I was particularly struck by the depersonalization of war that the increasing integration of drone warfare implies. Drone technology, especially as AI rapidly advances, can completely abstract a human agent not only out of battle but also out of target deliberations, reducing opportunities for the human conscience to mitigate brutality. As the Reuters podcast noted, the U.S. mandates that a human being must be “in the loop” for any kinetic attack, but a lot of other nations don’t have similar restrictions – and I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that the U.S. will liberalize its guardrails to keep up with geopolitical competitors. It seems that in some ways, because they are cheaper than missiles, drone warfare will level the global playing field, preventing the bifurcation of the world into the strong and the weak (and enabling future “Ukraines” to resist their conquest, as Ukraine has).  But it also seems like the greater chasm between those who foment conflict and those who suffer that drone warfare facilitates will increase civilian casualties and lead to a proliferation of refugee crises.

I was also shocked by how holistically Ukrainians have incorporated the war into their daily lives. As Deb’s Substack illuminates, it is astonishing how people will gamble on a few extra hours of sleep rather than race to a bomb shelter, but it also makes sense: we fundamentally need to preserve mundane experiences and any illusion of normalcy. Organizing every aspect of everyday life around the possibility of death probably feels like a form of capitulation. The New York Times article about the Ukrainian children’s books that address the war is another example of this integration of the war into life, rather than treating it as the geopolitical anomaly that it is. I wondered whether the desensitization to war that these children’s books may encourage paradoxically protects childrens’ sensitivity, or whether it may be counterproductive. For example, I was slightly disturbed by the anecdote about the mom who bought her 10-year-old son books about “fighter jets, missiles, drones, and fire arms” because it “helps him have hope.” The desire to safeguard your child’s childhood is the most human instinct there is, but I wondered whether these books play a role in the excessive militarization of a society, whether treating war as normal will ultimately reproduce cycles of violence.

I was intrigued by the Russian state’s relationship to religion, as presented in the documentary A Faith Under Siege. The narrator commented that Russia is a “self-described Christian nation targeting evangelicals in Ukraine”; the persecution of white Christians (a group that is far more often persecuting others) is an image with no modern parallel, and their ethnic and religious status doubtless contributed to the outsize global response to their suffering. I wondered whether the optimism and hope that religion nurtures is particularly threatening to Putin, especially because the barbaric arbitrariness of Russia’s drone strikes against civilian targets evinces a war strategy of demoralization and the crushing of the human spirit. Putin, however, is attempting to have it both ways with religion, mobilizing the Russian Orthodox Church as an instrument of power. The documentary notes that “in occupied Ukraine, Russia is trying to replace God with the Russian state.” Putin knows fidelity to faith jeopardizes fidelity to him, but he also is attracted to the possibilities of weaponizing a highly regimented, hierarchical religion.

by Devon Williams

Social media has been a key player in the war in Ukraine since the very beginning of the conflict. I remember seeing posts upon posts on Instagram from friends attempting to bring awareness to the cause, to encourage the people of the US to rise in solidarity with democracy and the protection of those whose rights were being attacked. It gave us a new ‘front row’ to a conflict thousands of miles away– both making us feel more involved in the outcome and somehow more personally responsible for our role or possible role within it. Journalism used to be the sole arbiter of this exchange of experience, responsibility, and involvement, while social media collapses this chain into a single role. Panievsky’s “The Populist War on Our Right to Know” in The New Censorship explains how journalists held the responsibility for “gate-keeping, investigating, and scrutinizing” and are increasingly vilified as corrupt meddlers so much so that the “very act of mediation is disputed” within society (Panievsky, 41). Social media embodies this dispute of mediation, making journalists’ official work mute when one can post or view warfare directly on one’s phone devoid of context or verification.

Within “The Playbook: Choose Your Weapon,” she develops this idea further in describing social media as “liberating technology” for the populous that renders official media “futile and unnecessary” (43). As Ukraine’s war is one of the most visible in history with social media littered with video of drone attacks, front lines, destroyed buildings, and civilian suffering and protest circulating instantaneously, it makes the audience feel as though they know everything about the war or at least are witnessing a true, large part of it. Seeming ‘firsthand’ accounts from battlefields or civilians can appear to be almost more trustworthy than a person on TV or authoring an article published hours later, but the key piece of context, verification, and representing balanced and diverse perspectives is missing from such content. This mediation can appear unnecessary through social media, but until polarization and misinformation reach a breaking point destructive enough to be noticed, it is hard to tell for the common viewer what is missing from their sources.

Technology is consistently collapsing the role of the watcher and soldier within global warfare–  it expands who has access to information, but it also allows for continuously advancing forms of weaponry such as AI powered drones and systems (Reuters). These drones put civilians and small teams once reserved for militaries, expanding the sphere of active participants in warfare in a new way that could expand into future warfare standards. Tech not only collapses the time it takes for a viewer to experience a war but also the time and involvement with which war is enacted. Without the human mediator of a drone pilot or soldier, is personal responsibility lost? Is context and the true cost of these actions obscured for those involved?

Verification, context, human judgement, and responsibility are removed from the equation of war without the mediators of journalism or human participant in warfare. Flaws in social media information could misdirect aid efforts or place the blame of the public on the wrong person, further polarize global views of conflict, or even numb the public due to the constant and massive influx of the experience of human suffering. Flaws in weaponry technology could result in unnecessary loss of life and loss of responsibility for that suffering if the one that technically ‘pulls the trigger’ isn’t human. Currently in Ukraine drones and AI assisted targeting are only increasing even as levels of actual autonomy are varied (Reuters). This push for mechanization of both information and mechanics is driven by the desire to ‘know’ everything fully without delay and from the front lines. But as Panievsky highlights, the removing of these intermediaries does not immediately guarantee greater freedom, truth, or responsibility. Social media makes war more visible to the world, but this also makes every video impossible to verify. Without mediators it is impossible to promise truth, even if information feels more immediate to those receiving it.

By Luna Ramirez Castellanos

At 9:10 AM, a line wraps around the Ted Weiss Federal Building; the quiet crowd is pressed against the towering facade. Farther down the road, NYPD officers and two Federal Protective Service cars are stationed. A security guard paces around the line; handcuffs and a gun are visible in his back pocket. From time to time, he pushes to move into line: “Hey! One line. Make it to the side of the building.” Amidst the chaos, an Argentinian priest hopes to bring calm to those awaiting their hearings: “No tengan ningún miedo. ICE no está acá.” [“Don’t be afraid. ICE is not here”] Rev. Eduardo Fabian Arias goes to court every day.

He tells me, “Lo que está instalado aquí es el miedo.” [“What they have instilled here is fear”]

Later that morning I experienced that fear.

Inside the building, we were immediately approached by a security officer who warned us [you] “might have to leave. The courtroom size is too small to host you.” A few moments later, I sat down in the waiting room— a volunteer asked me to help her translate for a respondent. As the security officer noticed me speaking with them, he approached us: “The only thing I ask for in MY waiting room is that you remain seated. I retrieve a couple of phrases from his rant: “Everybody notices” that we are students and what we are doing is “frowned upon.” It ended with a warning:

“Be careful”.

The immigration system functions under the Executive; with judges appointed by the Attorney General, there is little room for independent supervision. Immigration Court can therefore be a black box, and most often, the only way to hold it accountable is to be there and to report back. Journalism acts as the public’s check and balance.

Though Immigration Courts are open to the public, harassment and violence directed at observers is pushing many out the door. Fear-mongering against the press reduces public scrutiny of institutions. The Guardian’s piece reminds us that this is happening worldwide, and at an alarming rate. In Germany, the figures are daunting: only last year, 218 refugee shelters faced “politically motivated” assaults, many of which were orchestrated by far-right political movements.

Read against “The New Censorship”, a term pops up: legal authoritarianism. Constant campaigning against the free press and critical journalists plays a key role in eroding democratic institutions.  Populism is both a divisor and homogeniser; while pushing for a distinction between “real people” and “corrupt elites”, the populist leader hopes to create a mono-intellectualist culture. Criticism directly challenges the populist-imposed media’s role as a mirror to what the “real” people want. Indeed, Jan-Werner Müller reminds us “populists are not anti-elitists as much as they are anti-pluralists—only one way of thinking is allowed” (p. 25). In A Faith Under Siege, Rostyslav Pavlenko, Member of the Parliament of Ukraine, makes a similar appeal regarding the Russian government: “They condemn the values of freedom; they condemn the values of free speech”.  Mykhaylo Brytsyn, Evangelical Pastor, commented on the same rhetoric. His Church, which had been persecuted during Stalin’s terror, was accused of hosting German spies. 80 years later, in 2022, they were now being accused of hosting American ones. Marc Mcdonel, a Baptist Missionary in Ukraine, experiences the same delegitimisation: he is labelled as a CIA agent, solely because of his origin.

“Democracy has been the main source of legitimacy for journalists in modern societies” (p. 39). But democratic institutions are changing. By utilising an exploitative definition of democracy, which the book defines as “direct, majoritarian, [and] expressive”, populist leadership is pushing an “illiberal democracy”.

If this is the case, how do we bring these institutions back under the magnifying glass?

Warfare is evolving in a way that jeopardizes war crime accountability. Autonomous drones illustrate this concern. Autonomous machines are operated by computers far removed from the battlefield. They are often less accurate in identifying targets than human militants are. But the real problem is that autonomous weaponry largely eliminates humans from the “kill chain,” the process by which the military carries out an attack, from target identification through the actual launch. In traditional warfare, if something goes awry, the commander is ultimately responsible, as they sit at the apex of the kill chain calling the shots. With automated decisionmaking and a compressed kill chain, it will be harder to track culpability for a specific attack. Who should be responsible for an AI drone that mistakenly targets civilians? Is it the commander who relied on autonomous drones? Or the engineers whose algorithms yielded a problematic target list? Will computer scientists stand trial for a drone’s war crimes, or nobody at all?

The introduction of civilian volunteers in the Russia-Ukraine war raises further questions about accountability. Under international humanitarian law, civilians have a protected status: both parties in a conflict must take all necessary precautions to avoid the disproportionate loss of civilian life. But what happens when thousands of civilians begin to take direct part in hostilities, and in fact get paid to do so, using weaponry offered by the state? Likely, these civilians, though not enrolled in the army, are transformed into combatants, thereby losing protections afforded to them by the Geneva Conventions. When they cease to partake in these hostilities, interestingly, they again become classified as civilians. This liminal status – not quite militants, not quite civilians – will pose challenges for investigators and lawyers attempting to discern war crimes in the aftermath of a conflict. In fact, we are already seeing this in Gaza, where the IDF can claim that most civilians killed have been those with links to Hamas. At the moment of a strike, how can a military decide whether or not its victims have a protected status?

These questions about the nuances of accountability might ultimately be unimportant, as it’s clear from this week’s readings that there is widespread disregard for the rule of law in times of war. I was particularly struck by one man’s anecdote in the Ukraine documentary: despite the clear designation that only women and children were hiding in the basement of a church, Russia’s military still chose to attack it. Hundreds of innocents died as a result. And the children who are lucky enough to survive this war suffer devastation in their own way. Some Ukrainian children are forcibly transferred to Russian territory for “re-education” in their schools (which is clearly defined as an act of genocide in Article II of the Genocide Convention, by the way).  And as the heartwrenching children’s literature depicts, the youngest generation in Ukraine is forced to confront death, violence, and unimaginable loss as facts of daily life. Bunkers are as commonplace as classrooms. I can’t quite imagine how pervasive the trauma is as a result of this war, how embedded it is in the culture. To rehabilitate the soul of the nation, not just its wrecked infrastructure, will be a core part of the “day after” rebuild.

This week’s theme is all about Ukraine. The Ukrainian museum in Berlin depicted by the Guardian article ‘A living, moving exhibition’ is striking and I imagine, very vulnerable to walk into. It touches on some of the heartbreaking stories that characterises the horror of Russian attacks against Ukraine. The ‘Social Taxi’ attack in particular, places a focus on normal, regular every day jobs and people who are targeted for showing humanity, for doing exactly what their role in life is. Something that I thought was both unsettling and concerning was Hanna Maliar’s ending quote in this piece, “My advice to Germany is whatever you do, don’t get rid of your bunkers.” If that doesn’t say that things need to change, and the war needs to stop before it becomes cataclysmic for more than just Ukraine and Russia, then I don’t know what does. I actually think that an article like this, ending on that note, should have gained traction and propelled some sort of worldly peace conversation, it was published over a year ago. Did these conversations happen? If not, my question is, how do we get them to happen?

The article in the Kyiv independent, like Deb’s own fact file in the modules for class three, provides statistics for Ukrainian refugees and their settlement in Germany. One figure that astounded me was the 20 billion Euros funded into Ukrainian accommodation and integration. It goes without saying that that is a huge amount of money, I’d be interested in seeing what this lump sum looks like in action, in Berlin. Then we continue onto the next article and the picture becomes larger, in the second Guardian article we see that ‘Berlin reports rise in attacks on refugees amid surge in far-right crime.’ I’m not overly familiar with German politics but I can say for certain that the same anti-immigrant sentiment is shared by the unfortunate rise of the Reform party UK, which vows to prevent people from crossing the borders – even those who have a right to claim asylum. This rise of the far right in this sense, seems perpetuated across borders. It seems that people are displaying active efforts to prevent violence against asylum seekers and refugees, Jian Omar expresses this in the article “We demand a clear protection plan for refugees.” There is hope.

The podcast on Reuters about the drone war immediately brought to mind operation spiders web, which I had read a significant amount about in a journalism class I took last fall. Ukraine dispersed 117 modular FPV drones that targeted – not people – but Russian military aircraft, weakening their modes of attack. Note how it’s primarily defensive, not offensive. On the subject of drones, I saw a concerning article in the NYT the other day about Open AI gaining a sort of consciousness of its own, now that is frightening, especially when drones are now being powered by AI. It feels as though all those ridiculous fiction films or novels about robots taking over the world (The Terminator or Robopocalypse) is scarily becoming a reality. In the podcast, one of the presenters mentioned how AI drones don’t need to be programmed necessarily because they can “talk to each other” or communicate like a flock of birds. Perhaps it is not corrupt political leaders we should fear, but AI powered drones, or weapons. Just a thought. Moving onto Deb’s substack, will the volunteers who are guarding the skies now and shooting down drones, have the capacity to take down AI powered drones?

Written by Leila Leibert

Reading this week’s passages provided a glimpse into the lives of the refugees fleeing Syria and internal political conflicts that persisted within the country. What struck me most was the extraordinary sacrifice these refugees took to reach Europe in the first place, oftentimes having to abandon their family, adapt to new languages, and face the stigmas of their migration. This abandonment, not only of citizenship in their home state, but their communities and professional identities adds another layer of their ability to adapt. 

Loubna Mrie’s memoir captured the unavoidable reconciliation with the very structure and government regime that provided her father, an ally of the Assad regime, a life of privilege and corruption. What stood out to me was how her own family, grandmother and her uncles, went silent instead of helping her mother since they were too afraid of what the regime might do. This betrayal made me think of the distance and separation that my own mother endured. More particularly, the sacrifices she made leaving Ethiopia, immigrating to Europe before starting new beginnings and a family in the United States. 

Reading Patrick Kingsley’s book reminded me of my mother’s story too. The years of lost connection she had from her own parents and siblings as they exiled to Germany, and her struggle contorting herself to fit in Western society, teaching herself five languages in an effort to get her point across. It made me question the feasibility of reversing migration once someone has established a new identity elsewhere– a question I find myself asking about my own mother.

By Devon Williams

Chris Bao is a man full of contradictions.

He knows that “only some people get obituaries in the New York Times,” yet insists every personal story has value.

As former head news editor of The Daily Princetonian, he has written more than 80 stories but can’t find a word to say about himself.

Even when he states he doesn’t think he is “that interesting,” it’s clear there is more to Bao than meets the eye.

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, Bao grew up primarily in Plainsboro just 15 miles from Princeton. His parents, both immigrants from China, work in software engineering and financial consulting. Bao calls his younger sister “one of my best friends.”

Despite this closeness, that trust has not been as easy with his parents. Differences in values have shaped Bao’ relationship with them in adulthood, and he is of the mind “found family” with those “who consistently prove that they’re there for you, and you’re there for them as well” is the critical form of community.

“I’m grateful for a lot of my upbringing,” he said, but he also appreciates that “not every family looks alike, and not every relationship with your family is going to look the same.”

Bao spent two years of his youth in China, particularly remembering an educational emphasis on endurance, conformity, and self-sacrifice, through intense mathematical study and stories prioritizing the nation over the individual.

“Back then it seemed pretty normal,” he said.

Since returning in sixth grade, he has come to prefer American individualism. Yet time in both cultures shaped a worldview skeptical of how much “free will” people truly have over who they are.

He believes that behavior is “very heavily influenced by our environment,” rather than chosen character.

This does not allow him to tolerate cruelty or selfishness, however.

“A little bit of kindness and thoughtfulness in your interactions with other people is, I think, something that’s ultimately important,” he said.

Siyeon Lee, a close friend and fellow Daily Princetonian writer, sees those values in the way he approaches the world.

“He’s a deeply analytical person,” She said. “I think he views the world as something that he can sort of dissect and analyze and understand.”

That drive has called him to become one of the most dedicated head news editors and prolific writers the ‘Prince’ has seen.

“I don’t really think about myself, and that’s why I like journalism, because you can think about other people,” he said. “The best interviews come when I try to sort of forget all of my preconceptions and everything I know, and just try and purely hear them out.”

Lee thinks this habit explains why Bao underestimates himself. His journalism “largely stems from… listening to other people and crafting narratives about them” to the extent that “he doesn’t think about himself as much as the average person does.”

Charlie Yale, another close friend from the paper, is more blunt.

“I take issue with that.” Yale said of Bao’ claim that he is uninteresting. “I think he’s extremely interesting.”

Yale sees this humility as a reflection of the intense dedication Bao exemplifies. “If he is going to do something, it’s gonna be done well.”

Bao admits this non-stop work ethic can sometimes verge on neuroticism.

“I’m the kind of person who will ask like five people to read an email before I send it off…or if I misspelled their name even though I checked it like 17 times.”

While deep in the swing of the paper and his studies at Princeton, Bao suffered health problems relating to stress-based carpal tunnel that led him to take a gap year.

Such a setback may slow down the average person, but Bao faced it with acceptance and an unstoppable work ethic. He continued to do independent work while at home, and was still ever-present on campus and at coffee dates with his friends.

“It is entirely possible that I might not be able to do X, Y, Z in my life. But I just have to somehow come to terms with that and…focus on what I can do,” he said.

Now back at Princeton, Bao is considering law school despite his love of journalism. “There are no jobs, there is no pay. You might get assassinated!” he said, but he still loves the field even if not for the long-term.

Whatever he chooses, Lee says Bao “undersells himself.” In her mind, he would be exactly the kind of person to get the New York Times obituary he joked about.

“He would probably work for The New York Times, and then he would die in The New York Times,” she said.

At the very least, he would be well remembered by those who admire his incredible drive and dedication as a journalist but also, as a friend.

By: Carina Fucich 

This week’s readings really gave me a varied view into both the experience of people dealing with the Syrian revolution, and the conflicts in Ukraine. I really appreciated how this weeks’ readings showed us perspectives through novels, articles, podcasts, and memoirs because I admittedly did not know much about these two revolutions previously. I thought that the articles showing how Syrians are being financially incentivized to leave Germany combined with the perspectives of Syrian doctors in Germany to be very interesting. When this is coupled with the memoirs of the experiences of these people during the revolution, I felt like I got a view into the tumultuous emotional pathways of Syrians who ended up in Germany. 

 Although I enjoyed all of the readings, I found the defiance reading to be the most interesting and eye opening. The imagery and details shown through the reading helped me really get into the head of the main character and get a glimpse into what it is like to live in Turkey during the revolution. Additionally, I thought discussions of mental health were very interesting. For example, when the main character showed up to work after sleeping in, it was an American who referred her to a mental health specialist. The main character then explains how she had never heard of anyone who sought mental health, and she immediately took offence to the suggestion, although she was evidently struggling with her mental health. Why was the person to suggest to her to seek mental health specifically identified as an American? Is the author biased in claiming that Americans are more forward with destigmatizing mental health? I am also interested in learning more about that American character and how they are portrayed. 

Additionally, I enjoyed reading about the main characters’ interactions with social media. I of course know the great impacts of social media and how prevalent it is in global conflicts currently. However, reading about how people reacted to the main character’s social media post was very eye opening. The global impacts and visibility to issues that social media no doubt offers is definitely shown here, but the passionate and angry comments were also shown to hurt the main character’s mental health even more. Is there a way that we can adjust how people interact with social media so that these stories can still be shared, while protecting the mental health of the users? By showing both the impacts in visibility from posting on social media, as well as the detriment to the main characters’ mental health, the author opens an interesting discussion surrounding social media. When arguing for the benefits of social media in conflicts like these, are we inherently overlooking the mental health of these individuals, and in doing so shortening them to insignificance?

A profile on Carina Fucich by Leila Leibert

When you have the opportunity to sit next to Carina Fucich, you can’t help notice her calm and attentive nature. Once you listen to her, you begin to better understand the history of restlessness and recovery that has shaped her.

Shifting her weight, crossing one leg, then uncrossing it the next minute, she maintained full attention throughout our interview. This was despite, her body negotiating a comfortable seating position with the park chair. Post-interview, when the lecture ended and we said our goodbyes, she didn’t linger. She grabbed her bike, secured her helmet, and was gone within seconds, pedaling off smiling and waving a friendly goodbye. 

It was a small moment, but it captured something her friend Rachel had told me. Fucich physically cannot sit still, “Her mental health and wellness fully depends on her ability to do some sort of active sport every single day.”It’s a rule Fucich has lived by for years. One that outlasted the sport that defined her very childhood and adolescence: soccer.

Watching her that afternoon, that claim didn’t feel like an exaggeration. If anything, it felt like a doctor’s diagnosis.

Soccer was less a hobby but more of an organizing principle throughout her childhood. It was something deeply rooted in Fucich, something that she thought about constantly, trained relentlessly for, and built her identity around. Another friend, Kyle, who met her only after she’d arrived at Princeton, remarked how “She would talk about how her practices went and stuff… how she wouldn’t have the chance to become as good as her soccer idols.”

A knee injury ended her dreams of going pro her senior year of high school. For a person who had built her sense of self around motion, the sudden stillness was its own kind of injury she had to battle. Her ambitions of becoming a D1 athlete naturally faded away and her focus became honed in on her immigrant parents objectives of academics over athletics. The daughter of a Maltanese immigrant mother and Croatian father, she described her upbringing was largely shaped by the “American Dream”, where academics were viewed as the surer path forward. 

Even that reinvention came with its own cost. Fucich tried to keep soccer alive in her life at Princeton by joining the club team as a freshman and got injured again. “It would have been easy for her to put soccer and the complexity of her injuries behind her,” her friend Sophia said, “but she put her passion and enthusiasm first.” The second injury arrived at a particularly hard moment being her first time living far from home, facing a recovery process she’d already been through once and had hoped never to repeat. “Not only was she a freshman at Princeton, but she also had to confront a daunting recovery process and the reality that she would lose her sport,” Sophia said. “However, her strength and humility triumphed once more.” This strength to bounce back was something that every friend of hers I interviewed brought to light. What stands out in the accounts of people who know her well is the fact that she still managed to shrink passions to a scale that her knees could tolerate.

What she rebuilt after the injury was the very infrastructure of a life that was never meant to be static or still. Her vision for her life is designed around being organized, deliberate, and constantly, staying in motion.

Whilst soccer gave her the structure to become a stellar athlete. Losing soccer taught her the habit of being dynamic.

In 2021, shortly after the last American plane left Kabul, I found myself working on a desolate stretch of New Mexico desert somewhere between Fort Bliss and White Sands Missile Range. Over ten thousand Afghan refugees were living in a temporary settlement that had been thrown up in just a few weeks. The area had until recently been used as a training range for artillery and small arms. Wind lifted the dusty ground and turned over scattered piles of spent ammunition. Hundreds of diesel generators roared day and night. Black Hawks tore low across the sky. The port-a-potties baked in the sun, overflowing into lagoons of waste that dried into twenty-foot wafers, and I wrote reports about it. 

We were instructed to only call them guests. Not refugees, or asylum seekers, or Afghans. 

Soldiers and contractors told me about the opium rings and the child marriages supposedly running in the tents, though nobody seemed to have actually witnessed any of it. Most of the guests had been doctors, lawyers, translators, government officials. Now, they were just foreigners in tents. Maybe the rumors made the conditions easier to stomach. 

In The New Arab’s article, the first talk of Syrians going home from Germany came within hours after Assad’s fall. Alice Weidel posted that anybody celebrating a free Syria on a street in Berlin “evidently no longer has a reason to flee.” Bavaria’s interior minister put it more graciously: the well-integrated remain welcome, while the rest should be helped back. 

Three months later, the Washington Post counted some 6,000 Syrian doctors propping up German hospitals, and the same ministry that had suspended asylum decisions was warning that whole areas of the health sector were dependent on these Syrians. 

Kingsley offers a more intimate and striking view of the machinery that refugees must navigate. The New Odyssey opens with Hashem al-Souki in a smuggler’s boat on the night of his son’s birthday, unable to see the people around him and able only to hear them.

Loubna Mrie ends up inside the machinery from the other side. Months after her mother is disappeared by her own father’s men, she is flown to a donor-funded “civil society workshop” in an Istanbul hotel. She realizes she was invited because she is Alawite — exactly what the donors wanted to see. She is not there to be taught. She is there as evidence that the intervention is working.

I wrote environmental inspection reports, and I understood who they were for.