US manufacturing accelerated after China was admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2001, increasing America’s soaring trade and budget deficit even more. Political and business elites hoped the move would open up the huge Chinese market to US goods and investment, but China’s rapid modernisation made its industry more competitive than its American rivals in many fields.

Ultimately, this era of intensive financialisation of the world economy created a series of regional and then global financial crises, damaging the economies of many Latin American and Asian economies. This culminated in the 2008 global financial crisis, precipitated by reckless lending by US financial institutions. The world economy took more than a decade to recover as countries wrestled with slower growth, lower productivity and less trade than before the crisis.

For those who chose to read it, the writing was on the wall for America’s era of global domination decades ago. But it would take Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election – a profound shock to many in the US “liberal establishment” – to make clear that the US was now on a very different course that would shake up the world.

Making a bad situation more dangerous

In my view, Trump is the first modern-day US president to fully understand the powerful alienation felt by many working-class American voters, who believed they were left out of the US’s immense post-war economic growth that so benefited the largely urban American middle classes. His strongest supporters have always been lower-middle-class voters from rural areas who are not college-educated.

Yet Trump’s key policies will ultimately do little for them. High tariffs to protect US jobs, expulsion of millions of illegal immigrants, dismantling protections for minorities by opposing DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion) programmes, and drastically cutting back the size of government will have increasingly negative economic consequences in the future, and are very unlikely to restore the US economy to its previous dominant position.

US president Donald Trump unveils his global tariff ‘hit list’ on April 3 2025. BBC News.

Long before he first became president, Trump hated the eye-watering US trade deficit (he’s a businessman, after all) – and believed that tariffs would be a key weapon for ensuring US economic dominance could be maintained. Another key part of his “America First” ideology was to repudiate the international agreements that were at the heart of the US’s postwar approach to globalisation.

In his first term, however, Trump (having not expected to win) was ill-prepared for power. But second time around, conservative thinktanks had spent years outlining detailed policies and identifying key personnel who could implement the radical U-turn in US economic policy.

Under Trump 2.0, we have seen a return to the mercantilist point of view reminiscent of France in the 17th and 18th centuries. His assertion that countries which ran a trade surplus with the US “were ripping us off” echoed the mercantilist belief that trade was a zero-sum game – rather than the 20th-century view, pioneered by the US, that globalisation brings benefits to all, no matter the precise balance of that trade.

Trump’s tax-and-tariff plans, which extend the tax breaks to the very rich while reducing benefits for the poor through benefit cuts and tariff-driven inflation, will increase inequality in the US.

At the same time, the passing of the One Big Beautiful Bill is predicted to add some US$3.5 trillion to US government debt – even after the Elon Musk-led “Department of Government Efficiency” cuts imposed on many Washington departments. This adds pressure to the key US Treasury bond market at the centre of the world financial system, and raises the cost of financing the huge US deficit while weakening its credit rating. Continuing these policies could threaten a default by the US, which would have devastating consequences for the entire global financial system.

For all the macho grandstanding from Trump and his supporters, his economic policies are a demonstration of American weakness, not strength. While I believe his highlighting of some of the ills of the US economy were overdue, the president is rapidly squandering the economic credibility and good will that the US built up in the postwar years, as well as its cultural and political hegemony. For people living in America and elsewhere, he is making a bad situation more dangerous – including for many of his most ardent supporters.

That said, even without Trump’s economic and societal disruptions, the end of the US era of hegemonic dominance would still have happened. Globalisation is not dead, but it is dying. The troubling question we all face now, is what happens next.

This is the first of a two-part Insights long read on the rise and fall of globalisation. Read part two here: why the next global financial meltdown could be much worse with the US on the sidelines.

For you: more from our Insights series:

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Voices from the sea, part four: when dreams reach land, what’s next?

2025-10-23T16:48:46Z

As the Ocean Viking approaches the Italian coast, the prospect of a new life in Europe becomes more concrete. Morgane Dujmovic, Fourni par l'auteur

This is the final part of our series drawing on a year of research conducted on board the Ocean Viking, the civilian search-and-rescue ship operated in the central Mediterranean by the NGO SOS Méditerranée. It explores the perspectives of exiled people based on testimonies from 110 survivors who were picked up while attempting the crossing from North Africa, as well as crew members’ experiences and the researcher’s creative collaborations on board the ship.

Catch up on parts one, two and three, and explore an immersive French-language version of the series here.

Solidarity at sea and autonomy

While my study onboard the Ocean Viking search-and-rescue ship highlighted civil rescue operations by one of the many NGOs now present in the central Mediterranean, it is important to emphasise the significance of autonomous crossings – and the many rescues and acts of solidarity at sea carried out by exiled people themselves.

For example, Ellie, a member of the SOS Méditerranée search-and-rescue (SAR) team, recounted a rescue during which two vessels in distress assisted each other:

There are people I remember very well. They had left through the Tunisian corridor in a fibreglass boat and came across another boat, wooden, which was adrift. When we arrived, we had this fibreglass boat in distress towing a wooden boat in distress, with 30 or 40 people on board. It was like a rescue of a rescue – quite incredible, this solidarity among the people at sea.

Reconstruction of a rescue between distressed boats by Ellie from SOS Méditerranée. Morgane Dujmovic, Fourni par l'auteur

NGO crews thus seek a balance between maintaining the autonomy of exiled people, and the management of large numbers of people onboard boats in sometimes extreme conditions (often referred to as “crowd control”).

Our study on the OV precisely explored the expectations of rescued people in the immediate aftermath of rescue, known as the post-rescue phase. Their opinions made it possible to formulate several operational recommendations for the days of navigation until the rescue ship reaches a safe port in Europe.

One of the most striking findings was the need for direct communication with loved ones – particularly to inform them that the crossing had not ended fatally.

Support and information from family and friends are among the main resources available to people on the move at different stages of migration (mentioned by nearly 60% of respondents). But it is not uncommon for rescued people to lose their phone during the crossing, and even when that’s not the case, connectivity is limited in the middle of the sea.

Psychological and physical impacts

The study also revealed both the physical and psychological impacts of violence in Libya, which affect the mere ability to meet basic needs. Participants mentioned their difficulties eating, as well as finding rest and respite:

In prison we only ate once a day, we could wash only once a month.

My back is very painful, I cannot sleep.

My mind is too stressed and I can’t control it.

These traces are also visible in the countless graffiti drawings left on the Ocean Viking’s walls over the years.

Survivors’ comments and drawings aboard the Ocean Viking. Morgane Dujmovic

In this chain of violent borders, the stay on the rescue ship represented a breathing space, judging by the open-ended comments offered at the end of our questionnaire:

We are treated like your brothers here; it’s so different from Libya!

I don’t have much to say, but I will never forget what happened here.

In the middle of the sea, when the number of people on board allowed it, we would sometimes witness moments of regained intimacy – or, conversely, collective jubilation, most notably when a port assigned by Italy as a landing point for the survivors was announced.

As for the mapping workshops and the questionnaire study I conducted, participant feedback suggests that they were able to engage in a form of empowerment – or at least, in the power to reflect and to narrate their experiences.

It’s the first time in a very long time that someone asked me what I think and what my opinions are about things.“

An explosion of joy after the announcement of a port of disembarkation in Italy. Morgane Dujmovic, Fourni par l'auteur

A sense of regained control over their actions emerged as the prospect of disembarkation and a new life in Europe drew near. As we sailed towards the Italian coast, the drawings and comments gathered from survivors on our collective exercises illustrated their increasingly concrete dreams and imaginings:

I hope to quickly get a residence permit in Germany.

I’m thinking to give back the money I borrowed to its owners, learn the language fast, and see my family safe and healthy.

‘When dreams reach the land’ (from the collective mapping project on board the OV). Alisha Vaya/SOS Méditerranée , Fourni par l'auteur

A new form of violence

One can imagine the emotion of setting foot for the first time in a European port for those who finally make it. But what is less often imagined is that this step can represent a new form of violence. In Ancona, for example, Koné recalled the impression left by the heavy deployment of forces when they arrived:

When I got off the boat, I saw so many sirens that I thought: ‘Are there only ambulances in Italy?’

The welcome committee for people disembarking in Italy after being rescued at sea is composed of national security authorities (police and the carabinieri), Italian health services, the Italian Red Cross and Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency – whose intervention is systematically oriented around a single question: "Who was driving the boat from Libya?” In other words: “Who could be prosecuted for facilitating unauthorised entry into the territory of the European Union?”

At the level of international search-and-rescue (SAR) conventions, the rescue officially ends once people are disembarked in a “place of safety”. For the SOS Méditerranée crews, it is customary to consider that the work stops there – even if human relationships sometimes continue afterwards.

For civilian search-and-rescue NGOs, disembarkation is quickly followed by many administrative procedures and interrogations that they must undergo to avoid the risk of vessel detention, which would prevent a ship going back out into the operational area to continue its rescue missions.

After several days aboard the Ocean Viking together, the goodbyes are tinged with both joy and anxiety, as we know that for each of these individuals, a new journey of struggle is beginning.

First steps on Italian soil. Alisha Vaya/SOS Méditerranée, Fourni par l'auteur

In this fleeting moment of grace, when dreams touch the ground, I am struck by the profound power of silence.

The silence of the sea that swallowed so many bodies.

The focused silence of rescue teams when RHIBs race toward distressed boats.

The stunned silence aboard the same RHIBs bringing people back to the mothership, still dazed from escaping shipwreck.

The exhausted silence of survivors regaining their strength; the palpable silence as I listen to their stories on the deck of the Ocean Viking.

The tentative silence as the Italian coast appears for the first time.

The silence of European institutions, which conceal and obstruct the efforts to save lives at sea – and on land, by supporting interceptions and forced returns to Libya.

And finally, my own silence, faced with the awareness of my powerlessness toward the exiled people I met at sea:

I know you’re writing – it’s good, people will see it. But the story will go on.

The wake of the Ocean Viking search-and-rescue ship. Morgane Dujmovic, Fourni par l'auteur

Acknowledgements

Heartfelt thanks go to everyone who participated in this onboard study and shared their stories, especially Koné and Shakir, as well as to all the teams at sea and on land who supported my long-term research, in particular Carla Melki and Amine Boudani. I also warmly thank Rafik Arfaoui and Elizabeth Hessek for their assistance with translations from Arabic and into English.

Note: some real first names were used in these articles and others were changed , according to the preferences of the people concerned.

You can also read this entire series in French

Interactive version: En pleine mer: Un an sur l'Ocean Viking

À bord de l’« Ocean Viking » (1) : paroles de personnes exilées secourues en mer

À bord de l’« Ocean Viking » (2) : avant la mer, les périls des parcours

À bord de l’« Ocean Viking » (3) : échapper à la Libye, survivre à la mer

À bord de l’« Ocean Viking » (4) : quand les rêves touchent terre

Morgane Dujmovic does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Voices from the sea, part two: using maps and drawings, survivors share the dangers they faced on their journeys to reach the ship

2025-10-23T16:48:43Z

This series of articles draws on a year of research conducted on board the Ocean Viking, the civilian search-and-rescue ship operated in the central Mediterranean by the NGO SOS Méditerranée. It explores the perspectives of exiled people based on testimonies from 110 survivors who were picked up while attempting the crossing from North Africa, as well as crew members’ experiences and the researcher’s creative collaborations on board the ship.

This is the second of a four-part series – read part one here and part three here, and explore an immersive French-language version of the series here.

Fragments of journeys

In all, 21 sketches were created in the workshops I conducted onboard the Ocean Viking. They tell fragments of journeys – routes that were sometimes smooth but often fraught, starting from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Syria, Palestine and Egypt.

From Dhaka to Zuwara: one of ten sketches describing routes participants had taken from Bangladesh. Morgane Dujmovic, Fourni par l'auteur

Some journeys were very costly but quick and organised, such as those of some Bangladeshi individuals who had travelled from Dhaka to Zuwara via Dubai in just a few days. Others stretched and intertwined over several years, adapting to encounters, resources, dangers and the multiple wars and violence in those countries crossed.

Among 69 people who responded to the questionnaire, 37.6% had left their country of origin the same year. But 21.7% had been travelling for more than five years – and 11.5% for over ten years. The longest journeys began in countries as diverse as Nigeria, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and, in 60% of the cases studied, Syria. As one respondent explained:

I fled the Syrian army. I spent three years in prison and torture, saw terrible scenes. I was 18, I was not old enough to live or see such things.

From Syria to Zuwara: one of 11 sketches describing routes participants had taken from the Middle East. Morgane Dujmovic, Fourni par l'auteur

2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015: the steady spread of departure dates for these journeys highlights the persistence of the conflicts that drive migration around the world. Motivations to continue these long journeys are often personal ambitions for a better life, such as being able to study or help family left behind – as was explained by a young Egyptian man: “I am the only son in my family. My parents are old and they are worried I won’t make it.”

The survey made it possible to outline the types of support received and the dangers encountered along the way. Alongside financial resources from personal savings or family loans, nearly 60% of respondents mentioned the importance of immaterial resources such as “advice from friends”, “psychological support from my husband”, or “information and emotional support from my niece”.

For some, the information received from loved ones seemed crucial at certain stages of the journey: as one respondent explained, it provided moral support to “survive in Libya”. Conversely, another participant confided it had been essential to hide the realities of their daily life in Libya from their family, in order “to hold on”.

Indeed, it was in this North African country that most difficulties were encountered: among the 136 situations of danger described, half were in Libya – compared with 35.3% at sea, 8.8% in the person’s country of origin, and 5.9% at other borders along their migration routes.

When maps tell stories of exile, with Morgane Dujmovic. French-language video by The Conversation France, 2025.

‘Inhumane acts’ against people in exile

The atrocities targeting people on the move in Libya are now well-documented. They appear in numerous sources including NGO reports and documentary films, as well as direct testimonies from those affected.

The findings of an independent UN Human Rights Council fact-finding mission, published in 2021, qualified these realities as crimes against humanity. The report described “reasonable grounds to believe that acts of murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, persecution and other inhumane acts committed against migrants form part of a systematic and widespread attack directed at this population, in furtherance of a State policy. As such, these acts may amount to crimes against humanity.”

Through the study on board the OV, participants were able to define, in their own words, the nature of the dangers they had experienced there. Their quotes conveyed subjective, embodied experiences reshaped by emotions – yet they were numerous and convergent enough to reconstruct what has been happening in Libya. The mechanisms of the reported violence were systemic: punitive detention combined with torture, inhumane and degrading treatment, racial and sexual violence endured or witnessed. And these acts were often cumulative:

During my first period in Libya, I was imprisoned six times, tortured, beaten. I can’t even remember the exact details.

The acts of violence involved perpetrators who were, to a greater or lesser degree, institutionalised, including coast guards, prison guards, mafias, militias and employers. They occurred across the entire country (Benghazi, Misrata, Sabratha, Sirte, Tripoli, Zawiya and Zuwara were the most frequently cited cities), but also in the desert and in detention sites at unknown locations. Omnipresent was the prospect of violent and arbitrary detention, which generated a presumption of widespread racism against foreigners:

The racism I experienced as an Egyptian is just unimaginable: kidnapping, theft, imprisonment.

Black people felt particularly targeted by such attacks. Among those who testified, an Ethiopian man trapped for four years in Libya described his constant sense of terror, linked to the repeated racist arrests he had endured:

People get kidnapped in Libya. They catch us and put us in prison because we don’t have papers. Then we have to pay more than US$1,000 to be released. It happened to me four times: two weeks, then a month, then two months, and finally a year. All because of my skin colour – because I am black. It lasted so long that my mind is too stressed from fear.

Such racial discrimination was confirmed by the UN Human Rights Council report in 2021, which found “evidence that most of the migrants detained are sub-Saharan Africans, and that they are treated in a harsher manner than other nationalities, which suggests discriminatory treatment.”

However, the risks of kidnapping and ransom would appear to spare no one on Libyan soil. Koné described them as a generalised and systemic practice:

There’s a business that many Libyans run. They put you in a taxi which sells you to those who put you in prison. Then they demand a ransom from your family to get you out. If the ransom isn’t paid, you’re made to work for free. In the end, in Libya you’re like merchandise: they let you enter the country only to make you work.

A mapping workshop held aboard the Ocean Viking. Alisha Vaya/SOS Méditerranée, Fourni par l'auteur

Several study participants had been caught in these networks, and their analyses afterwards converged on one point: the Libyan experience amounts to a vast system of exploitation through forced labour.

The facts reported match the International Labour Organization’s definitions of “human trafficking” and “modern slavery”, and were again confirmed by the UN report, which noted: “The only practicable means of escape is by paying large sums of money to the guards or engaging in forced labour or sexual favours inside or outside the detention centre for the benefit of private individuals.”

Ultimately, what Koné remembered most painfully was the feeling of shame:

I pity myself, my story, but I pity the people who went to prison even more. If your family can’t pay the ransom, they must take on debts, so it’s a problem you put on your family. Some people went crazy because of it.

Mapping as testimony

While the accounts of time spent in Libya were always bitter and often horrifying, sometimes beyond words, the study revealed a strong desire to bear witness to what happens there – not only for the general public, but for those who might attempt the same journey:

I want to say that in Libya, there are many women like me who are in a very difficult situation.

I don’t have much to say, except that so many people are suffering even more than I did in Libya.

I don’t advise anyone to come by this route.

To accompany these stories, our mapping workshops aboard the OV served as an invitation – an opportunity to share experiences without having to put traumatic events into words.

At first, the collective mappings organised on the OV’s deck allowed participants to bring out the main themes they wanted to address, according to three sequences: “our past”, “our present”, and “the future we imagine”. My role was to create an appropriate framework for expression, guide participants toward accessible graphic techniques, and enable the sharing of creations through their gradual display on the deck.

A mapping workshop held aboard the OV. Alisha Vaya/SOS Méditerranée, Fourni par l'auteur

Workshops were then offered to small groups or individuals inside containers – spaces that were more conducive to the confidentiality of intimate stories.

One of the tasks suggested by participants was to represent the zones of danger felt throughout the migration journey — where Libya inevitably stood out. From these personal pathways, a second exercise was introduced: describing the experience of danger at the Libyan scale, building on the places already mentioned.

Participants were encouraged to enrich their sketched maps with personal illustrations and narrative legends in their native languages, which were later translated into English.

Ahmed’s experience of Libya

On his map, Ahmed, a Syrian-born participant, depicted “insecurity” in Tripoli, “bad treatment and extortion of money” in Benghazi, and “violation of rights” in Zuwara.

His illustration shows a scene of ordinary, widespread crime: “the Libyan” shooting at “foreigners” evokes the collective violence that Ahmed described as occurring all across Libya. This emotional and participatory method served as a language for sharing stories that were difficult to verbalise, and for mediating them.

Beyond what these drawings facilitated for those sharing their stories, they allowed myself and others observing these violent images to contextualise them within a complex web of factors across time and geographical space.

Now read part three in this four-part series, or explore an immersive French-language version here.

Voices from the sea, part one: people rescued in the Mediterranean tell their stories of survival in ‘onboard workshops’

2025-10-23T16:48:40Z

This is the first of a four-part series. Read part two here, and explore an immersive French-language version of the series here.

‘The journey we’ve undertaken’

“We were ready to jump. We were so afraid the Libyans would arrive!” These words came from a young Syrian man, recorded in the data table as part of my year-long study aboard the Ocean Viking search-and-rescue ship, between the summers of 2023 and 2024.

His words did not reflect an isolated incident. Among the 110 rescued people who took part in the onboard survey, nearly a third described a similar fear at the sight of a ship on the horizon. Not fear of imminent shipwreck or drowning, but of being intercepted by Libyan forces and returned to that country.

Portrait of Shakir. Morgane Dujmovic, Fourni par l'auteur

The words echo those of Shakir, a Bangladeshi man I met on the OV – as the Ocean Viking ship is commonly nicknamed. He told me: “You refreshed our minds with the workshops. Since Libya and the sea, we felt lost. Now, we understand the journey that we’ve undertaken.”

On the OV’s deck and in the containers serving as shelters until disembarkation in Italy, I offered participatory mapping workshops. Around 60 people took part, retracing the steps, places and timelines of their journeys through hand-drawn maps.

I developed this collaborative research method to encourage the expression of knowledge formed through migration. I had not anticipated that these gestures and drawings could also help reclaim points of reference and build valuable understanding about the journey undertaken.

Portrait of Koné. Morgane Dujmovic, Fourni par l'auteur

The words also resonate with those I collected after a disembarkation in Ancona. There, I met Koné, an Ivorian man who had been rescued by another NGO vessel a week earlier. He told me:

“The worst is not the sea, believe me, it’s the desert! When you go out on the water, it’s at night and you don’t see what’s around you – it’s only when daylight comes that you see the waves. In the desert, they put 50 people on a pickup truck made for ten: if you fall, you’re left behind. At sea, you die instantly. In the desert, you die a slow death.”

All these words have led me to rethink my assumptions about borders and their dangers. Why take the risk of crossing the sea, with such uncertain outcomes? How is rescue perceived from a boat in distress? What is life like during the days spent onboard an NGO vessel? What hopes are projected on to arriving in Europe, and beyond?

While rescues and shipwrecks often make headlines, the perceptions of the rescued people themselves are rarely studied; they usually reach us filtered through authorities, journalists or NGOs. Collecting these lived experiences and allowing exiled people to tell their own stories – this was the core purpose of my onboard research mission.

When maps tell stories of exile, with Morgane Dujmovic. French-language video by The Conversation France, 2025.

An improvised, floating laboratory

Onboard the OV, I occupied the “25th seat”, which is usually reserved for special guests. This was the ship’s first search-and-rescue (SAR) mission to host an external researcher.

For SOS Méditerranée, it was an opportunity to open the NGO’s work up to objective observation by a social scientist and to refine its operational response, drawing on the priorities expressed by rescued individuals. Among the crew, several members suggested this work could enhance their practices and deepen their understanding of the migration journeys they had been witnessing for years.

The Ocean Viking docked in the Sicilian port of Syracuse. Morgane Dujmovic, Fourni par l'auteur

This was the case for Charlie, one of the NGO veterans who have spent a decade refining their rescue techniques for boats in distress. As SAR team leader, he coordinates the RHIBs (rigid-hulled inflatable boats) launched from the OV to carry out rescues. “This work is really useful because we are constantly looking to improve,” he told me. “What I’m really curious about is what happens before [the rescue]. I talk with them sometimes, but I want to know more about them.”

As for me, while I have worked for 15 years with exiled people, this was the first time I have written about borders while being physically inside a border zone – a feeling of immersion heightened by the horizon of the sea and the confined daily life onboard the OV.

The study unfolded over the course of five rotations, each a six-week mission in the search-and-rescue zone. It was implemented with the support of the entire OV crew: rescue, medical, protection, logistics and communications teams – all of whom were trained in the survey methodology.

The questionnaire emerged from a dialogue between scientific and operational objectives. It was designed around three themes: the sea rescue itself; care onboard the mothership in the post-rescue phase; and migration projects and pathways – from the country of origin to the imagined destinations in Europe. My presence on board allowed me to refine the initial version as I received feedback from both rescued people and crew members.

A mapping workshop held on the deck of the OV. Morgane Dujmovic, Fourni par l'auteur

This was complemented by qualitative methods I have previously used on land, at the French-Italian and French-Spanish borders or in the Balkans, offering people who cross them participatory and emotional mapping tools to narrate their journeys.

To adapt these methods to the sea, I brought on board the OV maps previously drawn by other exiled people along with creative materials, and arranged a dedicated space. In this improvised, floating laboratory, I sought to create a space-time conducive to reflection, allowing silenced knowledge to emerge and be shared with the wider public – for those who wished to.

The invitation to participate was designed to be reassuring and encouraging. The workshop was guided and required no specific language or graphic skills; the aesthetic result mattered less than the interaction experienced during the mapping process.

When maps tell stories of exile, with Morgane Dujmovic. French-language video by The Conversation France, 2025.

These scientific and ethical concerns closely aligned with operational priorities – during the days of navigation before disembarking at an Italian port, there is a need to fill the waiting time and lift spirits.

On the OV’s deck, mapping gradually found its place among post-rescue activities, some of which had a psychosocial dimension aimed at restoring the dignity of rescued people and preparing them for the next stage of their journey in Europe. The collective mappings – where texts and drawings appeared – became a shared language and gesture, linking crew members and rescued people who joined the workshop.

Read part two of this four-part series here, and explore the immersive French-language version of the series here.

Voices from the sea, part three: how do exiled people experience their moment of rescue?

2025-10-23T16:48:37Z

This is the third part of our series drawing on a year of research conducted on board the Ocean Viking, the civilian search-and-rescue ship operated in the central Mediterranean by the NGO SOS Méditerranée. It explores the perspectives of exiled people based on testimonies from 110 survivors who were picked up while attempting the crossing from North Africa, as well as crew members’ experiences and the researcher’s creative collaborations on board the ship.

Catch up on parts one and two, or explore an immersive French-language version of the series here.

‘The worst decision of my life’

The dangers of Libya are generally discovered only when people on the move enter that country with hopes of finding decent work and a better life. One survivor told me while they were on board the Ocean Viking (OV): “On my very first day in Tripoli, I realised I had made the worst decision of my life.”

Few people manage to transit through Libya in less than a month. As Koné explained when we met in Ancona, on the Adriatic coast of Italy: “In Libya, it’s not easy to get in, but it’s even harder to get out!”

Most of those we met on the OV (57.9%) had spent between one and six months in Libya. But some had been trapped there for over two years – and for one Sudanese participant, up to seven years in total.

Different migration routes and configurations emerged from the survey, with the longest forced stays in Libya mainly affecting people from the poorest and most war-torn countries.

Another significant finding was that women experienced longer periods of detention in Libya – those we met had spent an average of 15½ months there, compared with 8½ months for men. This reflects the mechanisms of coercion and violence that specifically affect women migrating through the Mediterranean, as was powerfully described by Camille Schmoll in her 2024 book, The Wretched of the Sea.

When maps tell stories of exile, with Morgane Dujmovic. French-language video by The Conversation France, 2025.

Mohamad’s experience of Libya

Under the conditions in Libya described to us, the decision to take to the sea despite the risks of a Mediterranean crossing could be summed up like this: better the risk of dying now than the certainty of a slow death.

On his map, Mohamad illustrated this well, depicting the cumulative violence he had encountered along the Libyan coast from east to west: captivity in Tobruk by a “human trafficker”, imprisonment and theft in Benghazi, racism and xenophobia in Ajdabiya, and mistreatment in Zuwara – where he finally managed to flee by sea.

Mohamad’s illustration shows, from right to left, the chain of events that led him from imprisonment to the boat:

Libyan experience #2: ‘Seven months’ by Mohamad. Translation: Amine Boudani & Rafik Arfaoui. Mohamad. Fourni par l'auteur

To take to the sea, however, first one must gather a considerable sum of money. Participants mentioned borrowing from their families – US$2,000, $6,000, even $10,000 – to buy a place on a boat. This place was also sometimes obtained after doing forced labour in prison conditions, or in exchange for promising to be the person who steered the boat.

When attempts to cross the sea are thwarted by interceptions followed by forced returns to Libya, the original sum must be paid again. As one participant explained: “They scammed me first for US$2,000, then $3,000, and the third time I paid $5,000.”

Drawing of a ‘game house’ where people who have paid for their crossing wait for the signal to depart. Alisha Vaya/SOS Méditerranée, Fourni par l'auteur

Some participants also described their living conditions in so-called “game houses” – the buildings where people who had paid for their crossing wait for the signal to depart. These stays can last from several days to several weeks, with varying amounts of supplies and conditions depending on the network and the sum that has been paid to get there.

However, everyone shared the same realisation upon their first attempt to cross: the boats were unfit for navigation and dangerously overcrowded. But as Koné explained, at that stage it was generally too late to turn back:

We started from a beach near Tripoli at 4am. They made us run into the water: ‘Go, go!’ It was too late to change our minds.

The moment of rescue

Departures from Libyan beaches often happen at night, meaning it’s only in the morning that the vastness of the sea becomes visible. The on-board survey helped reveal how people on boats in distress often feel a sense of disorientation at the moment of rescue. One participant mentioned “the simple joy of having found something in the water”, when recalling his first impression of the Ocean Viking appearing on the horizon.

Others described how their perceptions were distorted by the navigation conditions, or the distressed nature of the boats they had travelled in. A Bangladeshi man who had boarded in the hold of a wooden boat recalled:

I was inside the boat; I couldn’t see or hear anything. I didn’t believe it was a rescue until I came out and saw it with my own eyes.

Charlie, the SAR team leader who coordinated that rescue, recalled his shock upon discovering 68 people aboard a vessel built for 20: “As we transferred them on to our RHIBs [rigid-hulled inflatable boats], more people kept coming out from under the deck, hidden.”

Jérôme, the deputy search-and-rescue coordinator on board the OV, confirmed the case of an “extremely overcrowded” boat, as was highlighted by the final rescue report: “They were really overcrowded! The alert had reported 55 people on board, but we actually found 68 because some were hidden under the deck.”

Wooden boat in distress, as seen by a rescued person (from the collective mapping project on the OV). Morgane Dujmovic, Fourni par l'auteur

A distressed boat adrift

Drawing on the questionnaire, cartographic workshops, and targeted interviews, I attempted to reconstruct this rescue with both the rescued individuals and members of the crew.

In the OV’s bridge, using the monitoring screen as support, we retraced the positions of the boat in distress throughout its search. That morning, the alert had been given by Alarm Phone, a citizen hotline operating continuously from both shores of the Mediterranean to relay and monitor cases of boats in distress. Jérôme recalled the moment when the decision to launch the search-and-rescue operation was made:

We got a position at 6.19am. We tried calling Tripoli several times, no answer. We said: ‘We’re going anyway, we’re very worried.’ We sent the official email saying we were going.

In our reconstruction, the OV headed for the reported position in international waters off the Libyan city of Zuwara. Shortly after, our radios set to the watch channel crackled: “We generally wake everyone up when we’re within ten miles, because that’s the distance at which we can spot them with binoculars. And at 6am, the first light of dawn appears”. The search for the boat in distress, however, soon became complicated:

With the first data – the boat’s departure point and second position – we had an idea of their speed: we thought they were going five knots. So we thought we’d find them at this next position. But once we arrived, we started tearing our eyes out – they weren’t there!

Reconstruction of a maritime distress case. Morgane Dujmovic, Fourni par l'auteur

The calculations made during this search phase integrate multiple factors: the different positions received (when there are any), the presence or absence of a functioning engine, and the weather and sea conditions, as Jérôme explained:

I think they must have gotten lost and gone off course. With the sea and the wind in their faces, I think they couldn’t see anything they were doing. They were just fighting against all that.

Confirming this hypothesis, many of the people rescued that day arrived on the OV’s deck suffering from dehydration and seasickness:

As we saw in the photos, they had really big swells and wind hitting them in the face. The further you go off shore, the more you’re battered by the sea … Plus, here the wind was enough to make them drift: they were heading straight back to Tripoli!

‘These boats shouldn’t even exist’

Despite the difficulties described during that rescue, it was considered a “low-risk” operation. Far more critical events are regularly reported, both by rescuing crews and rescued people. Over time, rescue teams have seen the quality of boats deteriorate, as Jérôme explained:“First there were wooden boats, then rubber boats. Now the worst are the iron boats.”

In 2023, hastily welded metal boats began appearing off the Tunisian coast. For seasoned sailors like Charlie who make up the rescue teams, the very existence of such boats on the open sea is scarcely conceivable:

These boats shouldn’t even exist. They have extremely weak structures. They’re handmade, badly and quickly put together; they’re just metal plates welded together. They have no stability – they’re like floating coffins.

For these maritime professionals, the concern is real: “We need to be prepared for this.” The sharp edges of these metal boats can damage the inflatable RHIBs, risking the entire rescue operation, as happened in September 2023 during a patrol on the Tunisian route, when the RHIBs had to be protected using whatever was available on board the OV – in that case, carpets.

Each new type of boat requires implementation of very specific techniques: the approach and positioning (known as the “dance”) of RHIBs around distressed boats; the communication methods needed to keep people calm; and the emergency care during their transfer to the mothership. All of this is meticulously studied to anticipate as many scenarios as possible.

Simulation of a ‘massive MOB’ event involving a metal boat. Morgane Dujmovic, Fourni par l'auteur

In the crew’s daily meeting room, using a model built by SOS veterans to train for simulations, Charlie explained the techniques developed to approach each type of distressed boat, whether made of fibreglass, wood, rubber or metal.

In the latter case, he emphasised the critical implications of a rescue going wrong: “Iron boats can capsize at any moment and sink quite rapidly, straight down. In that case, the scene would be a massive MOB!” – a “man overboard” alert involving numerous people going into the water. This was illustrated by the small blue objects scattered across Charlie’s model.

Drowning rather than being captured

Another factor which has made rescue operations increasingly unmanageable is the activity of groups within the Libyan search-and-rescue region, created in 2018 with EU support. Two authorities are tasked with coastal surveillance in the this region: the Libyan Coast Guard under the Ministry of Defence, and the General Administration for Coastal Security under the Ministry of the Interior.

The numerous illegal and violent acts attributed to these Libyan groups at sea have justified the growing use of the term “so-called Libyan Coast Guard”. Yet these groups receive abundant support from the EU and several of its member states.

An explanation of funding sources for the ‘so-called Libyan coast guards’. Graphic by SOS Humanity, Fourni par l'auteur

On board the OV, testimonies abounded regarding the perilous manoeuvres of these Libyan actors at sea – explicitly aimed at thwarting the rescue operations. “I’ve seen them make crazy manoeuvres,” said Charlie the SAR team leader, “trying to make the rescue as hard as possible, to make it impossible for us to rescue people – shouting, screaming.”

Several micro-scenes of this kind were reconstructed during our workshops and survey, leading to similar observations and recollections from both the crew and rescued individuals:

They drive as close and as fast as possible to create waves. They get in the middle of our way or interfere near the mothership.

When Libyan actors are on scene, the surge of emotions linked to the arrival of rescuers can turn into panic and jeopardise the success of the rescue. Almost a third of our study participants expressed a negative perception at the sight of a ship on the horizon, associating it with the fear of being intercepted and pushed back by Libyan groups at sea:

In the distance, we didn’t know if it was a rescue boat or the Libyans. It was huge stress on board; people were screaming, children were crying. We were ready to jump.

The presence of Libyan authorities was often perceived as a greater danger than the risk of drowning. “For me,” said one participant, “the danger is not the sea, it’s the Libyan authorities.”

This fear is easily explained among people who have already experienced one or more interceptions. Some participants mentioned violence during their forced return to Libya, including beatings, armed threats, theft of money, deprivation of water and food, or even deadly acts:

My first-time sea crossing, the Libyans shot the engine, the fuel burned and exploded, the people next to me died.

Reconstruction of interference by Libyan actors (blue) near the mothership (red). Morgane Dujmovic, Fourni par l'auteur

Moreover, the close ties between the “Libyan coast guards” and militias or mafia networks are notorious. One respondent said of the General Administration for Coastal Security (GACS): “There’s always a risk that the GACS, an armed group with masks, will take you to prison.”

Interceptions are generally followed by arbitrary detention in Libya (under inhumane conditions detailed in part two of this series). One participant told us: “I tried to cross four times but was caught and put in prison with my child; I suffered a lot.”

These reports, by both the OV crew and rescued people, are widely supported by international organisations, humanitarian groups and activist collectives monitoring the situation in the central Mediterranean. In its 2021 report, the UN Human Rights Council left little doubt about the chain of causality linking interceptions at sea to human trafficking in Libya:

The Libyan Coast Guard would … proceed with an interception that was violent or reckless, resulting at times in deaths … There are reports that, on board, the Libyan Coast Guard confiscates belongings from migrants. Once disembarked, migrants are either transferred to detention centres or go missing, with reports that people are sold to traffickers … Rather than investigating incidents and reforming practices, the Libyan authorities have continued with interception and detention of migrants.

By linking these maritime rescue scenes with the vast exploitation system organised from detention sites in Libya, it becomes clear that interceptions by the “Libyan coast guards” have become a strategy of capture. The central Mediterranean has thus turned into a battleground for protecting life and human dignity.

Read the final part in this series here, and explore an immersive French-language version of the series here.

‘I have it in my blood and brain … I still haven’t been able to shake this nightmare off.’ How voices from a forgotten archive of Nazi horrors are reshaping perceptions of the Holocaust

2025-10-22T17:12:11Z

Helena Dziedzicka’s notes and pass from the Hamburg Ravensbrück trials, with a still photo of the accused. Lund University Library, CC BY

“The witness – a tall, 16-year-old boy with a child-like face – recounts his sad story as if he were an old man”, she noted in her papers. “He speaks without becoming upset, only breaking down slightly when I ask about the fate of his parents and sister”.

They were sitting in an old school building in Sweden, serving as a makeshift refugee camp. Taking her time to interview the Polish boy, the woman occasionally asked him to clarify or elaborate, gently urging him on while carefully taking notes.

His name was Genek Granek. He had been 12 when the Nazis closed the ghetto in his hometown Łódź in central Poland and initiated the week-long Sperre, clearing the ghetto of everyone unfit for work. He had seen the cars stop outside the hospital, where “patients were seized and thrown out the windows directly onto the cargo beds of the trucks,” Granek said, adding: “… among them were pregnant women, newborn infants, and people suffering from typhus, dysentery, and other diseases.”

He had seen the children from the orphanage trying to flee into the surrounding fields, only to be hunted down like rabbits. He had seen the soldiers moving from building to building, seizing 15,000 children, sick and elderly to be deported to the extermination camp of Chełmno in northern Poland.

Hungarian Jews on the ramp at Auschwitz-II-Birkenau in 1944. Photo from the so-called Auschwitz Album, which was found at Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in 1945. Wikipedia

When Granek was 14 he was herded into a freight wagon with his family and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He said when they arrived, his mother and sister “went into the baths; that much I saw. What happened after, I don’t know. I still haven’t heard from them”. A few weeks later Granek was sent on to other camps – to the mines of Gross-Rosen, then to Flossenbürg, and from there to Bergen-Belsen. He had just turned 15 when the allied forces finally arrived.

To the dark-haired woman in her early thirties conducting the interview, Granek’s story contained few surprises. Luba Melchior had heard countless stories like his before. She had grown up in the Polish town of Radom, less than 150km from Łódź, and she had seen, felt and smelt the inside of several camps herself, including Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ravensbrück. “His testimony is incontestably trustworthy,” she remarked at the end of her notes, despondently adding: “He is on his own now.”

To most of us, testimonies like Granek’s are hard to fathom, however familiar they may seem. Faced with the reality of the Nazi genocide we often prefer to avert our eyes, comforting ourselves with the notion that it was a long time ago, and we all know what it was like. Neither of which is actually true.

I realised this when I first read Granek’s account almost a decade ago, the very first of literally hundreds of similar testimonies I would go through in the years that followed. The impact of his voice caught me off guard, not because of the horrible details of his story, but because of its complete absence of emotion and drama. It was the voice of a boy to whom brutality and inhumanity had become so normalised that it seemed a natural and preordained part of the world.

An archive of Nazi horrors

A few years earlier I had been appointed head of the Special Collections department at Lund University Library, and among the jumble of rare documents on the shelves was a collection known as the Ravensbrück archive. Being a historian specialising in early modern culture, I knew next to nothing about it. But according to my new colleagues it was a virtually unique – albeit strangely forgotten – collection that documented the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps in unprecedented detail.

Note books containing poetry, a family photo and a handmade mirror, made by prisoners at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Lund University Library, CC BY

Today, after a decade of work to make it available online, the Ravensbrück archive has been placed on Unesco’s Memory of the World International Register – and rightly so, given that it was one of the earliest attempts in the world to systematically document the crimes of the Nazi regime. These previously forgotten testimonies reveal atrocities like human experimentation, child murder and the Nazi attempts to cover up genocide.

Yet they also uncover a more complex reality where friendship, empathy and tenderness could exist alongside nightmarish brutality and abuse; where prisoners could sell out their fellow inmates for a scrap of food, but also where guards could turn a blind eye in a moment of compassion.

A deal behind Hitler’s back

It all began in the spring of 1945, when the largest humanitarian campaign of the second world war was launched from Sweden – the so-called White Buses operation. Throughout the war, Sweden had carefully remained neutral, thereby narrowly avoiding being occupied by Nazi Germany. But Sweden had also drawn increasing ire from the allied countries and its Nazi occupied neighbours, since their seemingly non-committal stance could easily be taken as pro-German – not least since Swedish companies had continued to make handsome profits on trading deals with the Nazis while the rest of the world was burning.

So, when it became evident that the allies would eventually win the war, considerable pressure was put on the Swedish government to take action to save face. In February 1945, the Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte, a top official at the Red Cross, began negotiating with Heinrich Himmler – head of the SS and Hitler’s right-hand man – to evacuate prisoners from concentration camps in northern Germany. Surprisingly, Himmler was not averse to the idea. He had realised what Hitler still refused to accept – that the war was lost. In desperate need of goodwill from the allied countries and seeing Hitler’s loosening grip of reality, Himmler even began to envision himself as the new führer, hoping he would be made the leader of Germany if he played his cards right. As a consequence, all negotiations with Bernadotte were conducted behind Hitler’s back.

Arrival of survivors to Sweden on the white buses in April 1945. Photos taken by K. W. Gullers for the Swedish magazine VI. Nordiska Museet, CC BY

By the end of March, the rescue operation was in motion. All in all, 75 vehicles – cars, motorbikes, trucks loaded with supplies and 35 white-painted buses carrying the Red Cross’s symbol – were deployed with a staff of almost 300 volunteers, ranging from physicians and nurses to drivers and mechanics.

For weeks, the convoys travelled along barely passable roads and bombed-out villages, shuttling between camps where they, despite Himmler’s orders, often had to bribe SS soldiers to be allowed to take the survivors onboard. Eugenia Rygalska, who had spent more than four years at Ravensbrück concentration camp, later described her feelings when seeing the convoy halt outside the gates:

White, bright, joyful busses that brought freedom. How they differed from the black car, hopeless box, heading for executions. How they differed from the dark, dirty trucks that went to the gas chambers … At last, people with human faces … The camp burst out with joy and happiness. There were crowds of women, speaking (and even laughing) only about the white buses that brought freedom.

Two days later, Rygalska’s bus rolled off the small ferry into Malmö harbour, where they were greeted by medical staff and press reporters unable to hide their shock. “Almost all of them are marked by terrible abuse”, a journalist from Arbetaretidningen reported. “Many have had all their finger joints broken, are missing nails on their fingers and have large scars on their faces.” On a stretcher he saw “a man with the face of a 75-year-old”, he wrote. But when asking the staff about the survivors’ condition the reporter was informed “that he weighs 35kg and his real age is 22”.

Arrival of survivors to Sweden in April 1945. Photos taken by K. W. Gullers for the Swedish magazine VI. Nordiska Museet, CC BY

The shock is understandable. Reports of Nazi war crimes had been sparse and most people had no idea of what the reality looked like in a concentration camp – or, indeed, of what the term actually meant. Nor did many have any idea of the breathtaking proportions of the Nazi camp system. When the war ended, there existed at least 980 concentration camps, more than 30,000 slave labour camps, and approximately 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps on German territory.

Preserving evidence

By the end of July, more than 20,000 survivors (Polish, German, French, Belgian, Dutch, and Scandinavian) had been quartered in hastily evacuated schools, museums and dance halls. To handle the situation, the Swedish government appealed for help from the public. Hundreds heeded the request, including housewives, retired nurses, physicians and academics who could act as interpreters – one of whom was Zygmunt Lakocinski.

Lakocinski was a Polish art historian and a colourful character in the small academic town of Lund. Despite his well-tailored suits and immaculate bow ties he was often considered a bit bohemian by the reserved Swedes, who found it slightly odd that people were always thronging in his kitchen, engaged in jovial discussions around the coffee pot.

Zygmunt Lakocinski (1905-1987) in 1953. Lund University Library, CC BY

But Lakocinski was a man who followed his heart rather than convention. A decade earlier he had fallen in love with a young Swedish student who was on a brief study-trip to Krakow, and he had swiftly followed her back to Lund. By the time the survivors began to arrive, they were expecting their second child, and Lakocinski had a minor position as a lecturer in Slavic languages at the university.

Whatever Lakocinski may have felt when first meeting the survivors, he was better prepared than most. Throughout the war he had used his vast social network to maintain contact with the Polish government-in-exile and stay informed about the situation in his former home country. Personal letters suggest that he had seen reports describing the brutal reality of the concentration camps well before the war ended. And quite possibly he had already realised, even before the arrival of the survivors, that the world was facing something unprecedented.

Fearing a typhus epidemic, the government proposed to seize and burn everything the survivors had worn and brought with them to Sweden, but Lakocinski was quick to intervene. Among the belongings were not only worn-out prison clothes, but also deeply personal objects and tokens from the camps: handcrafted toothbrushes; children’s toys made of discarded cardboard; tiny notebooks created from scraps of paper and pieces of cloth, containing poetry, drawings, even food recipes jotted down from memory as a reminder of a life lost. Lakocinski wrote in a letter:

The atrocities committed by the Germans during the war are unparalleled in history … the importance of preserving every form of documentary evidence of these recent events is simply beyond discussion.

Drawings made by prisoners in concentrations camps. Lund University Library., CC BY

But more important than collecting objects, he realised, was to document the personal experiences of the survivors – and promptly so, before the victims resolved to stay silent, forget and move on, simply as a way to survive the trauma. Many of the survivors Lakocinki approached were extremely reluctant to talk about their experiences, while others openly refused; a silence rooted not only in pain caused by the memories but also in fear that no one would believe them.

Driven by a sense of urgency, Lakocinski assembled a team of co-workers, but with an unexpected twist: they were all survivors he had met at the refugee camps. Lakocinki’s idea was that by sharing similar experiences, his co-workers would be able to break through the wall of trauma, distrust and silence, while also being uniquely equipped to evaluate the truthfulness of the testimonies.

‘Screams of children would keep us awake’

For more than a year the group shuttled between refugee camps, encouraging survivors to talk and sometimes conducting several interviews a day. It must have been incredibly difficult for Lakocinski and his team to document the harrowing stories of cruelty and loss. But perhaps the most striking feature is often their unexpectedly factual, almost detached tone. In her interview, 20-year-old Basia Zajączkowska-Rubinstein said:

On 27 June 1943, the population [of Kielce Arbeitslager] was redistributed to other labour camps … the remaining children were gathered up and given toys; once they were calm and amused, they were shot dead with machine guns.

To take this dispassionate tone as an indication of indifference would most certainly be a mistake. However traumatised many of the survivors were, the ambition of the working group was to make the witness accounts as reliable and informative as possible by focusing on facts rather than feelings, on what the survivors had seen and heard rather than how they had felt.

The only known photo of the Lund working group, taken outside the home of Zygmunt Lakocinski in1946. Back row (left to right) Bożysław Kurowski, Ludwika Broel-Plater, Carola von Gegerfelt (Zygmunt Łakociński’s wife), Józef Nowaczyk, Krystyna Karier, Zygmunt Łakociński. Front row (left to right): Helena Dziedzicka, Luba Melchior, Halina Strzelecka. Private collection of Jadwiga Kurowska, CC BY

“The incoming transports had many corpses – people who had suffocated in transit,” 26-year-old Lajka Mandelker stated. She added:

The crematoria operated for days and nights on end. At night, I would often see naked figures being led towards the crematorium. Later, when less gas was used, we could hear the screams of people being burned half alive. The screams of children being led to the crematorium would keep us awake.

A burning rage

Anna Jachnina in the 1930s. Public domain.

However, some accounts do simmer with a burning rage. The testimony of Anna Jachnina, for example; a social welfare clerk who was arrested by the Gestapo in November 1942 for cooperating with the Polish resistance. In 120 densely written pages – by far the longest interview in the archive – she struggled to describe a reality so otherworldly it often seemed to defy words.

Jachnina had been interrogated in Warsaw and then herded on to a freight train. Days later she arrived, aged 28, at a place reeking of excrement and rotten flesh; a place where the nights never turned dark because the sky was constantly glowing from the flickering ashes rising from the crematoria chimneys:

Gigantic torches that release columns of fire several metres in height … Long tongues of flame, writhing fantastically, stray off to the sides and take on a bloody-golden hue.

Auschwitz-Birkenau had by now grown into a sprawling, city-like complex of 40 closely interconnected camps, covering more than 35 square km and swallowing half a million lives a year. “There were periods when, over the space of a single day, 20,000 people would be gassed in the five crematoria and in the pits dug specially for that purpose”, Jachnina said.

And still, as the pace of the Nazis’ purge accelerated it was not nearly enough to keep the flood of new arrivals at bay. On her first day Anna was led into a barrack lodging almost 1,000 women and the sight of the overcrowded space was “unreal”, she said, adding:

… bunks in stacks of three, full of bizarre figures. Five, six, ten women to a bed, bundled up in rags, they sit like monkeys in overcrowded cages, scratching themselves awfully … It was like living inside a pressure cooker.

But Jachnina was fortunate: she was non-Jewish and fit for work. After a few weeks in the fields, piling stones and carting earth, she contracted pneumonia and typhus and was sent to the camp infirmary. Realising she would never survive the winter out in the fields, she started to make herself useful. “Still staggering around with legs swollen up like logs”, she said. She had started to help out at the infirmary and after a while she was allowed to stay as a nurse.

For almost two years, she cared for the sick, the wounded and the women giving birth. Time and again, she witnessed the midwife deliver a baby and send the mother off to work again, while the child was given an injection or simply “tossed out into the freezing cold” outside the barrack. “Most often, however … Nurse Klara, who delivered the babies, would drown them in a bucket herself”.

Women in the barracks of Auschwitz, 1945. Still photo from a Soviet film documenting the liberation of the camp, taken by the film unit of the First Ukrainian Front. Wikipedia

Providing actual help for the patients was virtually impossible, she said, as the rat-infested infirmary lacked both proper medicines and equipment. During the recurring epidemics of typhus, the mortality rate often rose to 400 a day, and the dead bodies were piled like firewood outside by the Liechenkommando, or “corpse unit”. When the night fell, Jachnina recalled:

… a truck would pull up with a dozen or so Jews from the Sonderkommando. These were the people charged with running the chimney [used to burn the dead]. They would work for six weeks, after which they were incinerated [themselves] and others took their place. They were often forced to burn their own mothers, wives, and daughters.

A Nazi cover up

The most degrading tasks in the camp were reserved for the Jews. They were the untermenschen, or “subhumans”, that the Nazi grandees had vowed to eradicate at the Wannsee conference in January 1942, thereby sending the genocide into overdrive. But what may have been obvious to everyone inside the camp was still not known outside, and the Nazis did their best to keep up appearances.

When Jewish prisoners arrived, Jachnina explained, they were forced to write postcards to their relatives, claiming they were fine and happily working. Then “the Jews were burned, and after a few months had passed the cards they had written were sent with altered dates to their families”.

At the infirmary, Jachnina had even witnessed a surreal PR stunt, when a Jewish woman had given birth and was then put with her baby “in a bed that had been beautifully made up with actual sheets”. Suddenly “an SS man came with a camera” and a female supervisor stood posing “at the mother’s bedside dressed in a white apron and cap”. Jachnina said:

The mother held the baby in a close embrace, gazing at it steadily and tenderly. A picture was taken and at the next Sortierung [selection] she and her baby went to the gas to die. I watched this farce myself the entire time.

Jachnina’s testimony is one of the most comprehensive and eloquent interviews in the archive. But it is not the gut-wrenching details she recounts that set her apart from other survivors – it is her seething, almost palpable anger and overwhelming need to talk, to share, and just maybe relieve some of the pain.

“I actually lived through Auschwitz”, she said when the interview was drawing to a close, unable to hide her disbelief.

I have it in my blood and brain … I still haven’t been able to shake this nightmare off.

Medical experiments on ‘slaves’

Like many survivors who were interviewed by the group, Jachnina had been transferred to Ravensbrück towards the end of the war. Though less well-known today compared to Auschwitz, Ravensbrück was one of the major concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Located 90km north of Berlin, it had opened in 1939 to provide slave labour for the many industries in the area – most notably Siemens & Halske, the company producing much of the electrical equipment needed for the German war machine.

Like most other camps, Ravensbrück had also expanded over the years into a behemoth of interconnected camps and subcamps that could provide a constant supply of new labourers for the factories. But Ravensbrück was unique in one respect; it was specifically designed for women and children. During the six years it was in use, more than 130,000 female and minor prisoners were pumped into the system. When the war ended, less than 30,000 remained alive.

The use of slave labour was as natural to Nazi ideology as it was vital to the German economy. At the height of the Third Reich, almost a quarter of the total workforce in Germany – some 15 million people – consisted of enslaved prisoners from conquered territories. But the idea of a German Herrenvolk, or “master people”, inherently superior to other races and nationalities, would also effectively dehumanise the conquered subjects, gradually removing all ethical constraints.

By 1941, the Luftwaffe began to examine the effects of hypothermia by submerging prisoners in freezing water. In early 1942, prisoners at Dachau were placed in low pressure chambers to examine the effects of high altitudes. And in the summer of 1942, a team of physicians initiated a series of experimental operations on the prisoners at Ravensbrück, some of them as young as 16.

Gustawa Winkowska, who had worked at the camp infirmary, recounted how she had seen the leading physician “tussle with a healthy young Ukrainian woman whom he was trying to force to lie down on a trolley so that she could be taken to the operating theatre”. Crying out for help, the woman was eventually subdued, whereupon “he put the prisoner under anaesthesia and then amputated her leg – which was perfectly healthy.” She added:

A similar operation was conducted on another young Ukrainian woman, who had an entire collarbone removed before likewise being given a lethal injection a few hours later.

Zofia Mączka, a trained physician who had been arrested in 1941 and assigned to the infirmary at Ravensbrück, gave a detailed testimony of the experiments. She described how Nazi doctors studied the regeneration of bone tissue, either by amputating entire limbs, or by surgically exposing the leg bones whereupon they “were broken with a hammer on the operating table” and set in various forms of braces and plasters.

Other experiments were aimed at generating new forms of antibiotics based on sulfonamides (synthetic drugs) because penicillin was not available. The prisoners were called Kaninchen, or króliki in Polish (literally meaning “little rabbits”) by the staff. They would be cut open and their wounds contaminated with pathogens to cause gangrene and other infections. Sometimes the physicians would insert rusty nails or sawdust in the wounds, which were then sewn together. When the potential cure had been administered, the wound was opened anew and the process repeated. Most of the victims “were operated on several times each, and some up to as many as six times”, Mączka said.

Zofia Mączka during the ‘Doctors’ trial’ at Nuremberg Medical, 1947. National Archives

Mączka would later testify when American authorities prosecuted leading physicians behind the human experimentation programme at the so-called “Doctors’ trial” at Nuremberg.

British authorities also initiated the Ravensbrück trials in Hamburg, prosecuting only a handful of camp officers, physicians and nurses – 17 men and 21 women, out of literally thousands that had kept the system running.

Among the prime witnesses in Hamburg was Helena Dziedzicka, who had spent four years imprisoned at Ravensbrück before she was brought by the White Buses to Sweden and joined the working group in Lund, eventually conducting more than 60 interviews with other survivors from the camp.

The fact that the working group was approached by British authorities was a major acknowledgement of its efforts. In October 1946, when the documentation project was drawing to a close, the British War Crime Investigation Unit sent a team of investigators to Sweden to review the interviews (there were around 500 in total) and collect evidence for the upcoming trials, eventually also deciding to call Dziedzicka personally to Hamburg as a witness.

In her personal notebooks, compiled during the two-month long session, Dziedzicka gave a detailed account of the proceedings, describing the reactions and behaviour of the accused as well as of the prosecuting tribunal – and eyeing both sides with growing disdain.

Some of the accused women during the Hamburg Ravensbrück trials 1946-1947. Lund University Library, CC BY

Though relieved that the worst perpetrators were put to justice she was clearly disappointed in the objectives of the trial. “The moral effect of the camp on the prisoners was completely ignored”, she wrote. “This kind of trial should not only aim at punishing a few criminals, but also at clarifying the barbaric methods by which people were not only physically annihilated, but morally”.

Participating in genocide

In hindsight, Dziedzicka’s disappointment is understandable. The trials were clearly meant to put the matter to rest; not to make the world understand how the camp system had worked and what it had actually done to people.

The darkest aspect of the genocide was not that it had been orchestrated by a handful of Nazis, but that it was performed by thousands, if not millions of victims turned perpetrators in their struggle for survival. “The whole system in the camp had one purpose, to rob us of our humanity”, Dziedzicka said in her final statement to the court. “All our lowest instincts were nourished while the good ones were stifled”. Being a survivor did not always entail innocence.

And this may be the most painful aspect of the Nazi camp system: that it was built on the victims’ willing participation in the genocide. Time and again, the testimonies collected by the working group describe how prisoners took assignments as camp functionaries in exchange for privileges and a chance to live.

According to Jachnina, the head nurses at Auschwitz were generally recruited among the German-born prisoners and “they would rob the patients and hasten their demise by beating them without scruple”.

Female prisoners recently released from Ravensbrück, pausing at the Danish border on their way to Sweden. Lund University Library, CC BY

Tadeusz Berezowski explained that “having gold teeth meant a risk of losing one’s life”, since the prisoners in charge would kill for them, and then “share the spoils with the SS men; in return they were given free rein”.

At Mauthausen concentration camp these Blockälteste, or “block elders” in charge of a barrack, were more feared than the SS officers, Wacław Wawrzyniak said, since they “used to kill prisoners under their authority by drowning them in a barrel of water or ordering individuals to commit suicide by going ‘onto the wire’” – that is, by throwing themselves on the electric fence. “Every day, several corpses would be removed from the wire fence,” he said.

The system, deliberately designed to oppress and control by turning prisoners against each other, was surprisingly effective and drastically reduced the need for paid camp staff. In fact, one in every ten inmates at Nazi camps may have been a so-called Funktionshäftling, or prison functionary. The nurses administering lethal injections, the midwives drowning newborns, the “camp elders” selecting whom should be sent to the gas chamber – most of them were prisoners themselves, trapped in a system of Häftlings-Selbstverwaltung or “prisoner self-government”, as the SS termed it.

Empathy and tenderness survives

But while many prisoners used their privileges as functionaries to save themselves, others used them to protect and save the lives of others. In some camps, they even formed movements of silent resistance, based on loyalty, support and cooperation.

Natalia Chodkiewicz, 56, recalled how the woman in charge of her barrack had “shared her [food] parcels with me, fed me, supplied me with medicines, and defended me during selection”. Others stole food from the kitchen – “a severely punishable offence”, Chodkiewicz said – and when the small parcels had been smuggled into the barrack, the food was “divided and subdivided until each portion was merely the size of a nut” and shared among them all.

Sometimes in these eyewitness accounts, we even see compassion extending across the great divide, from the the Nazi guards to their prisoners. Krystyna Strzyżewska, aged 14, had arrived at Ravensbrück at the time when food rations had been cut to a bare minimum. She said:

There was often no soup. But we had a good aufseherka [a female SS overseer]. The aufseherka gave her lunch away to be given to the children. Every day, two young girls more received the aufseherka’s lunch. She took care of us. She dismissed us, the minors, earlier [from work], so we wouldn’t freeze.

Ewa Augustynowicz was also 14 when she arrived at Ravensbrück, and for more than six months she managed to escape “selection” by hiding from the guards, sometimes “in the toilet or behind the stove”, sometimes by sneaking over to another barrack where she knew she would be safe because the women in charge “were so good that they kept the children in their block from being taken away”.

Survivors in line for food in the Tennis Hall in Lund, one of many public buildings that were turned into refugee camps. Kulturen Museum, CC BY

In this barrack, Augustynowicz said, the “younger children lived in the dining room, which was heated. They kept warm there.” Some nights the adults organised games for the children, and at Christmas every child “received a present in the form of a piece of bread, a little sugar and fat, and a sweater, apron, or dress.” During the long nights there, Augustynowicz was even taught French by the older women, “secretly” since it was strictly forbidden, and hidden “on the top bunks” in case a guard would unexpectedly turn up.

More relevant than ever

Unsurprisingly, for those who had lived through the Third Reich – victims, perpetrators and bystanders alike – the reality of the concentration camps was often too painful to confront. Once the war trials were concluded by the end of the 1940s, the common response to what had happened was neither outrage nor guilt, but silence.

Drawing of fellow inmates at Ravensbrück concentration camp 1944, by Jeanne Letourneau. Lund University Library, CC BY

In Sweden, few politicians could see the need for a continued documentation project, and without funding the small working group quietly disbanded – some of them built new lives and careers in Sweden, others returned to Poland like so many of the survivors they had interviewed. None of them ever talked much about the project again, as if they didn’t fully realise what a remarkable accomplishment it had been, or – if they did – it had taken such a toll that they preferred not to think about it.

In any case, the material they had worked so hard to collect gradually fell into oblivion. Alarmed by the political situation in Poland after the war, Lakocinski even decided to close and seal the archive for 50 years to ensure that the material could not be claimed by the Soviet Union. And when the boxes were finally opened again in the late 1990s, the world took little notice.

To some extent this was undoubtedly due to the language barrier, given that all interviews were conducted in Polish. Today, however, the interviews are available online in English translation, and the attention they attract is hardly surprising. In a world where basic human rights are increasingly called into question, these eyewitness accounts serve as a reminder of how deep into the abyss one simple and alluring idea took us 80 years ago – the idea that the world would be a better place if some people were not a part of it.

But more importantly, they show us how resilient humanity can be under the pressure of ideology. And that makes them more relevant than ever.

For you: more from our Insights series:

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Håkan Håkansson works at Lund University Library, and headed the digitization of the Ravensbrück Archive in 2014-2022. The digitization was funded by numerous private donations, as well as a number of major foundations in Sweden and the United States.

Could digital currencies end banking as we know it? The future of money

2025-10-10T16:39:54Z

Inkoly/Shutterstock

Throughout history, control over money has been one of the most powerful levers of state authority. Rulers have long understood that whoever issues and manages the currency also commands the economy and, by extension, society itself.

In Tudor England, Henry VIII’s “Great Debasement” between 1542 and 1551 reduced the silver content of coins from more than 90% to barely one-third, while leaving the king’s portrait shining on the surface, of course. The policy financed wars and courtly extravagance, but also fuelled inflation and public distrust in coinage.

Centuries earlier, Roman emperors had resorted to similar tricks with the denarius, steadily reducing its silver content until by the 3rd century AD, it contained little more than trace amounts, undermining its credibility and contributing to economic instability.

Outside Europe, the same pattern held. In 11th-century China, the Song dynasty pioneered paper money, extending state control over taxation and trade. This was a groundbreaking innovation, but later dynasties such as the Ming over-issued notes, sparking inflation and loss of trust in the currency.

Such episodes underline a timeless truth: money is never neutral. It has always been an instrument of governance – whether to project authority, consolidate control or disguise fiscal weakness. The establishment of central banks, from the Bank of England in 1694 to the US Federal Reserve in 1913, formalised that authority.

Today, the same story is entering a new digital chapter. As Axel van Trotsenburg, senior managing director of the World Bank, wrote in 2024: “Embracing digitalisation is no longer a choice. It’s a necessity.” By this he meant not simply switching to online banking, but making the currencies we use, and the mechanisms for regulating it, entirely digital.

Just as rulers once clipped coins or over-printed notes, governments are now testing how far digital money can extend their reach – both within and beyond national boundaries. Of course, different governments and political systems have very different ideas about how the money of the future should be designed.

In March 2024, then-former President Trump, back on the hustings trail, declared: “As your president, I will never allow the creation of a central bank digital currency.” It was a campaign moment, but also a salvo in a much larger battle – not just over the future of money, but who controls it.

In the US, the issuance of currency – whether in the form of physical cash or digital bank deposits and electronic payments – has traditionally been monopolised by the Federal Reserve (more commonly known as “the Fed”), a technocratic institution designed to operate independently from the elected government and houses. But Trump’s hostility toward the Fed is well-documented, and noisy.

During his second term, Trump has publicly berated the Fed’s chair, Jerome Powell, calling him “a stubborn MORON” over his interest rate policies, and even floating the idea of replacing him. Trump’s discomfort with the Fed’s autonomy echoes earlier populist movements such as President Andrew Jackson’s 1830s crusade against the Second Bank of the United States, when federal financial elites were portrayed as obstacles to democratic control of money.

In March 2025, when Trump issued an executive order establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, he signalled the opening of a new front in this institutional battle. By incorporating bitcoin into an official US reserve, the world’s largest economy is, for the first time, sanctioning its use as part of state financial infrastructure.

For a leader like Trump, who has consistently sought to break, bypass or dominate independent institutions – from the judiciary to intelligence agencies – the idea of replacing the Fed’s influence with a state-aligned crypto ecosystem may represent the ultimate act of executive assertion.

Such a step reframes bitcoin as more than an investment fad or criminal fallback; it is being drawn into the formal monetary system – in the US, at least.

America’s crypto future?

Bitcoin is, by a distance, the world’s most valuable cryptocurrency (at the time of writing, one coin is worth just shy of US$120,000) having established a record high in August 2025. Like gold, its value is ensured in part by its finite supply, and its security by the blockchain technology that makes it unhackable.

For most who buy bitcoins, its key value is not as a currency but a speculative investment product – a kind of “digital gold” or high-risk stock that investors buy hoping for big returns. Many people have indeed made millions from their purchases.

But now, thanks in particular to Trump’s aggressively pro-crypto, anti-central bank approach, bitcoin’s potential role as part of a new form of state-controlled digital currency is in the spotlight like never before.

Trump’s framing of bitcoin as “freedom money” reflects its traditional sales pitch as being censorship-resistant, unreviewable, and free from state control. At the same time, his blurring of public authority and private financial interest, when it comes to cryptocurrencies, has raised some serious ethical and governance concerns.

But the crucial innovation here is that Trump is not proposing a truly libertarian system. It is a hybrid model: one where the issuance of money may become privatised while control of the US’s financial reserve strategy – and associated political and economic narratives – remains firmly in state hands.

This raises provocative questions about the future of the Federal Reserve. Could it be sidelined not through legal abolition, but by the growing relevance of parallel monetary systems blessed by the executive? The possibility is no longer far-fetched.

According to a 2023 paper published by the Bank for International Settlements, a powerful if little-known organisation that coordinates central bank policy globally: “The decentralisation of monetary functions across public and private actors introduces a new era of contestable monetary sovereignty.”

In plain English, this means money is no longer the sole domain of states. Tech firms, decentralised communities and even AI-powered platforms are now building alternative value systems that challenge the monopoly of national currencies.

Calls to diminish the role of central banks in shaping macroeconomic outcomes are closely tied to the rise of what the University of Cambridge’s Bennett School of Public Policy calls “crypto populism” – a movement that shifts legitimacy away from unelected technocrats towards “the people”, whether they are retail investors, cryptocurrency miners or politically aligned firms.

Supporters of this agenda argue that central banks have too much unchecked power, from manipulating interest rates to bailing out financial elites, while ordinary savers bear the costs through inflation or higher borrowing charges.

In the US, Trump and his advisers have become the most visible proponents, tying bitcoin and also so-called “stablecoins” (cryptocurrencies designed to maintain a stable value by being pegged to an external asset) to a broader populist narrative about wresting control from elites.

The emergence of this dual monetary system is causing deep unease in traditional financial institutions. Even the economist-activist Yanis Varoufakis – a long-time critic of central banks – has warned of the dangers of Trump’s approach, suggesting that US private stablecoin legislation could deliberately weaken the Fed’s grip on money, while “depriving it of the means to clean up the inevitable mess” that will follow.

Weaponisation of the dollar

Some rival US nations also feel deep unease about its approach to money – in part because of what analysts call the “weaponisation of the dollar”. This describes how US financial dominance, via Swift and correspondent banking systems, has long enabled sanctions that effectively exclude targeted governments, companies or individuals from global finance.

These tools have been used extensively against Iran, Russia, Venezuela and others – triggering efforts by countries including China, Russia and even some EU states to build alternative payment systems and digital currencies, aimed at reducing dependency on the dollar. As the Atlantic put it in 2023, the US appeared to be “pushing away allies and adversaries alike by turning its currency into a geopolitical bludgeon”.

Spurred on by these concerns and an increasing desire to delink from the dollar as the world’s anchor currency, many countries are now moving towards creating their own central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) – government-issued digital currencies backed and regulated by state institutions.

While fully live CBDCs are already in use in countries ranging from the Bahamas and Jamaica to Nigeria, many more are in active pilot phases – including China’s digital yuan (e-CNY). Having been trialled in multiple cities since 2019, the e-CNY now has millions of domestic users and, by mid-2024, had processed nearly US$1 trillion in retail transactions.

A key part of Beijing’s ambition is to use the digital yuan as a strategic hedge against dollar-based clearance systems, positioning it as part of a wider plan to reduce China’s reliance on the US dollar in international trade. Likewise, the European Central Bank has framed its digital euro – which entered its preparation phase in October 2023 – as essential to future European monetary sovereignty, stating that it would reduce reliance on non-European (often US-controlled) digital payment providers such as Visa, Mastercard and PayPal.

In this way, CBDCs are becoming a new front in global competition over who sets the rules of money, trade and financial sovereignty in the digital age. As governments rush to build and test these systems, technologists, civil libertarians and financial institutions are clashing over how best to do this – and whether the world should embrace or fear the rise of central bank digital currencies.

Trojan horses for surveillance?

The experience of using a CBDC will be much like today’s mobile banking apps: you’ll receive your salary directly into a digital wallet, make instant payments in shops or online, and transfer money to friends in seconds. The key difference is all of that money will be a direct claim on the central bank, guaranteed by the state, rather than a private bank.

In many countries, CBDCs are being pitched as more efficient tools for economic inclusion and societal benefit. A 2023 Bank of England consultation paper emphasised that its proposal for a digital pound would be “privacy-respecting by design” and “non-programmable by the state”. It would not replace cash but sit alongside it, the BoE suggested, with each citizen allowed to hold up to a capped limit digital pounds (suggested at £10,000-£20,000) to avoid destabilising commercial bank deposits.

However, some critics see CBDCs as Trojan horses for surveillance. In 2019, a report by the professional services network PWC suggested that CBDCs, if unchecked, could entrench executive power by removing intermediary financial institutions and enabling programmable, direct government control over citizen transactions. According to the report, this could mean stimulus payments that expire if not spent within 30 days, or taxes deducted at the moment of transaction. In other words, CBDCs could be tools of efficiency – but also of unprecedented oversight.

A 2024 CFA Institute paper warned that digital currencies could allow governments to trace, tax or block payments in real time – tools that authoritarian regimes might embrace. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has called the advent of this “programmable money” inevitable.

Imagine, for example, a parent transferring 20 digital pounds to their child’s CBDC wallet, but with a rule that this money can only be spent on food, not video games. When the child uses it at a supermarket, their payment is programmed so that the retailer’s suppliers and the tax authority are paid instantly (£15 to the shop, £3 to wholesalers, £2 straight to the tax office) with no extra steps. In theory, at least, everyone is happy: the parent sees the child spent the money responsibly, the suppliers are paid immediately, and the retailer’s tax bill is settled automatically.

In technical terms, programmable payments such as this are straightforward for CBDCs. But such a system raises big questions about privacy and personal freedom. Some critics fear that programmable CBDCs might be used to restrict spending on disapproved categories such as alcohol and fuel, create expiry dates for unemployment benefits, or enforce climate targets through money flow limits. The BIS has warned that CBDCs should be “designed with safeguards” to preserve user privacy, financial inclusion and interoperability across borders.

Even well-intentioned digital systems can create tools of surveillance. CBDC architecture choices, such as default privacy settings, tiered access or transaction expiry can all shape the extent of executive control embedded in the system. If designed without democratic oversight, these infrastructures risk institutional capture.

Some CBDC pilots – including China’s e-CNY, the Sand Dollar and the eNaira – have been criticised for omitting clear privacy guarantees, with their respective central banks deferring decisions on privacy protections to future legislation. According to Norbert Michel, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives and one of the most prominent US voices warning about the risks of CBDCs:

A fully implemented CBDC gives the government complete control over the money going into, and coming out of, every person’s account. It’s not difficult to see that this level of government control is incompatible with both economic and political freedom.

Fears of mission creep

The concerns being raised about central bank digital currencies extend beyond personal payment controls. A recent analysis by Rand Corporation highlighted how law enforcement capabilities could dramatically increase with the introduction of CBDCs. While this could strengthen efforts to stop money laundering and the financing of terrorism, it also raises fears of “mission creep”, whereby the same tools could be used to police ordinary citizens’ spending or political activities.

Concerns about mission creep – the idea that a system introduced for limited goals (efficiency, anti-money laundering) gradually expands into broader tools of control – extend into other areas of digital authoritarianism. The Bennett School has cautioned that without legal and political safeguards, CBDCs risk empowering state surveillance and undermining democratic oversight, especially in an interconnected global system.

It is not anti-technology or overly conspiratorial to ask hard questions about the design, governance and safeguards built into our future money. The legitimacy of CBDCs will hinge on public trust, and that trust must be earned. As has been highlighted by the OECD, democratic values like privacy, civic trust and rights protection must all be integral to CBDC design.

The future of money

Predictably, the public view of what we want our money to look like in future is mixed. The tensions we see between centralised CBDCs and decentralised alternatives reflect fundamentally different philosophies.

In the US, populist rhetoric has found a strong base among cryptocurrency investors and libertarian movements. At the same time, surveys in Europe suggest many people remain sceptical of replacing a central bank’s authority, associating it with stability and trustworthiness.

For the US Federal Reserve, the debate over bitcoin, decentralised finance (“DeFi”) and stablecoins goes to the heart of American financial power. Behind closed doors, some US officials worry that both the unchecked use of stablecoins and a widespread adoption of foreign CBDCs like China’s e‑CNY will erode the dollar’s central role and weaken the US’s monetary policy apparatus.

In this context, Trump’s push to elevate crypto into a US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve carries serious implications. While US officials generally avoid direct comment on partisan moves, their policy documents make the stakes clear: if crypto expands outside regulatory boundaries, this could undermine financial stability and weaken the very tools – from monetary policy to sanctions – that sustain the dollar’s global dominance.

Meanwhile, the Bank of England’s governor, Andrew Bailey, writing in the Financial Times this week, sounded more accommodating of a financial future that includes stablecoins, suggesting: “It is possible, at least partially, to separate money from credit provision, with banks and stablecoins coexisting and non-banks carrying out more of the credit provision role.” He has previously stressed that stablecoins must “pass the test of singleness of money”, ensuring that one pound always equals one pound (something that cannot be guaranteed if a currency is backed by risky assets).

This isn’t just caution for caution’s sake – it’s grounded in both history and recent events.

During the US’s Free Banking Era in the middle of the 19th century, state-chartered banks could issue their own paper money (banknotes) with little oversight. These “wildcat banks” often issued more notes than they could redeem, especially when economic stress hit – meaning people holding those notes found they weren’t worth the paper they were printed on.

A much more recent example is the collapse of TerraUSD (UST) in May 2022. Terra was a so-called stablecoin that was supposed to keep its value pegged 1:1 with the US dollar. In practice, it relied on algorithms and reserves that turned out to be fragile. When confidence cracked, UST lost its peg, dropping from $1 to as low as 10 cents in a matter of days. The crash wiped out over US$40 billion (around £29 billion) in value and shook trust in the whole stablecoin sector.

But Bailey’s crypto caution extends to CBDCs too. In his most recent Mansion House speech, the Bank of England governor said he remains unconvinced of the need for a “Britcoin” CBDC, so long as improvements to bank payment systems (such as making bank transfers faster, cheaper and more user-friendly) prove effective.

Ultimately, the form our money takes in future is not a question of technology so much as trust. In its latest guidance, the IMF underscores the necessity of earning public trust, not assuming it, by involving citizens, watchdog groups and independent experts in CBDC design, rather than allowing central banks or big tech to shape it unilaterally.

If done right, digital money could be more inclusive, more transparent, and more efficient than today’s systems. But that future is not guaranteed. The code is already being written – the question is: by who, and with what values?

10.09pm, October 10 2025: This article was updated post-publication to remove a quote which a reader highlighted as having been used erroneously.

For you: more from our Insights series:

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Millions of children face sexual violence as AI deepfakes drive surge in new cases – latest global data

2025-10-10T16:39:52Z

Shutterstock/KieferPix

Around 5 million children across western Europe report having been raped or sexually assaulted by the age of 18, according to the latest data gathered by Childlight, the Global Child Safety Institute. That’s about 7% of the child population.

In south Asia, data for India, Nepal and Sri Lanka suggests the figure rises to 12% of children – more than 50 million young people in those three countries alone.

The online picture is equally alarming. In western Europe alone, one in five children (19.6%) say they have faced unwanted or pressured sexual interactions online before adulthood.

The data also reveals that over 60% of all child sexual abuse material in western Europe (and 30% globally) is hosted in the Netherlands.

These shocking figures come from Childlight’s latest Into the Light index. As Childlight’s director of data, and as a professor of international child protection research, I have spent nearly 20 years studying the patterns of child sexual exploitation and abuse worldwide. What our data shows is both deeply troubling and a call to urgent action.

How we measure the scale

In 2024, we launched the inaugural Into the Light index – the first comprehensive global report of child sexual exploitation and abuse. It introduced a new framework, the first regional prevalence estimates and indicators of child sexual abuse material.

The 2025 edition goes further. It covers both online and offline abuse and country-level data for 41 countries in western Europe and south Asia, incorporating the analysis of:

89 studies which used survey methods to identify victims of rape and sexual assault
crime statistics and child helpline data
global child sexual abuse material trends, including AI-generated imagery and hosting patterns.

For western Europe, we reviewed 48 studies from 19 countries, finding that between 3.7% and 9.6% of children reported being raped or sexually assaulted by the age of 18. For south Asia, representative data from India, Nepal and Sri Lanka shows around 12% of children were raped or sexually assaulted by 18 – 14.5% of girls and 11.5% of boys.

What the data reveals

Our research points to widespread abuse and some keys issues emerged.

AI-generated child sexual abuse material is rising: reports rose 1,325% between 2023 and 2024, amid growing concerns about deepfake images placing children’s faces onto sexual material. This rise was seen in reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which rose to over 67,000 in 2024, from 4,700 reports logged in 2023.

Meanwhile, familial abuse is leading to the creation of new child sexual abuse material, with a large proportion of identified material depicting immediate family members.

Behind these numbers are real children, millions who stay silent out of fear, guilt or loyalty to family members. Yet the consequences are lifelong, affecting mental health, physical health and even life expectancy.

Online dangers for children. shutterstock/Natalia Lebedinskaia

Using data to fight child abuse

Childlight, hosted by the University of Edinburgh and the University of New South Wales, is the world’s first independent global data institute dedicated to protecting children from sexual exploitation and abuse.

As I have written before, the fight to keep young people safe from harm has been hampered by how data differs in quality and consistency around the world. Our aim is to work in partnership with many other organisations to help join up the system and close the data gaps.

What can be done

The good news is that solutions exist and momentum is building, with 30 governments globally pledging action to improve online safety for children since an intergovernmental summit in Colombia last November.

The legislation is showing promising signs. The EU Digital Services Act and the UK Online Safety Act now require platforms to assess child risk, report incidents and publish transparency data. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has also compelled firms to publish reports revealing how they are failing to track the problem.

Enforcement is having an impact. In April 2025, Kidflix, one of the largest paedophile platforms in the world, was shut down through an international Europol-backed operation, with servers seized and perpetrators arrested.

Prevention is working too. The Barnahus model in Europe, for example, brings together police, health and social services to support children in a child-friendly environment. It has been linked to more perpetrators being charged and convicted.

In addition, “blocklist” technology which acts as a virtual shield is thwarting 3 million attempts to view illegal sexual images of children online every week. Lists of known online addresses which host child sexual abuse material are compiled and shared by organisations including Internet Watch Foundation, so they can be blocked by major internet service providers, shutting down access to harmful images.

Urgency matters

The law must require proactive detection and removal of child sexual abuse material. Education and open conversations that empower children and families must be supported and encouraged. And finally we must invest in prevention models that work.

In the UK, that could mean extending the law on criminalising paedophile manuals to include material generated by AI. It could mean a Barnahus expansion, and it certainly should mean reforming the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme so all victims of child sexual abuse (including those harmed “virtually” through technology) are recognised and supported.

Child sexual exploitation and abuse is not inevitable. Like other public health crises, it is preventable and can prevent a lifetime of trauma with benefits for children, families, communities and economies.

But prevention depends on first understanding the true scale and nature of the problem. Our data is a spotlight, exposing what too often remains hidden in the shadows.

Deborah Fry receives funding from Human Dignity Foundation.

Our quest to find a truly Earth-like planet in deep space

2025-10-03T17:17:56Z

Nasa animation depicting the first 5,000 exoplanets to have been discovered, up to March 2022. M. Russo and A. Santaguida/Nasa-JPL

On October 6 1995, at a scientific meeting in Florence, Italy, two Swiss astronomers made an announcement that would transform our understanding of the universe beyond our solar system. Michel Mayor and his PhD student Didier Queloz, working at the University of Geneva, announced they had detected a planet orbiting a star other than the Sun.

The star in question, 51 Pegasi, lies about 50 light years away in the constellation Pegasus. Its companion – christened 51 Pegasi b – was unlike anything written in textbooks about how we thought planets might look. This was a gas giant with a mass of at least half that of Jupiter, circling its star in just over four days. It was so close to the star (1/20th of Earth’s distance from the Sun, well inside Mercury’s orbit) that the planet’s atmosphere would be like a furnace, with temperatures topping 1,000°C.

The instrument behind the discovery was Elodie, a spectrograph that had been installed two years earlier at the Haute-Provence observatory in southern France. Designed by a Franco-Swiss team, Elodie split starlight into a spectrum of different colours, revealing a rainbow etched with fine dark lines. These lines can be thought of as a “stellar barcode”, providing details on the chemistry of other stars.

What Mayor and Queloz spotted was 51 Pegasi’s barcode sliding rhythmically back-and-forth in this spectrum every 4.23 days – a telltale signal that the star was being wobbled back and forth by the gravitational tug of an otherwise unseen companion amid the glare of the star.

After painstakingly ruling out other explanations, the astronomers finally decided that the variations were due to a gas giant in a close-in orbit around this Sun-like star. The front page of the Nature journal in which their paper was published carried the headline: “A planet in Pegasus?”

The discovery baffled scientists, and the question-mark on Nature’s front cover reflected initial scepticism. Here was a purported giant planet next to its star, with no known mechanism for forming a world like this in such a fiery environment.

While the signal was confirmed by other teams within weeks, reservations about the cause of the signal remained for almost three years before being finally ruled out. Not only did 51 Pegasi b become the first planet discovered orbiting a Sun-like star outside our Solar System, but it also represented an entirely new type of planet. The term “hot Jupiter” was later coined to describe such planets.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

This discovery opened the floodgates. In the 30 years since, more than 6,000 exoplanets (the term for planets outside our Solar System) and exoplanet candidates have been catalogued.

Their variety is staggering. Not only hot but ultra-hot Jupiters with a dayside temperature exceeding 2,000 °C and orbits of less than a day. Worlds that orbit not one but two stars, like Tatooine from Star Wars. Strange “super-puff” gas giants larger than Jupiter but with a fraction of the mass. Chains of small rocky planets all piled up in tight orbits.

The discovery of 51 Pegasi b triggered a revolution and, in 2019, landed Mayor and Queloz a Nobel prize. We can now infer that most stars have planetary systems. And yet, of the thousands of exoplanets found, we have yet to find a planetary system that resembles our own.

The quest to find an Earth twin – a planet that truly resembles Earth in size, mass and temperature – continues to drive modern-day explorers like us to search for more undiscovered exoplanets. Our expeditions may not take us on death-defying voyages and treks like the past legendary explorers of Earth, but we do get to visit beautiful, mountain-top observatories often located in remote areas around the world.

We are members of an international consortium of planet hunters that built, operate and maintain the Harps-N spectrograph, mounted on the Telescopio Nazionale de Galileo on the beautiful Canary island of La Palma. This sophisticated instrument allows us to rudely interrupt the journey of starlight which may have been travelling unimpeded at speeds of 670 million miles per hour for decades or even millennia.

Each new signal has the potential to bring us closer to understanding how common planetary systems like our own may (or may not) be. In the background lies the possibility that one day, we may finally detect another planet like Earth.

The origins of exoplanet study

Up until the mid-1990s, our Solar System was the only set of planets humanity ever knew. Every theory about how planets formed and evolved stemmed from these nine, incredibly closely spaced data-points (which went down to eight when Pluto was demoted in 2006, after the International Astronomical Union agreed a new definition of a planet).

All of these planets revolve around just one star out of the estimated 10¹¹ (roughly 100 billion) in our galaxy, the Milky Way – which is in turn one of some 10¹¹ galaxies throughout the universe. So, trying to draw conclusions from the planets in our Solar System alone was a bit like aliens trying to understand human nature by studying students living together in one house. But that didn’t stop some of the greatest minds in history speculating on what lay beyond.

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270BC) wrote: “There is an infinite number of worlds – some like this world, others unlike it.” This view was not based on astronomical observation but his atomist theory of philosophy. If the universe was made up of an infinite number of atoms then, he concluded, it was impossible not to have other planets.

Epicurus clearly understood what this meant in terms of the potential for life developing elsewhere:

We must not suppose that the worlds have necessarily one and the same shape. Nobody can prove that in one sort of world there might not be contained – whereas in another sort of world there could not possibly be – the seeds out of which animals and plants arise and all the rest of the things we see.

In contrast, at roughly the same time, fellow Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC) was proposing his geocentric model of the universe, which had the Earth immobile at its centre with the Moon, Sun and known planets orbiting around us. In essence, the Solar System as Aristotle conceived it was the entire universe. In On the Heavens (350BC), he argued: “It follows that there cannot be more worlds than one.”

Such thinking that planets were rare in the universe persisted for 2,000 years. Sir James Jeans, one of the world’s top mathematicians and an influential physicist and astronomer at the time, advanced his tidal hypothesis of planet formation in 1916. According to this theory, planets were formed when two stars pass so closely that the encounter pulls streams of gas off the stars into space, which later condense into planets. The rareness of such close cosmic encounters in the vast emptiness of space led Jeans to believe that planets must be rare, or – as was reported in his obituary – “that the solar system might even be unique in the universe”.

But by then, understanding of the scale of the universe was slowly changing. In the “Great Debate” of 1920, held at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis clashed over whether the Milky Way was the entire universe, or just one of many galaxies. The evidence began to point to the latter, as Curtis had argued for. This realisation – that the universe contained not just billions of stars, but billions of galaxies each containing billions of stars – began to affect even the most pessimistic predictors of planetary prevalence.

In the 1940s, two things caused the scientific consensus to pivot dramatically. First, Jeans’ tidal hypothesis did not stand up to scientific scrutiny. The leading theories now had planet formation as a natural byproduct of star formation itself, opening up the potential for all stars to host planets.

Then in 1943, claims emerged of planets orbiting the stars 70 Ophiuchus and 61 Cygni c – two relatively nearby star systems visible to the naked eye. Both were later shown to be false positives, most likely due to uncertainties in the telescopic observations that were possible at the time – but nonetheless, it greatly influenced planetary thinking. Suddenly, billions of planets in the Milky Way was considered a genuine scientific possibility.

For us, nothing highlights this change in mindset more than an article written for the Scientific American in July 1943 by the influential American astronomer Henry Norris Russell. Whereas two decades earlier, Russell had predicted that planets “should be infrequent among the stars”, now the title of his article was: “Anthropocentrism’s Demise. New Discoveries Lead to the Probability that There Are Thousands of Inhabited Planets in our Galaxy”.

Strikingly, Russell was not merely making a prediction about any old planets, but inhabited ones. The burning question was: where were they? It would take another half-century to begin finding out.

The Harps-N spectrograph is mounted on the Telescopio Nazionale de Galileo (left) in La Palma, Canary Islands. lunamarina/Shutterstock

How to detect an exoplanet

When we observe myriad stars through La Palma’s Italian-built Galileo telescope using our Harps-N spectrograph, it is amazing to consider how far we have come since Mayor and Queloz announced their discovery of 51 Pegasi b in 1995. These days, we can effectively measure the masses of not just Jupiter-like planets, but even small planets thousands of light years away. As part of the Harps-N collaboration, we have had a front-row seat since 2012 in the science of small exoplanets.

Another milestone in this story came four years after the 51 Pegasi b discovery, when a Canadian PhD student at Harvard University, David Charbonneau, detected the transit of a known exoplanet. This was another hot Jupiter, known as HD209458b, also located in the Pegasus constellation, about 150 light years from Earth.

Transit refers to a planet passing in front of its star, from the perspective of the observer, momentarily making the star appear dimmer. As well as detecting exoplanets, the transit technique enables us to measure the radius of the planet by taking many brightness measurements of a star, then waiting for it to dim due to the passing planet. The extent of blocked starlight depends on the radius of the planet. For example, Jupiter would make the Sun 1% dimmer to alien observers, while for Earth, the effect would be a hundred times weaker.

In all, four times more exoplanets have now been discovered using this transit technique compared with the “barcode” technique, known as radial velocity, that the Swiss astronomers used to spot the first exoplanet 30 years ago. It is a technique that is still widely used today, including by us, as it can not only find a planet but also measure its mass.

A planet orbiting a star exerts a gravitational pull which causes that star to wobble back and forth – meaning it will periodically change its velocity with respect to observers on Earth. With the radial velocity technique, we take repeated measurements of the velocity of a star, looking to find a stable periodic wobble that indicates the presence of a planet.

These velocity changes are, however, extremely small. To put it in perspective, the Earth makes the Sun change its velocity by a mere 9cm per second – slower than a tortoise. In order to find planets with the radial velocity technique, we thus need to measure these small velocity changes for stars that are many many trillions of miles away from us.

The state-of-the-art instruments we use are truly an engineering feat. The latest spectrographs, such as Harps-N and also Espresso, can accurately measure velocity shifts of the order of tenths of centimetres per second – although still not sensitive enough to detect a true Earth twin.

But whereas this radial velocity technique is, for now, limited to ground-based observatories and can only observe one star at the time, the transit technique can be employed in space telescopes such as the French Corot (2006-14) and Nasa’s Kepler (2009-18) and Tess (2018-) missions. Between them, space telescopes have detected thousands of exoplanets in all their diversity, taking advantage of the fact we can measure stellar brightness more easily from space, and for many stars at the same time.

Despite the differences in detection success rate, both techniques continue to be developed. Applying both can give the radius and mass of a planet, opening up many more avenues for studying its composition.

To estimate possible compositions of our discovered exoplanets, we start by making the simplified assumption that small planets are, like Earth, made up of a heavy iron-rich core, a lighter rocky mantle, some surface water and a small atmosphere. Using our measurements of mass and radius, we can now model the different possible compositional layers and their respective thickness.

This is still very much a work in progress, but the universe is spoiling us with a wide variety of different planets. We’ve seen evidence of rocky worlds being torn apart and strange planetary arrangements that hint at past collisions. Planets have been found across our galaxy, from Sweeps-11b in its central regions (at nearly 28,000 light years away, one of the most distant ever discovered) to those orbiting our nearest stellar neighbour, Proxima Centauri, which is “only” 4.2 light years away.

Illustration of Proxima b, one of the exoplanets orbiting the nearest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri. Catmando/Shutterstock

Searching for ‘another Earth’

In early July 2013, one of us (Christopher) was flying out to La Palma for my first “go” with the recently commissioned Harps-N spectrograph. Keen not to mess up, my laptop was awash with spreadsheets, charts, manuals, slides and other notes. Also included was a three-page document I had just been sent, entitled: Special Instructions for ToO (Target of Opportunity).

The first paragraph stated: “The Executive Board has decided that we should give highest priority to this object.” The object in question was a planetary candidate thought to be orbiting Kepler-78, a star a little cooler and smaller than our Sun, located about 125 light years away in the direction of the constellation Cygnus.

A few lines further down read: “July 4-8 run … Chris Watson” with a list of ten times to observe Kepler-78 – twice per night, each separated by a very specific four hours and 15 minutes. The name above mine was Didier Queloz’s (he hadn’t been awarded his Nobel prize yet, though).

This planetary candidate had been identified by the Kepler space telescope, which was tasked with searching a portion of the Milky Way to look for exoplanets as small as the Earth. In this case, it had identified a transiting planet candidate with an estimated radius of 1.16 (± 0.19) Earth radii – an exoplanet not that much larger than Earth had potentially been spotted.

I was in La Palma to attempt to measure its mass which, combined with the radius from Kepler, would allow the density and possible composition to be constrained. I wrote at the time: “Want 10% error on mass, to get a good enough bulk density to distinguish between Earth-like, iron-concentrated (Mercury), or water.”

In all, I took ten out of our team’s total of 81 exposures of Kepler-78 in an observing campaign lasting 97 days. During that time, we became aware of a US-led team who were also looking for this potential planet. In true scientific spirit, we agreed to submit our independent findings at the same time. On the specified date. Like a prisoner swap, the two teams exchanged results – which agreed. We had, within the uncertainties of our data, reached the same conclusion about the planet’s mass.

Its most likely mass came out as 1.86 Earth masses. At the time, this made Kepler-78b the smallest extrasolar planet with an accurately measured mass. The density was almost identical to that of Earth’s.

But that is where the similarities to our planet ended. Kepler-78b has a “year” that lasts only 8.5 hours, which is why I had been instructed to observe it every 4hr 15min – when the planet was at opposite sides of its orbit, and the induced “wobble” of the star would be at its greatest. We measured the star wobbling back and forth at about two metres per second – no more than a slow jog.

Kepler-78b’s short orbit meant its extreme temperature would cause all rock on the planet to melt. It may have been the most Earth-like planet found at the time in terms of its size and density, but otherwise, this hellish lava world was at the very extremes of our known planetary population.

Illustration of the Kepler-78b ‘lava world’ – similar in size and density to Earth. simoleonh/Shutterstock

In 2016, the Kepler space telescope made another landmark discovery: a system with at least five transiting planets around a Sun-like star, HIP 41378, in the Cancer constellation. What made it particularly exciting was the location of these planets. Where most transiting planets we have spotted are closer to their star than Mercury is to the Sun (due to our detection capabilities), this system has at least three planets beyond the orbital radius of Venus.

Having decided to use our Harps-N spectrograph to measure the masses of all five transiting planets, it became clear after more than a year of observing that one instrument would not be enough to analyse this challenging mix of signals. Other international teams came to the same conclusion and, rather than compete, we decided to come together in a global collaboration that holds strong to this day, with hundreds of radial velocities gathered over many years.

We now have firm masses and radii for most of the planets in the system. But studying them is a game of patience. With planets much further away from their host star, it takes much longer before there is a new transit event or the periodic wobble can be fully observed. We thus need to wait multiple years and gather lots of data to gain insight in this system.

The rewards are obvious, though. This is the first system that starts resembling our Solar System. While the planets are a bit larger and more massive than our rocky planets, their distances are very similar – helping us to understand how planetary systems form in the universe.

The holy grail for exoplanet explorers

After three decades of observing, a wealth of different planets have emerged. We started with the hot Jupiters, large gas giants close to their star that are among the easiest planets to find due to both deeper transits and larger radial velocity signals. But while the first tens of discovered exoplanets were all hot Jupiters, we now know these planets are actually very rare.

With instrumentation getting better and observations piling up, we have since found a whole new class of planets with sizes and masses between those of Earth and Neptune. But despite our knowledge of thousands of exoplanets, we still have not found systems truly resembling our solar system, nor planets truly resembling Earth.

It is tempting to conclude this means we are a unique planet in a unique system. While this still could be true, it is unlikely. The more reasonable explanation is that, for all our stellar technology, our capabilities of detecting such Earth-like planets are still fairly limited in a universe so mind-bogglingly vast.

The holy grail for many exoplanet explorers, including us, remains to find this true Earth twin – a planet with a similar mass and radius as Earth’s, orbiting a star similar to the Sun at a distance similar to how far we are from the Sun.

While the universe is rich in diversity and holds many planets unlike our own, discovering a true Earth twin would be the best place to start looking for life as we know it. Currently, the radial velocity method – as used to find the very first exoplanet – remains by far the best-placed method to find it.

Thirty years on from that Nobel-winning discovery, pioneering planetary explorer Didier Queloz is taking charge of the very first dedicated radial velocity campaign to go in search of an Earth-like planet.

A major international collaboration is building a dedicated instrument, Harps3, to be installed later this year at the Isaac Newton Telescope on La Palma. Given its capabilities, we believe a decade of data should be enough to finally discover our first Earth twin.

Unless we are unique after all.

For you: more from our Insights series:

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Christopher Watson receives funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).

Annelies Mortier receives funding from the Science and Technology Facilities council (STFC) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).