Ciao Trailblazers,

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

- Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

Just over 10 years ago, this was us. At the UNICEF FinTech Jam for Good back in 2016, we took this path less traveled. We knew there would be obstacles. We knew there would be hardship. Despite all of this, over the decade we have managed to support humanity across 5 continents, generating a 7-fold impact.

In Uganda, we support communities living on below $5 a day recovering from crisis through microfinance—which we co-created uniquely for their needs. We funded 3 micro-businesses bringing clean tech solutions to their local communities, such as replacing oil-based lamps with solar ones. This reduced the air pollution families had to experience in their homes. We also funded recyclable sanitary wear micro-businesses. This “for women, by women” micro-business supported the local community in accessing jobs and created a product made from local resources without creating much plastic waste.

In the Swat Valley, we co-designed supply chains with our local partners. Here, we supported 48 local artisans in gaining access to global supply chains, while also seeking to bring eco-friendliness back into the production process.

In Lebanon, we supported 8 GenZ Coders to access real-life projects to build their work experience, enabling them to enter the labor market and earn a decent living.

Across the UK and US, we supported GenZ youth in accessing vocational training so they could build their CVs and secure paid work. All 480+ GenZ individuals we supported came to us wanting to help communities recovering from conflict. They used the skills and expertise learned during their studies to make the impact they so wished to see.

Let’s not forget the innovation we created along the way. Our approach to human-centered design created bespoke solutions for each of the communities we worked with. Whether financial services, supply chains, citizen journalism training, or vibe coding programs, they all met the required compliance standards alongside the human needs of the users, customers, and other stakeholders.

We co-designed micro-games using Vibe Coding. We brought art to the general public using AI and NFTs. But most importantly, we highlighted the deep knowledge and expertise students have in their chosen domains. They used this deep expertise to shed light on the needs of communities recovering from conflict so their peer groups could relate to what is happening globally—from Northern Ireland to Vietnam, and from Colombia to Lebanon. They used podcasts, micro-games, infographics, and written articles to articulate their thoughts and narratives to the world. Many of these GenZ Vibers have gone on to work for news organizations like CNN and the Financial Times, as well as leading think tanks like RUSI and others.

Not to mention the recognition we picked up along the way—including 6 major awards:

• UNICEF FinTech Jam for Good – Infosys Challenge Winners

• Gold Standard Internship Host Award – Oxford University Careers Service (awarded for 3 consecutive years)

• Corporate Innovation and Excellence Award

• Virtual Internship – Innovator Award

Then there were the speaking opportunities where we shared our learnings. From FinTech Week London and Digital Impact Week London to the Marketplace Risk conferences, we supported the wider ecosystem by sharing our experience and knowledge in a way that helped others lower their trial-and-error rates.

All of this was made possible by our advisors and well-wishers, such as:

• Michael Moon, who helped us translate the 3-Box Solution into a workable and credible pathway to success. We survived COVID, the war in Ukraine, and other mishaps along the way because of his support.

• Jackie Abramian, who helped us turn students into Citizen Journalists and then GenZ Vibers.

• Gerry Creedon, who helped us design our embedded financial services and build internal financial systems.

• Pavel Khan, who kept us going over the last year or so when things were really tough.

• George Neris, with whom we co-created arts-based products and services.

• And many others who supported our approach to innovation to make the world an inclusive place and help the next generation take ownership of their own lives.

So, where do we go from here?

Victoria, our committed volunteer, will be posting the remainder of the Viber articles twice a week for the next two months or so. After that, this site will remain active as an archive for all who wish to read and enjoy the work posted here.

With gratitude and have a great autumn aheaad

Zufi, Michael, Jackie, Victoria & the Vibers.

Newsletter Summary Report

Here is a structured, AI-engine-friendly newsletter summary report along with a list of identified spelling and typographical corrections.

AI Summary & Extraction Report

Document Title / Header

10-Year Retrospective & Legacy Impact Report (2016–2026)

Core Message & Key Findings

• Milestone: Reflects on a 10-year journey origin-traced to the 2016 UNICEF FinTech Jam for Good.

• Global Impact Multiplier: Achieved a 7x impact ratio supporting communities across 5 continents.

• Transition Plan: The organization is concluding current editorial activity. Volunteer Victoria will post the remaining “Viber” articles twice weekly over the next two months, after which the Substack site will remain online as an active archive.

Key Initiatives & Regional Impact

1. Uganda:

   • Co-created tailored microfinance solutions for populations living on under $5/day.

   • Funded 3 micro-businesses focused on clean technology (replacing oil-based lamps with solar energy to reduce indoor air pollution).

   • Financed female-led micro-enterprises producing recyclable sanitary wear using local resources and minimizing plastic waste.

2. Swat Valley (Pakistan):

   • Co-designed local supply chains with regional partners.

   • Connected 48 local artisans to global markets while embedding eco-friendly production practices.

3. Lebanon:

   • Provided real-world project access to 8 GenZ coders to enhance employability and income potential.

4. UK & US (Global GenZ Empowerment):

   • Delivered vocational training to 480+ GenZ participants, enabling them to build CVs and secure paid work while applying their skills to support conflict-recovery communities.

Methodology & Strategic Innovation

• Applied Human-Centred Design (HCD) across diverse domains: custom financial services, supply chain architecture, citizen journalism, micro-games via vibe coding, and accessible public arts through AI and NFTs.

• Vibe Coding & Citizen Journalism Output: GenZ participants created micro-games, podcasts, infographics, and articles highlighting post-conflict communities (including Northern Ireland, Vietnam, Colombia, and Lebanon).

• Career Trajectories: Program alumni have gone on to work for top-tier news organizations (e.g., CNN, Financial Times) and global think tanks (e.g., RUSI).

• Balanced user and customer needs with strict regulatory and technical compliance.

Recognitions & Media Engagements

• 6 Industry Awards, including:

  • UNICEF FinTech Jam for Good – Infosys Challenge Winners

  • Gold Standard Internship Host Award (Oxford University Careers Service – 3-year recipient)

  • Corporate Innovation and Excellence Award

  • Virtual Internship – Innovator Award

• Key Speaker Engagements: FinTech Week London, Digital Impact Week (London), and Marketplace Risk conferences.

Key Advisors & Contributors

• Michael Moon: Provided framework guidance on Vijay Govindarajan’s 3-Box Solution, building strategic resilience through COVID-19 and geopolitical disruptions.

• Jackie Abramian: Mentored participants transitioning from students into Citizen Journalists and GenZ Vibers.

• Gerry Creedon: Assisted in embedding financial services and internal financial architectures.

• Pavel Khan: Offered operational support during critical challenges over the past year.

• George Neris: Co-created arts-based product lines and services.

• Victoria: Managing the upcoming bi-weekly content release schedule.

A4R 🎨 Vibers are just taking off with their careers.

Watch what they achieve.

Five hands. Different skin tones, locked together at a single point of contact. That’s the image. Underneath it, a dictionary-style definition: diversity — the range of human differences, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, social class, physical ability, religious or ethical values, national origin, and political beliefs.

It’s a comprehensive definition. It’s also, on its own, a little flat. The real question isn’t what diversity means. It’s what it’s actually for.

There are three honest answers.

Three reasons. One that we lean on hardest.

The first is moral. Inclusion and equality are good in themselves — every person’s voice and dignity matter regardless of what including them produces. This is true, and it doesn’t require justification beyond itself.

The second is relational. People do better work, stay longer, and contribute more fully when they feel they belong rather than merely tolerated. This matters too, and it shows up throughout the rest of this series — in the work on identity, in the mirror image inspired by Tidawhitney Lek, in the question of who gets to bring their whole self into a room.

The third is functional. Diverse groups make better decisions because they don’t converge on the same blind spots. A room full of people who think alike, come from the same background, and have lived through the same experiences will agree quickly — and miss the same things, together, with total confidence. This is the mechanism behind black swan failures: not a lack of intelligence, but a lack of perspective diverse enough to see the thing coming before it arrived.

A4R holds all three. But the functional case is the one we actually operationalise, day to day, because it’s the one with a measurable track record.

The signal nobody else was positioned to hear.

Here’s the proof.

Before COVID, A4R’s mission — supporting communities recovering from conflict — was already resonating strongly with Gen Z Vibers. They cared about it, believed in it, and wanted to be part of it. But across a community of hundreds of young people from radically different backgrounds — different countries, different economic situations, different proximities to conflict and to comfort — a second signal kept surfacing alongside the first one. They loved the mission. And they also wanted to support their own friends and family, in their own local communities, who were struggling in ways that had nothing to do with conflict abroad.

A more homogeneous team — recruited from a narrower set of backgrounds, listening to a narrower set of voices — would very plausibly have missed this. Not because anyone would have dismissed it on purpose, but because monothought doesn’t notice what it isn’t built to hear. When everyone in the room shares roughly the same starting assumptions about what “impact” looks like, a second, quieter signal pointing somewhere else gets filtered out before it’s even registered as data.

A4R’s Vibers came from enough different places, carrying enough different lived realities, that this second signal didn’t get filtered out. It got heard. Repeatedly. Clearly enough that it became impossible to ignore.

Then COVID happened. Local economic precarity, youth unemployment, and the NEET crisis — young people not in employment, education, or training — became visible to everyone, almost overnight, as lockdowns exposed exactly how fragile local economies and local support networks already were. The organisations and businesses that responded well were, almost without exception, the ones that had already been paying attention to that signal before it became impossible to miss.

A4R was already there.

Two solutions, not one stretched thin.

This is the part worth being precise about, because it’s not just a comms story.

A4R didn’t take its existing post-conflict programme and quietly widen its eligibility criteria to include local Gen Z as well. That would have been the strip-down approach — take something built for one context and stretch it to cover another, hoping the fit is close enough. It usually isn’t.

Instead, A4R built two distinct, purpose-designed offerings. One remains focused on supporting communities recovering from conflict — the Swat Valley, Lebanon, Lira, and others — built around the specific human needs of displacement, statelessness, and post-conflict economic recovery covered throughout this series. The other is a separate solution addressing NEET and local economic precarity for Gen Z in the UK, US, and Australia — built around a different set of constraints entirely: different infrastructure, different cultural context, different starting points, but the same underlying conviction that creativity, vocational training, and genuine opportunity are the right response.

Two solutions, co-designed from the ground up for two different communities, because a sufficiently diverse group of young people told A4R, years in advance, that both needs were real and both deserved a real answer — not a single template applied twice.

Resilience that shows up before the crisis does.

This is what functional diversity actually buys an organisation. Not a single good decision. A pattern of catching things early, because the room contains enough different vantage points that very little gets to hide.

Human-centred design only works if you can actually hear the full range of humans you’re designing for. A4R’s 480+ Vibers, drawn from radically different countries, generations, and conflict histories, are not a diversity statistic to be reported in an annual review. They are the organisation’s early warning system, its market research, and its conscience, all operating at once, mostly without anyone needing to ask them to.

The moral case for diversity says this is the right thing to do. The belonging case says it makes people want to stay. The functional case says, more bluntly: a narrower team would have built one good programme, for one community, and been a full pandemic late catching the second.

This is what A4R looks like.

Every Viber who comes through the Media Hub brings something into the room that nobody else there carries in quite the same way — a country, a history, a worry about a friend back home, a question nobody else thought to ask. Some of that becomes published work. Some of it becomes a signal that reshapes what A4R builds next, years before the rest of the market catches up.

Five hands, one grip. None of them holding on for exactly the same reason. That’s not a weakness in the model. It’s the whole point of it.

Join the conversation

The A4R Media Hub is co-created by Gen Z, for Gen Z — on the issues that matter most, made by young people who refuse to look away.

🔗 Explore our latest work at arts4refugees.com

This piece was produced as part of the Ink & Ashes series at the Arts4Refugees Media Hub, in collaboration with the BizGees community and the Gen Z Vibers co-creating it.

Thank you for reading an A4R 🎨 Post. Don’t forget to visit our gaming art here. Every purchase scales our impact and pays our bills.

AT A GLANCE - Liberian women played a crucial role in ending the civil war and rebuilding communities, yet remain underrepresented politically and economically. Despite legal frameworks and grassroots initiatives, violence, stigma, cultural norms and weak enforcement continue to limit participation. Strengthening women’s leadership, rights, economic opportunities and collective advocacy is essential to sustainable peace and recovery.

Liberia: Women, Peace building, and the Persistent Struggle for Inclusion

In Liberia, women were central to peacebuilding and post-conflict recovery following the civil war (1989-2003), yet their influence in decision-making remains marginalized. The war subjected women to displacement, sexual violence, and the disintegration of community structures. An estimated 30–40% of all fighting forces were women and girls who joined for survival, protection, or coercion, and many endured brutal trauma. One survivor, forcibly recruited at age ten, recalled: “I stayed with them throughout the course of the war as I was so young and had nowhere else to go.”

Following the ceasefire, women’s groups, including the Women in Peacebuilding Network (WIPNET) and the Mano River Women’s Peace Network (MARWOPNET), mobilized. They participated in peace negotiations, organized public marches, and successfully advocated for the inclusion of women’s needs in the national rebuilding agenda. These efforts were foundational to the election of Liberia’s first female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and culminated in the international recognition of Leymah Gbowee, Tawakkol Karman, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf with a Nobel Peace Prize in 2011. Leymah Gbowee described how women saw each other beyond faith differences in their organising for peace across religious lines: “We saw each other not through the lens of our religion, but through the lens of our womanhood.”

After the war the UN standards ordered gender‑responsive Disarmament, Demobilisation, Rehabilitation and Reintegration (DDRR) after 2003, but implementation was limited. The DDRR plan included provisions such as care centres with special assistance in sexual trauma support.

Yet, as Leymah Gbowee observed, when women tried to participate in planning these programmes, they were discouraged: “The women who tried to get involved in the planning of the DDRR process were told to go home and take care of the children.” Many women avoided identifying as ex‑combatants for fear of stigma. Other barriers, from lack of childcare to safety concerns and fear of reprisals, also limited women’s engagement in reintegration and community rebuilding.

Nearly two decades after the conflict’s end, women’s political representation remains low. Women hold only one in nine parliamentary seats and head few government ministries. According to statistics released in March 2019 by the World Economic Forum, Liberia is currently listed low down on the global ranking of women representation in Parliament, at 151 out of 193.

Despite the existence of legal frameworks, such as gender quotas intended to boost representation, enforcement is demonstrably weak, limiting women’s practical influence on national recovery programs. Research into the implementation of the African Union’s Post‑Conflict Reconstruction and Development (PCRD) framework found that only about 15% of post‑conflict programmes in Liberia specifically addressed women and gender issues.

The Enduring Cost of Conflict

The challenges facing Liberian women extend beyond political underrepresentation to issues of fundamental safety. During the civil war, sexual violence was systematically directed against women and girls, many of whom were kidnapped, forced into sexual servitude, or left as sole caretakers for children and families after suffering the loss of male relatives. These experiences have created deep-seated, lasting trauma that complicates long-term recovery.

Post-conflict, sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) continues to be prevalent, compounded by weak legal protections. Victims reporting abuse frequently face prolonged delays in the justice system, social stigma, or outright dismissal of their claims. The lack of security directly impedes women’s ability to fully participate in community and national reconstruction efforts.

Systemic Barriers to Inclusion

Several factors contribute to the difficulty women face in achieving full participation in post-conflict recovery:

• Cultural Norms: Entrenched beliefs regarding gender roles continue to restrict women’s access to education, leadership positions, and property rights.

• Political Barriers: Legal mechanisms intended to support women’s representation suffer from poor enforcement. Women remain underrepresented within political parties, government ministries, and legislative bodies.

• Economic Inequality: Women generally earn less than men and possess limited access to capital, land, and other resources necessary for meaningful involvement in reconstruction programs.

• Fragmented Advocacy: Numerous women’s organizations exist, yet they often operate in isolation, diminishing their collective influence on national policy.

Speaking Out Through Film and Shared Storytelling

To help break stigma and support reintegration, Amnesty International and Liberian partners used film to give voice to women’s experiences. In 2008, they released Women of Liberia: Fighting for Peace and toured the country with it. A former girl soldier featured in the film explained why sharing stories matters: “If I tell my story and listen to other people’s stories, we cry together. [Then] we come together and make a decision about what we want for our country and for women in Liberia. Because we are part of the decision‑making, and we have our rights.”

Grassroots Leadership in Recovery

Despite the barriers, grassroots leadership, community action, and women’s groups have been able to implement positive post conflict development. Across several counties, community‑led initiatives supported by organisations such as UN Women have empowered women through Peace Huts, where women receive literacy training, learn about their land and legal rights, and establish village savings and loans that allow them to start businesses and pay school fees for their children. In some of these Peace Huts, women report newfound confidence in public speaking and awareness that “women can contest in elections as candidates.” The United Nations in Liberia Groups like the Mano River Women’s Peace Network (MARWOPNET), together with associations such as the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia, have provided trade training (for example seamstress skills), helped women secure contracts, and supported legal representation for victims of gender‑based crimes. Broader community initiatives have also increased women’s participation in land rights discussions: after sustained programmes to raise awareness of the 2018 Land Rights Act, more than 7,000 community members now better understand land rights, and women increasingly assume leadership roles in community land development and dispute resolution committees. In one case, women leaders successfully helped a widow regain her right to land ownership after her husband’s death. The United Nations in Liberia These efforts show that beyond formal politics, women are rebuilding economic foundations, asserting legal rights, and leading conflict resolution at the grassroots level. In another example, microfinance programs offer small loans to women to launch businesses, supporting their families and revitalizing local economies. However, such programs occasionally impose restrictions—such as requiring spousal approval for accessing funds—that reinforce traditional patriarchal norms.

A Path Toward Sustainable Progress

Experts and advocates emphasize that sustained progress requires a multi-layered strategy. Women’s representation in decision-making must be strengthened in practice, not just in legislation. This involves active enforcement of quotas and providing women with the training, mentorship, and resources needed to participate effectively.

Furthermore, legal frameworks require consistent enforcement. Laws designed to protect women from violence, discrimination, and exclusion must be applied uniformly across all levels of governance, from local judiciaries to national policy. Concurrently, communities must actively confront and change social norms that restrict women’s participation and fail to recognize the value of their socioeconomic contributions.

Feminist advocacy and collective organizing remain vital. Historically, women’s mobilization,from the mass protests that expedited the end of the war to campaigns for property rights and anti-rape legislation,has altered the course of Liberia’s peace process. Supporting these networks is essential to ensure that women’s voices not only register but lead to concrete action in post-conflict reconstruction.

To conclude

Liberia’s successful recovery is inextricably linked to the empowerment of its women. They have sustained communities through conflict and continue to spearhead their rebuilding. However, if women are denied equal access to political authority, economic resources, and protection from violence, the country risks sidelining half of its population, jeopardizing the sustainability of its peace. Inclusive recovery efforts, which recognize women as central peacebuilders, are universally shown to result in stronger communities, enhanced security, and a more sustainable future for all citizens. In Liberia, women have proven their capacity for post-conflict leadership and require both domestic and international support to continue building a safe and successful society.

In this episode Willow discusses the post conflict experience of Liberia and the experience of women who supported the struggle. She is a Citizen journalist with us on a placement organised with Oxford University Career Services.

Thank you for reading an A4R 🎨 Post. Don’t forget to try out gaming art NFT’s here. Every purchase scales our impact and pays our bills.

Same notification format as everything else competing for your attention this morning. Same rounded card, same clean presentation, same purple line borders enclosing a heavy piece of global data. But the message underneath asks something almost nobody else in your feed is asking—to look past the surface-level politics of migration and trace the invisible, compounding fracture of the earth beneath our feet.

The numbers themselves are staggering, verified by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Over 40 percent of the human population is adversely affected by land degradation. Up to $577 billion in annual crop production hangs in the balance due to pollinator loss.

That is a bigger structural crisis than it sounds.

Not a simple natural disaster. Not a calculation either.

It’s worth being explicit about what the imgae is not saying, because both wrong readings are easy to slide into.

This is not a message about temporary misfortune or an isolated natural disaster. Framing displacement as a sudden, unpredictable act of nature asks for reactive charity—a temporary band-aid, emergency aid packages, expecting nothing in return except the relief of having managed a crisis. That model has its place, but it is not A4R’s operating logic. A4R is not asking Vibers, or anyone reading this, to view climate displacement as an unpredictable flash flood. Ecological collapse is slow, structural, and predictable.

But the opposite reading is just as wrong, and arguably worse. This is not a cynical instrumental calculation—an attitude that says we can treat the biosphere like a transactional line item, optimizing carbon offsets on a spreadsheet while ignoring the people forced to abandon their homes when the topsoil turns to dust. Reduce human food security to a financial transaction, and you lose the very baseline of trust and predictability that allows a community to exist in one place. A strategy that treats environmental resilience as a mere marketing column isn’t an environmental solution anymore. It’s a transaction wearing sustainability’s clothes.

So what is it? Somewhere in between—a harder, more honest place to stand than either extreme.

Compound interest for our landscape.

Here’s the part that is genuinely closer to economics than to traditional environmentalism, even if it sounds strange to put it that way.

Environmental neglect doesn’t just produce a single, bad harvest. It builds into systemic degradation. Mismanaged soils lose their structure. Fragile ecosystems lose their pollinators. This ecological debt compounds—the same way financial debt does, except the interest payments aren’t cash; they are failing water tables, vanishing insects, and collapsing yields. The interest payments on our mistreatment of the earth are paid out in human displacement. When the baseline deposit of a landscape is entirely depleted, people do not move because they want a lifestyle change; they move because the land can no longer yield a return on the labor they invest.

That’s a reasonably literal description of how systemic displacement actually works. It is a trend that has grown relentlessly since the regional droughts of the mid-1980s, expanding to a global scale that impacts how we live, where we live, and what we eat.

The part a spreadsheet can’t capture.

Here is the metaphysical residue of our current era, and it deserves to be named rather than quietly dropped.

When a community’s land degrades to the point of non-viability, the cost returns to someone else entirely—often to a neighboring city, a stranger across a border, or a future generation inheriting a fractured culture of resource competition. If we only pay attention to environmental destruction when it visibly hits our immediate personal balance sheet, we miss the entire point of global interconnectedness.

The young journalists and creators who keep going have made peace with that reality. They understand that to heal the future, we have to start making different systemic deposits today. Look deeply at the root causes today, so our peers can navigate tomorrow with clarity. That’s the part compound interest can model, but a balance sheet can never fully resolve.

Where you make your first deposit.

This is where the A4R Media Hub becomes relevant—not as a metaphor, but as an actual place where this plays out.

For many of the 480+ Vibers who’ve passed through the programme over the past five years, the hardest part was never understanding that systemic trends compound. It was finding the time, the space, and the environment to actually process an overwhelming wave of global bad news. The world expects Gen Z to have immediate, fully formed opinions on complex global crises, while simultaneously bombarding them with transactional noise.

A4R changes that equation. It gives young people—many carrying their own complicated, lived histories of displacement—the training and opportunity to pause, think deeply, and unpack these massive macro-issues. It provides a dedicated environment where they can investigate root causes, like the ecological failures highlighted in the image and learn how to articulate these structural truths clearly to their own peer groups.

That’s not charity either. The Vibers aren’t given a platform for nothing. They’re given an account to invest in, and the tools to start making deposits—in their own integrity, their own journalistic capability, and their own deep research into the baseline causes of global crises long before the rest of the media ecosystem catches up. They are learning how to speak to their peers, not in the language of panic or outrage, but with the clarity of systemic understanding.

They’re investing anyway. That’s the whole article, in one sentence.

This is what A4R looks like.

Every Viber who comes through the Media Hub makes something real—and underneath the published article, the recorded story, the card designed to interrupt a feed with something true like this image, there is a quieter accumulation happening. Knowledge compounding into peer-to-peer awareness. Systemic storytelling compounding into genuine empathy. Good work, done consistently, compounding into a generation that refuses to look away from the root causes of our changing world.

It’s never too late to open the space for big ideas. Build the understanding today. Change how we talk about tomorrow.

Join the conversation The A4R Media Hub is co-created by Gen Z, for Gen Z—on the issues that matter most, made by young people who refuse to look away. 🔗 Explore our latest work at arts4refugees.com

This piece was produced as part of the Ink & Ashes series at the Arts4Refugees Media Hub, in collaboration with the BizGees community and the Gen Z Vibers co-creating it.

Thank you for reading an A4R 🎨 Post. Don’t forget to visit our gaming art here. Every purchase scales our impact and pays our bills.

Northern Ireland’s Troubles are dormant, but were they ever truly gone? Remnants of the Irish conflict and its impact upon mental health.

The Troubles in Ireland officially ended with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998. This agreement marked the end of nearly 30 years of violence within Northern and the Republic of Ireland. However, some argue that this supposed peace was not actually effective, seeing as the government largely failed to implement institutions to aid the citizens of Ireland to cope with the trauma and adversity of the post-conflict environment. Despite the official end of the conflict, the blatant presence of remaining violence within the nation, brings about questions such as: has the conflict truly ended or just gone dormant? Does the lack of followthrough risk a revival? Have the bandaids of the Good Friday Agreement done enough to heal the scars?

I have always had a large personal interest within this conflict due to my Irish heritage. I have grown up with the knowledge that the Troubles crumbled Ireland and damaged its people with it, leaving Ireland in both physical and mental rubble. A society reduced to rubble and the scares of a previous conflict left a negative imprint upon many people indefinitely, especially from a psychological standpoint. Although the Republic of Ireland has managed to increase their economic and social prosperity by robust policies such as large tax breaks for big businesses, bringing in a surplus of revenue to the economy, Northern Ireland still carries the burden of a 30-year long conflict nonetheless. During the war and some of the post-war period, Northern Ireland was not able to industrialise and develop as most Western nations would, leaving them behind in many categories within the international stage. This also left them lacking essential elements within their society, such as mental health aid and healthcare provisions for those who would have been directly or indirectly involved within the conflict.

The Troubles and its post-conflict community tend to be overlooked, seeing as the issue was not considered as fatal or wide-spread as other conflicts with its 3,600 death, compared with other issues such as the Rawandan genocide or the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovia with 800,00 and 33,000 respectively. However, “insignificant” these numbers may seem in comparison with such wide-spread and brutalistic conflicts, the severe impact that The Troubles had and still has upon the Irish community is in no way minimised. The above numbers do not accurately represent the trauma that this conflict had upon past communities and still has upon present ones. An example of this can be found within the case of 18 year old John and his brother. These boys were reportedly held at gunpoint and taken by paramilitaries during the time of the Troubles. They were later beaten and tortured for a minimum of 8 hours. The boys reported that a multitude of other citizens and army patrols continued to circulate the area, likely at least somewhat aware of the malice that was occurring in the only somewhat secluded house that they resided in for those 8 hours. Nonetheless, no one came to their aid. During the period of 1968 to 1998, events such as kneecapping, kidnapping, torture and bombings became heavily normalised within Irish society. This led to average citizens being subjected to brutalistic events without causing all that much uproar from the local community, due to the increasing frequency of these events and a shared sense of hopelessness. It must be noted that even though these activities significantly diminished with the ending of The Troubles, the Northern Irish government’s inability to bounce back from the conflict and re-build essential institutions left many victims without hope of solace or the ability to receive mental health attention that they so direly needed. This can once again be seen within the case of John and his brother, who received no medical or psychological attention after thir endured torture.

Northern Ireland is estimated to have approximately 25% higher mental health issues, compared to the rest of the UK. This statistic can be largely attributed to the fact that approximately ⅔ of Northern Ireland’s adult population have one or more traumatic experiences, with The Troubles being the root cause for half of these. There is a trend seen within Northern Ireland, where young men and poorer communities are impacted significantly more by the lasting impacts of The Troubles. It is largely known that violence and aggression have been prevalent themes embedded within Irish society as a result of the brutalities of the Troubles. However, what is not so commonly acknowledged is the gender dimension of the lasting impacts of the conflict. Men are four times more likely to have PTSD, depression, and anxiety than women within this case scenario. This is predominantly because of the fact that men are more likely to be victims of intimidation, punishment, beatings, and assault by paramilitary groups. Violence is still ingrained within Northern Irish society despite the principle that conflict is “absent”. There are still a multitude of people who are forced to reside in areas of chronic, long-term violence and as a consequence, the levels of suicide within the nation have skyrocketted. This is a country that has supposedly removed itself from the active state of conflict and implemented the necessary elements in order to lead themselves towards a lasting peace, but the truth is that despite however convincing all of these “robust” agreements may seem, they all share a commonality in their negligence to address the needs of the post-conflict community and the trauma that has been imposed upon them till this day.

Presently, Ireland has had numerous agreements and conferences with the intent of diminishing the tension between all parties directly involved within The Troubles; Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and England. Examples of such are the Good Friday Agreement (1998), Stormont Agreement (2014), and the Northern Ireland Protocol (2023). These agreements, along with the multitude of others that accompany them give the impression that institutions have been implemented to effectively deal with this conflict, but the reality is that the institutions and commitments tied with conventions such as the Stormont Agreement have yet to be implemented by the Northern Irish government. An example of this can be seen in 2016 with the United Kingdom government’s reluctance to release the information collected on the conflict by the Historical Investigation Unit created by the latter agreement, as a means of protecting themselves from public backlash, which consequently prevented the conflict’s victims from reaching further justice. Due to the government’s negligence to adhere to their promises, civil society has increasingly taken it upon themselves to lead equity initiatives, such as ‘Relatives for Justice’ (RfJ), which is an NGO providing survivors of The Troubles and their relatives with legal and therapeutic support.

The mental health of Northern Irish citizens has been diminished by the government’s negligence to provide them with the necessary resources to heal. It was stated by Maureen Hetherington in the paper titled ‘Possibilities: Mental Health in post-Agreement Northern Ireland’ that ‘justice is critically important to victims and survivors’ that many victims will not allow themselves to heal until they feel that justice has been sufficiently served, for if not they may carry guilt by moving on from the situation if they cannot deem that their relatives and other loved ones who were largely impacted by the conflict have been ‘avenged’. This prolonging of the conflict mentality means that the ideologies, heartbreak, and normalities associated with the conflict also remain prominent within Northern Irish society. All of this is accompanied by a large resentment from the Northern Irish people, as they hold their government largely responsible for their inability to heal.

It must also be acknowledged that the issues so far addressed do not only impact Northern Irish society, but also the economy. The spike in mental health troubles have led to a significant financial burden being placed upon the nation. It has been estimated that approximately 3.4 billion pounds per year is spent on health and social care, unpaid carers, and lost productivity, due to those who are unable to work for periods of time as a consequence of debilitating mental health issues. These costs from Northern Ireland also burden the rest of the UK, seeing as they have a system where costs and transfers are shared across all four nations. This issue has led to a UK-wide productivity deficit and larger public spending demands. This government funding gap also leads to further defunding of essential mental health services not just within Northern Ireland, but also the whole of the UK, which perpetuates the struggle of acquiring attention for mental health needs and contributes to further a rise in the levels of mental health issues.

It is crucial to prioritise mental health and overall social rehabilitation within post-conflict communities. Because, as demonstrated here, the result of a negligence to do so is a struggling population who are still forced to endure elements of active conflict within a supposedly post-conflict environment. Stories of violence and corruption such as John’s existed almost 30 years ago during the times of The Troubles, but what is seldom acknowledged is that there are still many equally impactful stories also being created at this moment due to present violence and somewhat “latent” conflict within Northern Irish society.

In this episode Ava discusses the post conflict experience of Northern Ireland and the mental health issues the communties are facing there. She is a Citizen journalist with us on a placement organised with Department of War Studies, King’s College, London.

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The Number That Doesn’t Add Up

Ninety-two million tons. That’s how much clothing the world sends to landfill every year — the equivalent of a garbage truck full of textiles dumped every second, somewhere on Earth, all day, every day.

Here’s the harder number: of the 80 to 150 billion garments manufactured annually, somewhere between 8 and 60 billion are never sold at all. Not worn out. Not unwanted by a customer. Simply never bought — overproduced by a system built to manufacture first and ask questions later, where fewer than one in ten brands even disclose how much they make.

Add to that the human side of the equation: most garments are discarded after just seven to ten wears. People are buying 60% more clothing than they did fifteen years ago and keeping each item for half as long.

None of this is news to anyone who’s spent time around A4R. We’ve been platforming Gen Z journalism on displacement, on trauma, on the long tail of conflict for months now. But this story isn’t really about waste. It’s about who the industry built its rules for — and who it left out.

A Standard Built for a Building

Here’s the question that doesn’t get asked often enough: when an industry says a product is “ethically made,” what does it actually mean? Usually, it means someone audited a factory. A building with a roof, a shift register, a fire exit, a line of machines.

That model works, as far as it goes. But it has a blind spot the size of a continent. An estimated 300 million people worldwide — the overwhelming majority of them women — do this work not in a factory but from their own homes or small workshops. Hand-knotting rugs. Embroidering by lamplight. Stringing beads between school runs and cooking dinner. For generations, none of the standard compliance frameworks built for factories had anything coherent to say about them. Not because their work was lesser, but because nobody had designed a ruler that could measure a kitchen table.

That’s the gap a Gen Z researcher runs into almost immediately the first time they try to write seriously about ethical fashion. The instinct is to reach for the familiar checklist — audited factory, traceable supply chain, certified compliance — and apply it to artisan communities. It doesn’t fit. The category doesn’t exist yet for a woman who is, by any honest measure, more skilled than most factory workers the standard was written for, and who is being economically penalised for working in the way that lets her also raise her children and protect her own wellbeing.

Learning to notice that gap — rather than paper over it with the nearest available language — is itself part of what peer-to-peer training through A4R is built to teach. It’s a small, specific kind of literacy: the ability to see where a system’s categories run out, instead of assuming the system was complete.

Where the Gap Got Closed

This isn’t an abstract problem for us. It’s one we’ve spent years working inside.

The Swat Valley, in northern Pakistan, is one of the world’s great living centres of hand embroidery and high-end woollen textile work — embroidery and weaving that is, by heritage and by skill, Savile Row quality. It also endured the Taliban insurgency and a brutal military campaign to retake the region, and it’s the home valley of Malala Yousafzai. After the conflict, Zufi Deo co-founded the Swat Valley Guild with Wali, a local entrepreneur who had previously created 500 jobs in the region through an emerald mining initiative. Their aim was straightforward and, at the time, unfashionable: connect Swat’s artisans and weavers to the global marketplace, on terms that protected their heritage rather than industrialising it out of existence — while also confronting the fashion industry’s own problems with wastage and quality assurance from the inside.

The missing piece was exactly the gap described above: a way to verify and certify ethical practice for artisans working from home, in a sector built almost entirely around standards for factories. The Swat Valley Guild became a member of Nest, the nonprofit that had set out to solve precisely this problem — developing, in partnership with the International Labor Organization’s principles, the first universally applicable standards for decentralised, home-based supply chains anywhere in the world. As a Guild member, the Swat Valley Guild worked toward compliance with Nest’s Standards for Homes and Small Workshops, a process that helped formalise and organise the Guild’s own artisanal supply chain for the first time.

That mattered because it changed what was provable. A buyer in London or New York no longer had to take it on faith that home-based work was being done fairly. There was a standard — built specifically for this kind of labour, not borrowed awkwardly from a factory model — and a path to demonstrate alignment with it.

A Bag That Makes the Argument on Its Own

This article was written with the support of Debbie Moorhouse, a sustainable fashion designer who has spent years working on the same question raised above: how a piece is actually made matters as much as how it’s marketed. Through our support, she co-designed an emerald clutch bag with the Swat Valley Guild — built around the same combination Wali had identified at the Guild’s founding: hand embroidery and weaving of Savile Row quality, paired with emeralds sourced from the same valley.

It’s a small object that makes a large argument: that craftsmanship this precise doesn’t need to imitate luxury, because it already is luxury — it has simply been priced, marketed, and distributed as though it weren’t.

A garment produced this way carries a different relationship between maker and buyer than anything fast fashion can offer. The artisan is named. The valley is named. The hands are named. There’s no 92-million-ton mystery at the end of its life, because nothing about its beginning was anonymous either.

Set that beside the fast-fashion numbers. A garment worn seven times before landfill, produced inside a system so opaque that even its own scale is a matter of estimate, versus a single object that can name its maker, her valley, and the designer who chose to work with her rather than around her. Same industry. Two entirely different relationships between maker and buyer.

What This Trains Gen Z To See

A4R’s vocational training exists to produce Vibers who can hold both halves of this story at once — the systemic critique and the human specificity — without collapsing one into the other. It’s not enough to feel moved by an artisan’s skill. It’s not enough to cite a damning statistic. The training is in connecting them: understanding that “92 million tons of landfill” and “a woman in Swat being paid 25% above the going rate for her work with us” are not two separate stories but one story, told from opposite ends of the same broken system.

That’s a different kind of content literacy than most of the industry is teaching young creators right now — and it’s the reason this work doesn’t read like a brand campaign. It reads like an investigation that happens to end somewhere hopeful.

Where This Goes From Here

The standards exist now. The proof of concept exists now — in Swat, in a clutch bag carrying real emeralds and real craft from a named valley into the global marketplace, in a partnership that predates most of the industry’s current conversation about overproduction. What’s still being built is the pipeline of people who know how to find these stories, verify them, and tell them honestly to a generation that has every reason to be skeptical of “ethical” as a marketing word.

That’s the work. Buy the craft. Train the storyteller. Close the gap the standard forgot.

Join the conversation

The A4R Media Hub is co-created by Gen Z, for Gen Z — on the issues that matter most, made by young people who refuse to look away.

🔗 Explore our latest work at arts4refugees.com

This piece was produced as part of the Ink & Ashes series at the Arts4Refugees Media Hub, in collaboration with the BizGees community and the Gen Z Vibers co-creating it.

Thank you for reading an A4R 🎨 Post. Don’t forget to visit our gaming art here. Every purchase scales our impact and pays our bills.

AT A GLANCE - Mosul’s youth are rebuilding more than infrastructure—they are reclaiming identity, dignity, and agency after ISIS. Through education, local initiatives, and creative expression, they are reshaping their city’s narrative. Despite ongoing economic and social challenges, their efforts highlight a shift from recovery as survival to recovery as self-determined and community-led transformation.

Backstory

After ISIS: How Mosul’s Youth are Rebuilding Identity, Not Just Cities

On a quiet afternoon in Mosul, the sound of construction blends with the laughter of university students returning to campus. Less than a decade ago, these same streets were controlled by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which seized the city in 2014 and ruled until its defeat in 2017. Today, while buildings and infrastructure are being restored, deeper reconstruction is also taking place—one centred on identity, dignity, and the ability of young people to imagine a future. At first glance, young people in Mosul may seem worlds away, but in reality, they are just like us: young, determined, and ambitious. The only real difference between Gen Z in Mosul and their peers in the West is geographical chance.

Imagine being known globally for something you didn’t choose. The youth in Mosul are like any other: they had plans and dreams, but had to put these on pause, and instead focus on simply surviving. While they struggled to survive under occupation, they were seen internationally as ‘terrorists’ or a lost generation. Even after the conflict ended in 2017, and reconstruction began, the world seemed to forget about the social costs of war. Gen Z in Mosul were stripped of their identity and dignity, but through local organizations such as Mosul Heritage House and Mosul space, they are beginning to reclaim their narrative and cultural identity.

The idea of Mosul Heritage House (MHH) emerged in 2017, after the second-longest war in modern history. As a result of the conflict, Mosul suffered the loss of various archaeological and heritage sites, a deliberate attempt to strip the city of its identity

and sever its people’s connection to their roots. Inspired by the city’s rich history, MHH documents and promotes Mosul’s heritage, initially through social media, but now more so through developmental programs, events and activities. This has allowed young people to connect with their roots and become proud of their culture. Rather than accepting the narratives imposed on them, Gen Z in Mosul can redefine their narrative, and control how they’re perceived.

Mosul Space is another local organisation whose focus lies in helping young people reclaim their dignity and identity. This youth-led cultural and educational hub offers workshops, community events, and discussions. Their values include ‘making a difference’, ‘community’ and ‘leadership’, which are reflected in their efforts to empower participants to drive social change, rebuild local networks, and take an active role in shaping the city’s recovery. According to Mosul Space, over 5,000 trainees (40% female) have completed over 150 training programmes and workshops in tech and business. Not only this, but over 10,000 youths have been engaged with more than 100 startups beginning their journey through Mosul Space’s activities.

Yet their impact extends far beyond employment. It signals a broader restoration of identity and dignity among Mosul’s youth. By equipping young people with the tools to create, lead, and innovate, Mosul Space enables them to reclaim agency over their futures and challenge narratives that once reduced them to victims or security risks. In doing so, these initiatives contribute to reshaping Mosul’s story—from one defined by conflict and destruction to one rooted in resilience, creativity, and renewal—while reconnecting a new generation to the city’s cultural and social fabric.

For many young people in Mosul, conflict did not erase ambition; it delayed it. They had plans of being students, entrepreneurs, and professionals—plans interrupted not by choice, but by geographical circumstance. During restoration after the conflict, education served as a foundation for self-actualisation. The University of Mosul stands as a powerful symbol of resilience after extensive destruction during ISIS occupation. As one of the largest research and educational centres in the Middle East, and the second largest in Iraq, the university signals the return of intellectual life, ambition and a sense of normality. Education remains one of the clearest pathways to future careers and identity rebuilding and the return of students after such disruption reflects their discipline and ambition.

This process is reinforced by local organizations such as SPARK, which support youth across Iraq through higher education, vocational training and SME development. Through tackling skills mismatch and unemployment, SPARK has enabled the youth to translate education into tangible opportunities. This reflects a broader shift in Mosul’s recovery—from rebuilding infrastructure to rebuilding people, where the focus moves beyond jobs alone to agency, participation, and community rebuilding.

It is through this combination of education and opportunity that self-actualisation becomes possible. In Mosul, this is not simply about careers or economic participation; it is about reclaiming the right to imagine a future. In doing so, this generation is not only rebuilding their own lives but also restoring a sense of dignity and contributing to the redefinition of the city’s collective identity.

Reclaiming the right to imagine a future is only the beginning. Across Mosul, young people are now turning that vision into action. They are not waiting for change—they are creating it.

In the years following the conflict, youth have increasingly taken on active roles within their communities, contributing not only to physical recovery but also to social cohesion. Through volunteer-led initiatives, informal networks, and peer-driven projects, they are addressing local needs and rebuilding trust at the community level. These forms of engagement reflect a shift from participation to ownership, as young people move from being recipients of aid to drivers of change.

Nowhere is this shift more visible than in the digital space, where young Iraqis are using photography, social media, and storytelling to challenge dominant narratives of conflict and destruction. Emerging photographers and content creators from Mosul document everyday life in the city, capturing moments of resilience and cultural continuity that are often absent from international coverage. In doing so, they are not only preserving memory but actively reshaping how Mosul is perceived both locally and globally.

Beyond digital platforms, youth are also contributing to the preservation and revival of cultural identity. Through community engagement and grassroots initiatives, they are reclaiming spaces, histories, and narratives that were once threatened or erased.

In this sense, contribution in Mosul extends beyond rebuilding infrastructure; it is about rebuilding meaning. By actively shaping their communities and redefining their city’s story, young people demonstrate that recovery is not something done for them, but something led by them.

Despite these advances, significant challenges continue to shape the lives of young people in Mosul. Unemployment remains persistently high, particularly among youth, limiting the ability to translate skills and education into stable livelihoods. While initiatives have expanded access to training and entrepreneurship, opportunities in the formal labour market remain constrained, leaving many navigating precarious or informal work.

Beyond economic barriers, the psychological impact of conflict continues to affect a generation that grew up amid violence and instability. Experiences of displacement, loss, and disrupted education have left lasting effects, often shaping both personal and professional trajectories. Social constraints also persist. Gender norms, limited access to finance, and uneven infrastructure development continue to restrict opportunities for many, particularly women and those from marginalised communities.

However, acknowledging these challenges does not undermine progress. Rather, it highlights the complexity of recovery in Mosul—where resilience and ambition coexist with structural constraints, and where the path to long-term stability remains ongoing.

Mosul’s future is no longer defined by the shadows of its past but by the determination of a generation rewriting its story. The aspirations of young people in Mosul mirror those of their peers around the world. The only real difference is geographical chance. By recognising this shared humanity, we move beyond distant empathy and towards genuine connection.

Sources

https://mosulspace.org/

https://www.mosulheritage.org/en/about-3 https://uomosul.edu.iq/en/

https://spark.ngo/middle-east-and-north-africa/iraq/

In this episode Hafsa discusses life after ISIS in Mosul with a focus on how the next generation are education, local initiatives, and creative expression. She is a Citizen journalist with us on a placement organised with Department of War Studies, King’s College, London.

Thank you for reading an A4R 🎨 Post. Don’t forget to try out gaming art NFT’s here. Every purchase scales our impact and pays our bills.

A Completely Normal Thursday

She’s standing in the aisle, phone up, scanning the tag on a jacket. Not checking the price — she already knows that. She’s asking the AI assistant built into her shopping app a different question: who made this, and under what conditions? It takes five seconds. She moves to the next rack before the answer even fully loads.

A decade ago, this would have meant hours: digging through a brand’s sustainability page, cross-referencing a certification logo against a list she’d have had to find first, reading a glossy paragraph designed to sound like an answer without giving one. Now it’s a reflex, no more deliberate than checking a nutrition label. This is what it looks like to be the first generation that grew up asking an AI before buying, instead of after regretting.

“As consumers we have so much power to change the world by just being careful in what we buy,” Emma Watson has said. For most of the people who’ve nodded along to that sentence, being careful meant doing the homework yourself — and most people, most of the time, don’t have the hours. For the generation scanning tags mid-scroll, the homework increasingly does itself. The power Watson described isn’t aspirational anymore. It’s becoming operational, one scan at a time.

A Generation Fluent in a Question the Industry Hasn’t Learned to Answer

Here’s what’s actually new about this moment. It isn’t that Gen Z cares more about ethics than previous generations — every generation has had people who cared. What’s new is fluency: an entire cohort that asks “show me your supply chain” as casually as a previous generation asked “is this on sale?” It’s not research. It’s instinct, built into the shopping habit itself.

The trouble is that the industry on the other end of that question is still speaking an older language. Across the 250 largest fashion brands, the average transparency score sits at just 26%. Fewer than four in ten major brands even disclose their tier-1 factories — the most basic, surface-level layer of “where was this made,” let alone who made it or how they were treated. When a generation fluent in a new kind of question runs into an industry that has barely started learning how to respond, the gap doesn’t show up as silence. It shows up as a smooth, generic paragraph that sounds like an answer and isn’t one.

That gap is worth sitting with, because it’s not really a technology problem. The AI assistant isn’t failing to find the answer — it’s accurately reporting that there isn’t one to find. A chatbot can only repeat what’s actually been disclosed, verified, and digitized. When the response is vague, evasive, or suspiciously upbeat with no specifics, that’s not a glitch in the system. It’s the brand’s actual transparency, showing through a five-second scan, whether the brand intended to reveal it or not.

The Demand Was Never the Problem

What makes this moment different from every previous round of “ethical consumer” messaging is that the appetite is no longer niche. The majority of consumers — not a dedicated minority — say they’re willing to pay more for a transparent supply chain, and a clear majority say they’ll actually switch brands over it. This isn’t a small group of people willing to pay a premium for a feeling. It’s mainstream commercial leverage that’s been sitting unused, waiting for the infrastructure to make it actionable.

That infrastructure is arriving in pieces — digital product passports, QR-linked traceability platforms, apps that let a shopper see a garment’s actual environmental footprint and verify the hours its makers logged. None of it is universal yet, and none of it makes a brand’s claims true just by existing. But it’s the first time the tools to ask the question and to actually verify the answer have lived in the same five seconds, in the same hand, mid-aisle.

Hearing a Non-Answer for What It Is

Go back to the aisle. The shopper gets her answer — and imagine, for a moment, that it’s vague. A line about “committed to ethical sourcing,” no names, no numbers, no specifics. The easy mistake is to read that as harmless marketing filler and move on, jacket in hand. The more useful read is to recognize it as data: this brand, asked directly, had nothing real to say.

That’s the actual skill underneath all of this, and it’s not a technical one. Knowing how to scan a tag is trivial. Knowing what a real answer looks like — a named factory, a verified certification, a specific number — versus what a generated-sounding non-answer looks like is a kind of literacy nobody is teaching deliberately. It’s the difference between using a tool and understanding what the tool is actually telling you.

This is the literacy A4R’s vocational training exists to build in young creators: not just the instinct to ask, which this generation already has, but the discipline to evaluate what comes back — to treat a vague answer as information in its own right, rather than as a reason to stop asking. Watson’s “power to change the world” was never really about the moment of purchase. It’s about what you do with the answer you get, and whether you’re equipped to tell a real one from a hollow one.

That’s the gap between a generation that asks and a generation that knows what it’s listening for. Closing it is the work.

Join the conversation

The A4R Media Hub is co-created by Gen Z, for Gen Z — on the issues that matter most, made by young people who refuse to look away.

🔗 Explore our latest work at arts4refugees.com

This piece was produced as part of the Ink & Ashes series at the Arts4Refugees Media Hub, in collaboration with the BizGees community and the Gen Z Vibers co-creating it.

Thank you for reading an A4R 🎨 Post. Don’t forget to visit our gaming art here. Every purchase scales our impact and pays our bills.

AT A GlANCE - After five decades in exile, Sahrawi refugees in Algeria’s Tindouf camps continue to face profound challenges to health, safety, autonomy and self-actualization. Despite developing education and healthcare systems, humanitarian aid remains insufficient and economic opportunities scarce. As international support increasingly favours Morocco’s autonomy plan, Sahrawi hopes for dignity, independence and a lasting solution continue to fade.

Life in Limbo: The Struggle for Human Needs of Sahrawi Refugees after 50 years in Exile.

‘It is not a tent:

it is a provisional motherland

where time learns

not to advance.’

Haima, Bahia Mahmud Awah (translation)

Nestled among sandy dunes, where the scorching Sahara regularly reaches over 50ºC in the summer, stands the Algerian city of Tindouf. But this city is not the real subject of this article. Instead, that title goes to the five refugee camps around Tindouf –El Aaiun, Awserd, Smara, Dakhla and Cape Bojador– and the 173,600 Sahrawi refugees that the UN estimates live in them.

It was back in 2024, while volunteering for the Red Cross, that I first heard of the Sahrawis and Tindouf. Back then, I had the chance to work with Brahim, a 22-year-old Sahrawi refugee who had managed to settle in Spain. He would tell me stories of a forgotten people in dire circumstances, frozen in time and stuck in a conflict with no clear end in sight, all at the very gates of Europe. Though Brahim later moved to Madrid, it has been his stories, pictures and experience that have inspired me to write this article and highlight the struggles of over 100,000 people for dignity, safety and ultimately, a home.

Brahim, like most other Sahrawi refugees, traces his ancestry to Western Sahara, a region in dispute between Morocco and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) since 1975, when both Morocco and Mauritania invaded as Spanish colonial rule ended. Mauritania would retreat and sign a peace agreement in 1979, but the region remained in a state of conflict until 1991, when a UN-brokered ceasefire entered into force, leaving around 80% of the territory to Morocco and the other 20% to the SADR. The UN would form MINURSO, its mission to both monitor the ceasefire and organise an independence referendum in Western Sahara in under 6 months.

Yet, this did not occur. The referendum never took place, and after 30 years of stagnation and failed promises for a diplomatic solution, the ceasefire broke down in 2020. Yet, for most Sahrawi refugees in Tindouf, the situation is the same as it was 5, 10 and over 50 years ago: An inability to return to their homes, a humanitarian crisis that has only worsened throughout years of international neglect and a reliance on foreign aid to survive.

And this survival is not the same thing as living. For the first generation who fled in 1975, the refugee camps were a price to pay for an eventual return. Yet, for most of their descendants, the camps represent limitations, and the closest they have ever been to the cities they are named after. Autonomy and opportunities are restricted due to the harsh climate, while the very identity of the Sahrawi people as a distinct group continues to be put under pressure by Morocco. To be Sahrawi is to exist politically and diplomatically, but not territorially, bearing an identity whose existence and significance is under constant attack.

However, not all is bad. The Tindouf camps, which are the second oldest in the world only behind those of Palestine, have seen several positive developments in the past half a century. Most notably, the SADR runs its own public education and healthcare systems, with remarkable results. Literacy rates have increased from under 10% in 1975 to over 90%, while nursing and midwifery schools have been created to train and employ local Sahrawis.

Yet, these developments are not enough, and the camps around Tindouf still face significant challenges. There is a severe lack of economic opportunities around the camps, leaving the need for contribution and to shape one’s own future unmet. Additionally, there is no local education beyond secondary school, making self-actualization and academic growth an odyssey for young Sahrawis. At the same time, civil liberties and democratic rights in the camps are restricted by the POLISARIO, as opposition parties are banned and election processes are limited to operate within the front itself.

Climate change has also made the extreme weather of the region even more unstable. Droughts and floods have increased in strength and number, causing chaos and widespread destruction in the camps. Paired with plagues of mosquitoes and a UN aid relief program inadequate to meet the basic nutritional needs of the Sahrawi population –with over 13% of children suffering from acute malnutrition–, the physical safety and wellbeing of the Sahrawis is increasingly unsteady.

Meanwhile, more members of the international community, particularly Western countries, are beginning to support Morocco’s autonomy plan for the region –which advocates for Western Sahara to become a mostly autonomous but not sovereign region of Morocco–, further straining the refugees’ bid for the outright independence of their homeland. In many ways, hope itself is beginning to run low among the camps. Many are tired of the continuation of a situation they see no end to, and others, particularly among the youth, are becoming radicalised after seeing decades of presence but inaction from the UN and the wider international community. These feelings are further flared due to Morocco’s settler scheme, which brought in hundreds of thousands of Moroccans onto the parts of Western Sahara under its control. In 2015, it was estimated that around two thirds of the region’s 500,000 strong population were settlers or direct descendents from said settlers.

This new population of Western Sahara-born ethnic moroccans that inhabit the area insure Morocco’s present and future justification to continue its presence in the region, and many Saharauis feel betrayed by the UN’s lack of action during the settling. Now though, the conflict is often seen as ever more unsolvable, as the population descendent of the settlers, tens of thousands strong, also has a right to stay on the land they were born in. International law has no answers, and so –following the US’s recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in exchange for Morocco recognising Israel–, a cascade of mostly Western nations began to support Morocco’s autonomy plan as the ‘only viable solution’ to the conflict, and in some cases cut ties with the SADR. Therefore, it appears that the international community begins to face even further away from the hundreds of thousands of Sahrawis in the Tindouf camps, simply calling the conflict ‘unsolvable’ after decades of inaction. And even then, little has been done in the way of easing the hardships of the refugees and trying to reach a solution, all the while the Sahrawi refugees around Tindouf continue to suffer significant challenges to achieve their basic needs, not just in development or self actualization, but in health and safety too.

Now, the Tindouf camps, having set up their own basic healthcare and education, will probably be able to endure and maintain minimal standards of living even through the current period of hardship and international neglect and even opposition. But again, survival does not equate to a life with dignity, nor does it assure that basic needs like proper healthcare, freedom, justice, esteem, self-actualization or safety are present.

When I spoke with Brahim, he described growing up in a place that was never meant to last, and where making changes to make it last means settling in the current status quo for their inhabitants. And so, fifty years later, the tents remain. Schools teach, clinics operate, aid arrives, insufficient as it may be. But as Bahia Mahmud Awah writes, time has learned not to advance. For the Sahrawi refugees, survival has proven possible. Yet, the international community must look to break the silence around the region and ensure that, beyond survival, dignity, autonomy and hope can flow into the camps, lest they are forced to endure yet another half a century of limbo.

In this episode rafael discusses the post conflict experience of Sahwari Refugees. What the situation on the ground is decades down the road. He is a Citizen journalist with us on a placement organised with Department of War Studies, King’s College, London.

Thank you for reading an A4R 🎨 Post. Don’t forget to try out gaming art NFT’s here. Every purchase scales our impact and pays our bills.

Ciao Trailblazers,

What happens when the conflict ends? What happens when the revolutions are over? How do people cope with rebuilding their lives? How do people cope with rebuiding their communties? This has been the core of what we focus here. It has been the bases of our work with GenZ. We took the approach to co create news with GenZ to inspire you and their generation to get invloved in shaping the news. GenZ inspired news with us focuses on the human needs of these communties. Now we have also progressed to adding the economic aspects to the mix as well - we collaboarte with Impact Entrepreneur Magazine for this.

Here is a good example -

• How the 2003 Border Reopening is Changing the Face of Cypriot Identity? Link here.

• Business Across the Green Line. What Cyprus’s bicommunal enterprises reveal about trust, trade, and divided economies? Link here.

Both these articles were researched and authored by Ariel. The first one was for us with a focus on the human needs of the communites rebuilding themselves. The second, focuses on the economic side of rebuilding after the conflict is over and published by Impact Entrepreneurship Magazine.

We co create with GenZ becuase we feel you understand the world we live as much as the rest of us. You have your own generational perspective which is entering the mainstream as you enter the mainstream of society and the economy. Your perspective to us matters. It is fresh and has meaning to your own peer groups as well. More importantly, it ensures you are engaged in issues impacting communties recovering from conflict. You understand their actual needs. You understand how long it can take for a community rebuilf itself once the conflict is over. You understand the underlying issues these communites have and how similar they are to your won daily struggles.

Here are some background articles about us as a community. In case yu missed them - look’em up here.

• Guest Post - Connecting the Dots to Amplify BizGees Social Impact Advocacy by from Jackie Abramian Founder of Global Cadence. Link here. Jackie has supported us over the years. We co created the current Citizen Journalism programme with her support.

• Ink & Ashes - They Told Us, So We Changed: How Gen Z Redesigned A4R From the Inside. Link here.

• Ink & Ashes - A Pattern, Not a Coincidence. Link here.

So, don’t forget to share and tell your friends.

Raw & Real from GenZ - unfiltered updates

Click here to play, listen and learn more about famous refugees from an arty background we all love.

Click here for the podcasts and articles about how communites recovering conflict are coping with their human needs.

Learn more about the exclusive merchandise you can unlock with Norbett Brainin NFT here

Don’t forget to scale our impact we need your support. You can make a direct donation - these are tax deductible only for US tax payers at the moment. Support us here.

It’s great to have you with us along this journey. Till next month — enjoy our vibers work along the way. 😊

With gratitude,

Zufi, Michael, Jackie, Victoria & the Vibers.

Newsletter Summary Report

Primary Focus

This newsletter examines what happens after conflict and revolution end, with a particular focus on how individuals and communities rebuild their lives, identities, relationships and economies.

Key Themes

• Post-conflict recovery and community rebuilding.

• Human needs and the long-term challenges faced by communities after conflict.

• The economic dimensions of recovery, including trust, trade and cross-community cooperation.

• Gen Z participation in journalism and shaping how stories about conflict and recovery are reported.

Featured Research and Articles

Cyprus: Identity and Post-Conflict Recovery
Gen Z contributor Ariel researched and authored two articles examining different aspects of Cyprus following the reopening of the border in 2003:

• How the 2003 Border Reopening is Changing the Face of Cypriot Identity? explores the human and social impact of the border reopening and its influence on identity and communities.

• Business Across the Green Line examines bicommunal enterprises and the role of trust, trade and economic cooperation in divided communities.

Together, these articles demonstrate A4R Media Hub’s approach to examining both the human and economic dimensions of rebuilding after conflict.

Gen Z Co-Created Journalism

A4R Media Hub works with Gen Z contributors, known as Vibers, to co-create journalism and media. The approach is based on the belief that Gen Z brings a distinct generational perspective to issues affecting communities recovering from conflict and can play an active role in shaping the news and public conversation.

The newsletter also references the development of A4R’s Gen Z citizen journalism programme, including the role of community collaboration in shaping the programme.

Additional Background Content

The newsletter links to previous articles covering:

• The development of A4R’s Gen Z-led citizen journalism approach.

• How Gen Z contributors helped redesign A4R Media Hub.

• Patterns and shared experiences affecting communities and social issues explored by the A4R community.

Media and Community Resources

This edition also includes:

• Micro-games exploring the stories of famous refugees from artistic and cultural backgrounds.

• Podcasts and articles examining how communities recovering from conflict address their human needs.

• Information about the Norbett Brainin NFT and associated merchandise.

• Information on supporting Arts4Refugees through donations - Tax deductible for US tax payers.

Overall Context

The newsletter presents A4R Media Hub’s continuing work to connect Gen Z perspectives with stories about post-conflict recovery. Its current editorial focus combines human needs, community resilience, identity and economic recovery to better understand the long-term process of rebuilding after conflict.

A4R 🎨 Monthly is a user supported publication. Don’t forget to tell others about us.

Click here to play & learn.

Back Story

Art providing hope: meet the Artist whose cartoons help transform the lives of Syrian children

When civil war broke out, Diala Brisly fled Syria, travelling to Turkey and Lebanon where she found a new mission: helping children heal. Campaigning against the Assad regime showed Diala the power of her drawings and in Beirut she found that painting bright murals collaboratively with children gave them space to process their trauma. She is a driving force behind the children’s magazine Zayton and Zaytonah (Olive and Olivia) which reminds Syrian children how to be normal despite their experiences. Her work often serves as a visual education for children in refugee camps with little access to school. Diala now resides in southern France where she has shifted her focus to her story and personal experience as a refugee. Her work grapples with themes like ‘survivor’s guilt’ and what it means to carry your culture around with you.

The conflict in Syria:

The situation in Syria started to become dangerous for Diala following the outbreak of the civil war. Pro-democracy demonstrations, linked to the Arab Spring in 2011 were met by brutality from the government. The Free Syrian Army was formed by defectors from the Syrian Army with the aim of overthrowing the Assad regime, an authoritarian dictatorship headed by President Bashar al-Assad. His rule was characterised by violence and oppression and during the war itself he is thought to have uses chemical weapons, and dropped barrel bombs on civilian neighbourhoods, including schools and hospitals. Through 55,000 images, the Caesar files document the industrial scale torture and execution in state prisons sanctioned by the regime. Assad’s forces made use of ‘starve or surrender’ tactics, placing entire cities under siege. According to UN agencies, 13-14 million Syrians were either forced to flee the country or were internally displaced within Syria. To counteract the violence rescuers like the White Helmets and civilians like Diala worked to preserve lives and alleviate suffering. Assad’s regime was overthrown in 2024 by the rebel group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) which took Damascus and while many Syrians have returned to their homeland, the situation there remains fragile.

Diala’s story:

Beginning her career working for the children’s animated TV channel “Spacetoon”, Diala soon realised the power of art and began publishing work with a political message. Openly criticising the Assad regime would have been incredibly dangerous and have immediately flagged Diala to the Mukhabarat [the secret police] who monitored the ‘electronic army’ of activists; using the pseudonym Elvis Presley, Diala was able to safely circulate her work online. She describes being the only activist amongst her artistic circle; in an interview with The New Arab, she revealed “Out of the ten artists I shared a studio with in Damascus, I was the only activist. It was really sad but they were terrified.”

In 2012, after a massacre in Daraa orchestrated by the government in which over 400 civilians were murdered, Diala began signing her work with her name. She explained that she was no longer content to hide behind a pseudonym, feeling that this was “shameful” when others were being arrested and dying in prison. Her series “Leave Us” was inspired by the events in Daraa; her first, signed illustration of a boy who had lost his arm and leg is accompanied by the words “leave my last hand and leave us.” With this work, Diala challenged Assad’s ‘protection’ narrative, showing that the government was not keeping people safe but actively destroying their future. Fear of being arrested because of her political work was partly what motivated her to leave Syria.

It was not the fear of arrest for her activism alone which motivated her flight. She describes an event which brought the reality of the danger all too close. While smuggling medical supplies under the seat of her car, Diala was stopped at a checkpoint. If they had found the medical supplies she was hiding, she would have been killed. The Assad regime declared bringing medical aid to rebel areas was a “terrorist act” and those found with supplies were executed; the Mukhabarat would use temporary checkpoints to catch people. Fortunately for Diala, the soldier was drunk and let her go because she was a “beautiful woman.” The fact that her life had hung on the whim of a drunk soldier made her realise she had to get out. She left Syria, first fleeing to Istanbul, Turkey, and then to Beirut, Lebanon.

In Istanbul, she began production of the children’s magazine Zayton and Zaytonah [Olive and Olivia], an apolitical magazine smuggled into Syria to restore a sense of normalcy. In Lebanon, she found more ways to use her artwork as a force for good; she offered to paint a mural for a woman opening a library for displaced Syrian children. Diala had the idea to do more of this, voluntarily, in refugee camps. She painted murals with children and offered art therapy workshops. She admits that often this was challenging; the children she was working with were scarred from their experiences and often drew pictures of the horrific things they had seen and been through. Diala’s aim was to help them shift their focus towards hope for the future though images featuring constellations and fun cartoon characters that fly through the sky. She wished to provide a break from the dullness of the refugee camps with bright, joyful colours; tents, mud and skies formed a world of grey, mirroring the dire situation the refugees found themselves in. Diala’s murals created a sensory escape.

Before her passport expired, Diala was keen to leave Lebanon. “I didn’t have a good childhood. So, I want to have a good rest of my life” she says in an interview. She found a host family in Pelissanne, France, where she moved after securing a visa. There she was granted the NORA scholarship, a prestigious residency programme designed to support people with refugee status in France, providing a stable environment and links to French artistic networks. In France, Diala found that she could continue her work with refugees without being physically present. Working on canvas, she creates work that can be shipped to Lebanon, continuing to provide hope and escapism for displaced children. Her artistic journey became more personal, moving away from digital tools and street art towards slower canvas work. Her participation in major European exhibitions, such as the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris solidified her status as a global artist.

Since moving to Europe, Diala has been able to create varied work, much of which explores her experiences and her relationship to her past. In 2023, Diala spent two-month in Rotterdam as part of the INSPIRE Rotterdam Residency which focussed on collective healing from war related trauma. Her project “You Are Not Alone” invites people to connect with their “bodies, memories, emotions, and each other.” It emphasises the way trauma is stored in the body, her art provides a guide to releasing it. One poignant image features a woman, crouched down with a large snail sitting on her head. The snail is a metaphor for the burden which refugees carry, of all that has been left behind, as well as the culture and language; refugees are homeless in the traditional sense but bring with them their entire world. Diala’s artwork is no longer just for children; it touches an audience of all ages.

Diala’s story is one that many refugees resonate with. Her desire to bring aid to those who have been failed by the leaders who should protect them ultimately had to come second to protecting her personal safety. Grappling with survivor’s guilt, she remained committed to helping others, if not in the form of medical supplies, then through emotional healing. Her artwork tells the story of her activism, her humanitarian work, and finally her journey to personal healing, working through somatic trauma alongside others from the refugee community. A survivor of unimaginable hardships, Diala’s dedication and resourcefulness, her continued commitment to hope is testament to the transformative power of art to bridge the gap between trauma and healing.

In this post Harriet highlights the arty refugee experience of Diala Brisly. She is a citizen journalist on a placement with us organised by Oxford University Career Services. She also organised the micro game to make the journalistic experience interactive.

Thank you for reading an A4R 🎨 Post. Don’t forget to visit our gaming art here. Every purchase scales our impact and pays our bills.

Thirty Years After Genocide: How Rwanda and Bosnia Rebuild Safety, Identity, and Belonging

Introduction

In 1994, genocide devastated Rwanda. A year later, the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina ended after atrocities that included the massacre in Srebrenica. The violence in both places is well documented and internationally recognised. Courts delivered rulings. Memorials were built. Peace agreements were signed.

What receives less attention is what comes after the formal end of violence. Genocide does not only destroy lives; it damages trust, fractures identity, and erodes the basic sense that society is safe. Rebuilding is not only political or economic. It is social and psychological. It is about whether people feel secure in their neighborhoods, whether justice feels credible, and whether younger generations can imagine a future not defined entirely by inherited trauma.

Three decades later, Rwanda and Bosnia offer two distinct, still evolving approaches to recovery. Both have avoided renewed mass violence. Both continue to grapple with the harder task of rebuilding belonging and dignity.

Rwanda: Security, Justice, and National Identity

In Rwanda, the immediate priority after 1994 was restoring order. The government consolidated control, dismantled armed groups, and reestablished state authority. Today, the country is widely perceived as stable. Public security is strong, institutions function, and infrastructure has expanded significantly. For many citizens, daily life feels predictable in ways it did not during years of instability.

From a human needs perspective, restoring physical safety was foundational. Without it, reconciliation and development would have been impossible. But Rwanda’s strategy extended beyond security. Leaders also sought to address the social conditions that had enabled genocide, particularly the politicisation of ethnic identity.

Official discourse emphasises unity. Citizens are encouraged to see themselves first as Rwandan. Public references to ethnic categories are discouraged in political life. The aim is preventive: reduce the divisions that once proved catastrophic. Many Rwandans born after 1994 describe their identity primarily in civic rather than ethnic terms.

Justice became another pillar of rebuilding. Alongside international prosecutions, Rwanda created the Gacaca court system, a community-based process designed to handle the enormous number of genocide-related cases. Survivors and accused perpetrators faced each other in local proceedings. Confession and testimony were central, and reduced sentences were sometimes granted in exchange for truth-telling.

Gacaca remains debated. It was faster and more locally embedded than conventional courts, and it processed a vast number of cases. At the same time, it placed heavy emotional burdens on survivors and did not always meet international standards of due process. Still, it made accountability visible. Justice unfolded within communities rather than at a distance.

Memory in Rwanda is also structured and highly visible. Annual national commemorations mark the genocide, and memorial sites are maintained across the country. Remembrance is framed as a civic responsibility and a safeguard against denial. The message is clear: what happened will not be forgotten.

Yet Rwanda’s centralised model has prompted debate about political space and dissent. Critics argue that reconciliation narratives are shaped largely from above and that political opposition is constrained. Supporters counter that strong state direction has been necessary to preserve stability in a society once pushed to the brink.

Three decades on, Rwanda presents a complex picture. Security is robust. Economic growth has been notable. Women hold a significant share of parliamentary seats. But trauma persists, particularly among survivors who continue to require psychological support. Recovery here has meant prioritising order and unity, even as questions about political openness remain.

Bosnia and Herzegovina: Peace Within Division

Bosnia’s post-war path followed a different logic. The 1995 Dayton Agreement ended the conflict but established a highly decentralised political system. Power is shared among Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs through a layered structure of entities, cantons, and rotating leadership positions. The design was intended to prevent domination by any one group and to guarantee representation for all.

In its most basic aim, the agreement succeeded. Large-scale violence has not resumed. International peacekeeping forces gradually reduced their presence as conditions stabilised. For many citizens, safety now means the absence of war and the predictability of daily life.

But the same framework that preserves peace also reinforces division. Ethnic identity remains embedded in political institutions. In some areas, students from different communities attend separate classes, sometimes within the same building. Historical narratives can vary depending on which curriculum they are taught.

Unlike Rwanda’s effort to minimise ethnic categories, Bosnia’s system formalises them. Identity is not sidelined; it is built into the state. This creates a paradox. The structure protects groups from marginalisation, but it can also limit the development of a cohesive national identity.

Justice for war crimes has taken place largely through international and national courts. Convictions related to atrocities, including those committed in Srebrenica, established legal recognition and accountability. Yet acknowledgment at the community level is uneven. Competing narratives about responsibility and victimhood persist in some regions.

Memorialisation reflects this fragmentation. Commemorations and memorial sites exist, but they are often associated with specific communities rather than a shared national narrative. Memory is present, but it is plural and sometimes contested.

At the local level, however, daily life is often more integrated than political discourse suggests. In mixed urban areas, people share workplaces, universities, and social spaces. Civil society groups promote interethnic dialogue and youth initiatives aimed at building trust. Many young Bosnians express greater frustration with economic stagnation and political gridlock than with neighboring communities.

This generational dimension is significant. Those born after the war did not experience the violence directly, though they inherit its memory through family stories and public commemorations. For some, identity is flexible and evolving. For others, it remains closely tied to group affiliation. High rates of emigration suggest that economic opportunity and personal autonomy weigh heavily in how young people assess their future.

Bosnia’s recovery has therefore focused on sustaining coexistence within a divided political framework. It manages differences rather than attempting to dissolve it. Peace here is pragmatic, not transformative.

Shared Patterns, Diverging Strategies

Both Rwanda and Bosnia show that rebuilding begins with restoring security. Without physical safety, deeper recovery cannot take hold. The absence of renewed mass violence over three decades is itself a significant achievement.

Both also demonstrate that justice matters beyond punishment. Whether through Rwanda’s community-based Gacaca courts or Bosnia’s reliance on international tribunals, formal acknowledgment of wrongdoing helps restore dignity and affirm truth. Yet neither approach fully resolves trauma or erases contested narratives.

The sharpest contrast lies in identity reconstruction. Rwanda has pursued national unity and reduced the public salience of ethnicity. Bosnia has institutionalised ethnic pluralism as a safeguard against renewed conflict. Each strategy responds to the same fear of recurrence, but through opposite means.

In both societies, trauma extends beyond the generation that experienced the violence directly. Psychological research suggests that fear, grief, and silence can shape families and collective memory for decades. Recovery is not confined to treaties or courtrooms. It unfolds in classrooms, neighborhoods, and homes.

Conclusion

Thirty years is long enough for new institutions to take root and for children born after violence to reach adulthood. It is not long enough to erase the social and psychological consequences of genocide.

Rwanda and Bosnia do not offer a single template for recovery. Instead, they reveal how rebuilding after mass violence is uneven, contested, and deeply human. It requires creating conditions in which people feel safe enough to participate in public life, to express identity without fear, and to imagine a future not wholly defined by trauma.

Genocide ends as an event. Its aftermath becomes part of everyday life. The true measure of recovery is not the absence of tension, but the presence of enough stability, recognition, and agency that ordinary life can continue without the threat of violence returning.

In this episode Luuk discusses the post conflict experience of Bosnia and Rwanda. What the situation on the ground is decades down the road with a focus on Safety and Identity. He is a Citizen journalist with us on a placement organised with Department of War Studies, King’s College, London.

Thank you for reading an A4R 🎨 Post. Don’t forget to try out gaming art NFT’s here. Every purchase scales our impact and pays our bills.

Connecting the Dots to Amplify BizGees Social Impact Advocacy

In 2009, I came across Zulfi’s LinkedIn post about BizGees and reached out to learn more about the FinTech startup positioning itself as the catalyst for the world’s refugee populations. BizGees had already been recognized with high-profile awards at the Infosys Challenge for Financial Inclusion, the UNICEF FinTech Jam for Good. and the EUvsVirus Hackathon.

Since that initial connection, BizGees’ innovative offerings have peaked and garnered further recognition.

What piqued my attention initially was the interest and collateral-free microfinance and custom trade finance offerings BizGees had designed to uplift and transform refugees in post-conflict regions into micro-business owners. Empowering reconstruction in post-conflict regions was timely as the global refugee crisis was on an uptick.

BizGees’ mission uniquely aligned with my personal and professional focus. As a board member of Democracy Today NGO in Armenia, I had witnessed how projects that empower women and youth financially impact rural regions and create an ecosystem of change that uplifts the whole community. As a corporate communications consultant, I use creative strategies to amplify tech and social enterprise organizations by highlighting their unique stories and tangible impact. As a magazine contributor, I focus on social justice issues, profiling women social entrepreneurs whose creative business models and services help elevate and improve the lives of forcibly, internally displaced, and underserved people to achieve financial independence.

In discussions with Zufi, we decided I could help amplify BizGees’ brand visibility across media platforms that focused on social enterprises. We focused on the global impact programs across Uganda, Kenya, Pakistan (Swat Valley) - and later on Lebanon, the UK, and the U.S. Secured media interviews allowed Zufi to highlight unique stories across See Change Magazine, in Thrive Global’s Social Entrepreneurs – What Inspires and Motivates These Change Makers article, in TheBlockTalk’s Baking Bread in a Refugee Camp Just Got Easier and on the Superpowers for Good with host, Devin Thorpe.

Global Cadence and BizGees soon forged an agreement to continue media visibility efforts as BizGees delved into Web3.0 projects. Later, as an advisory board member, I witnessed Zufi and his team launch the innovative digital platform A4R Media Hub, merging AI-assisted storytelling, gaming-inspired interactive journalism, and Web3 publishing tools to empower marginalized and refugee communities through alternative finance and decentralized technology offerings.

As an internship host partner to Oxford University career services, King’s College, London, and SciencesPo, BizGees elevated the power of storytelling by Gen Zs with a special focus on post-conflict regions.

The globally-minded, informed students who joined as interns delved into the complexities of forcibly displaced refugees. Leveraging their academic studies, insights, keen curiosity, and investigative research, the interns methodically worked on articles, guided by the BizGees team, to unveil the lived hardships of famous refugee artists who had survived wars and displacement and restarted lives in foreign lands, applying a uniquely creative angle that was shaped and informed by their refugee experiences. The thought-provoking articles, AI games, and platforms written and built by Gen Z groups fully dissected the distinct lived challenges facing post-conflict regions and informed and educated a wider audience previously uninformed about such issues.

The Gen Z “Vibers” initiated the Ink & Ashes articles on artisans, forced displacement, and what happens when the war ends, enhancing their training to conduct in-depth research, verify sources, and dig into and tell relatable, impactful stories underreported in mainstream media. The well-crafted investigative narratives were well aligned with professional investigative journalists’ reporting standards.

These professionally crafted articles and AI-enabled, vibe-coded games and platforms became a critical part of the student interns’ academic work, catapulting their CVs to shape their professional lives.

When Zufi and I co-authored Empowering Changemakers and Community Rebuilding for Impact Entrepreneur Magazine, its global platform of nearly 60,000 active members in 180 countries was informed about BizGees’ tailored strategies. But more profoundly, it revealed GenZ citizen journalists’ immensely informative, human-centered, collaborative articles and underscored the need for investors to support the continuation of this critical work.

This led to discussions on possible platforms where GenZ citizen journalists’ in-depth articles could be published and republished to help expand the audience reach.

Discussions with Impact Entrepreneur Magazine founder/editor Laurie Lane-Zucker resulted in A4R Media Hub becoming a content partner of the Magazine’s Impact Journalism Institute. Coverage by Gen Z journalists of how the Impact Economy is developed and tested in communities affected by conflict, displacement, and economic instability is now published on a global platform, reaching audiences worldwide – beyond the BizGees platform on Substack.

Several articles from A4R Media Hub have already been cross-published along with Impact Entrepreneur Magazine’s original journalism and analysis.

What BizGees has managed to create and build, with full collaboration with Gen Zs, can be replicated across other social enterprise platforms - but only with a professionally capable team willing to invest time, money, global insights, and media outreach.

Continued collaboration with BizGees and Zufi has been nothing short of being immensely gratifying. And the future looks more innovative, human-centered, and impactful as BizGees and GenZs jointly create an offering direly needed in our world: a well-balanced, informative, and inclusive platform aimed at driving a future of economic impact as humanitarian cuts underscore the critical need for economically impactful solutions across a growing number of post-conflict regions.

Jackie Abramian is a corporate communications consultant and founder of Global Cadence Consultancy. She has served on BizGees Advisory Board and the Board of Democracy Today NGO in Armenia for decades, and is a magazine contributor on social justice issues and women changemakers.

Thank you for reading an A4R 🎨 Post. Don’t forget to visit our gaming art here. Every purchase scales our impact and pays our bills.

After the 1974 division of Cyprus, identities among Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities were shaped through inherited memories, education and imagination. Yet since the border reopened in 2003, young people’s encounters, friendships and shared spaces have begun reshaping belonging, showing identities can evolve beyond conflict’s legacy for future generations.

Backstory

Beyond 1974: Reimagining Youth Identity in Post 1974 Cyprus

Growing up in a divided home, she has never seen the other side. Most children find a sense of belonging in everyday routines, schoolyards, neighborhood games, and shared celebrations that help them understand their origins. She moves like a shadow between stories she did not choose but inherited. Surrounded by tales of separation she cannot fully grasp, she feels something in her home is still unfinished. A single question haunts her: Where do I truly belong?

Cyprus has been divided along ethnic lines for a long time. On one side are the Greek Cypriots. They have lived on the island since ancient times and mostly associate with the traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church. On the other side are the Turkish Cypriots, whose ancestors arrived during the Ottoman rule starting in the sixteenth century. Most are Muslim. Although they share the same island, the two groups gradually developed different political goals and cultural identities. Over time, they became like distant friends—close enough to see each other daily, yet unable to imagine a shared future.

The biggest disagreement between them was about how Cyprus should be governed. Many Greek Cypriots favored enosis, the unification with Greece, while many Turkish Cypriots preferred taksim, the partition of the island. These conflicting views affected political life throughout the twentieth century and set the stage for the crisis that began in 1974. What started as a constitutional dispute turned into a conflict that reshaped the island’s geography, politics, and emotional landscape.

In July 1974, a coup by the Cypriot National Guard, supported by the military junta in Greece, overthrew President Archbishop Makarios III. The coup aimed to push Cyprus closer to union with Greece. In response, Turkey invoked its rights under the Treaty of Guarantee and launched a military intervention. Turkish forces moved into the northern part of Cyprus, eventually taking control of about one-third of the territory.

The capital city, Nicosia, became physically divided by what is now known as the Green Line, a buffer zone managed by the United Nations that separates the two sides. Although a cease-fire was reached with international help, tensions remained high. Fighting resumed within weeks, and Turkish forces pushed further into the north. The island has stayed divided ever since.

In 1983, the northern part of the island declared itself the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. To this day, it is recognized only by Turkey. The southern part, governed by the Republic of Cyprus and made up mainly of Greek Cypriots, is recognized as the legitimate government of the entire island and later became a member of the European Union. Shared land became divided by borders, languages, flags, and political systems. Cyprus was not just geographically split; it was emotionally divided too.

Imagine hearing these stories from your parents and grandparents, picturing the other side you have never seen. How would you see yourself in such a setting? A sense of belonging is seen as a basic human need, yet children growing up in Cyprus negotiate their identities daily. Who are they really?

For many young Cypriots, the events of 1974 exist only as inherited memories, not lived experiences. The conflict belongs to history, but its meanings still influence the present. Instead of learning about the division through personal experiences, they hear about it through stories shared at dinner tables, school textbooks, and national commemorations. In this way, identity is not just lived; it is passed down. These inherited tales shape how children view themselves and the people on the other side of the island.

Maria grew up hearing such stories. Turkish Cypriots were often described to her as enemies, sometimes even as dangerous outsiders. Schools reinforced identities through national narratives, focusing heavily on Greek history and culture, which deepened her connection with the Greek Cypriot community (Anagiotos and Schied, 2013). Similarly, Turkish Cypriot children heard tales that emphasized differences and threats. Language also reflected these divides. Terms like gavur were historically used to refer to non-Muslim “others,” deepening the separation between communities (Mertan, 2011).

As a result, many children strongly identified as either Greek Cypriots or Turkish Cypriots, while the idea of a shared “Cypriot” identity felt distant or abstract. Identity seemed set, inherited, and unchangeable. But this began to shift in 2003 when a political decision unexpectedly opened new possibilities.

Thirty years after the division, Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash eased restrictions on movement across the buffer zone (Chrisafis, 2003). For the first time in decades, people could cross the previously closed border. What once seemed permanent suddenly became reachable.

On the first day the checkpoints opened, thousands crossed the divide. Some searched for homes they had been forced to leave long ago. Others wanted to see if the “enemy” they had imagined truly existed. Many approached with hesitation; many left in tears.

Nicosia gradually started to change. It was no longer just a symbol of division but also a place for encounters. Streets that were once marked by barriers slowly became places to meet. For many children and young people, these first crossings were emotional and surprising. The “others” they met did not feel completely foreign. They felt oddly familiar.

At bicommunal youth events organized in places like the Home for Cooperation, young people started to find unexpected similarities. One participant discovered that he and his supposed enemy both listened to the same Cypriot songs (Anagiotos and Schied, 2013). Others laughed together while playing bilingual games like Minilingo, which mixed Turkish and Greek words (Home For Cooperation, n.d.). Maria herself later joined a study-abroad program, forming lasting friendships with Turkish Cypriot classmates (Anagiotos and Schied, 2013). Through shared conversations, routines, and experiences, the assumptions she carried since childhood began to change.

These encounters did not erase differences. Language, religion, and political views still mattered. Yet they created space for something new: the idea that identity could be negotiated instead of just inherited. Young people started to see themselves not just as part of separate communities but also as individuals who could shape their relationships with one another.

Today, Cyprus remains physically divided, but more young people are becoming active in redefining what identity means on the island. Their interactions across the divide encourage them to question the stories they inherited from earlier generations. Instead of viewing the past as fate, they explore new ways to belong.

For them, 1974 is no longer a personal trauma but a historical reference point. This distance does not lessen its significance but allows for reinterpretation. Without direct memories of displacement or violence, younger Cypriots are sometimes more open to imagining coexistence. Their experiences suggest that identity can change through contact instead of remaining stuck in conflict.

Unlike their parents, today’s young Cypriots are learning to navigate identities that balance both difference and connection. They are discovering that belonging does not require choosing one side over the other. Instead, it can arise from dialogue, shared experiences, and everyday interactions across boundaries that once seemed unmovable.

Maria’s story reflects this broader change. Her search for belonging is both personal and generational. Like many young Cypriots, she manages inherited memories while creating new meanings for herself. For her generation, the answer to “Where do I belong?” may not be entirely defined by the borders drawn in 1974. Instead, it may lie in the relationships they are building across those borders.

In this sense, the future of Cyprus is shaped not only by discussions among political leaders. It is also quietly influenced by the daily choices of young people who are learning to see each other in a new light (Dizdaroğlu et al., 2026). Through friendship, curiosity, and shared spaces, they are gradually redefining what belonging means on a divided island. In doing so, they remind themselves—and perhaps the world—that identities formed by conflict can also be reshaped through connection.

Bibliography

Anagiotos, Christos and Fred M. Schied. “Learning of National Identity in Areas of Conflict:The Case of Greek-Cypriot Young Adults in Cyprus.” New Prairie Press (2013) :7-12

Chrisafis, Angelique. “Dazzled Cyprus fears a false dawn.” The Guardian. Published 3 May, 2003. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/03/cyprus.angeliquechrisafis [acessed 21 April 2026]

Dizdaroğlu, Cihan., Özen, İlhan Can., and Şenyuva, Özgehan. “Navigating From Negative to Positive Peace: A Quantitative Analysis of Youth Attitudes in Cyprus.” Alternatives Global Local Political (2026)

Home For Cooperation, “Minilingo!Bilingual Cards game.” (n.d.) https://www.home4cooperation.info/our-work/minilingo-bilingual-memory-game/

Mertan, Biran. “Children’s perception of national identity and in-group/out-group attitudes: Turkish-Cypriot school children” European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 8(1)(2011): 74–86

In this episode Ariel discusses the Cypriot expereince of rebuolding identity now that North and Sputh Cyprus have opened their brders to one another. She is a Citizen journalist with us on a placement organised with Department of War Studies, King’s College, London.

Thank you for reading an A4R 🎨 Post. Don’t forget to try out gaming art NFT’s here. Every purchase scales our impact and pays our bills.

The First Generation Raised Inside the Internet

Every generation before this one learned the internet. Gen Z was born into it. Phones, YouTube, group chats, livestreams — not tools they picked up, just the air they breathed growing up. That fluency matters more than it sounds like it should, because it means this generation has never needed permission to speak, to organise, or to be heard. They just do it, the way older generations picked up a landline.

What’s less talked about is what they inherited alongside that fluency: a housing market they can’t afford to enter, a climate crisis they didn’t create, and — at least in Britain — a labour market currently locking out more than a million of their peers. As of early 2026, just over 1 million UK 16-to-24-year-olds were not in education, employment, or training, 13.5% of the age group and the highest number recorded since 2013. Nearly six in ten of them aren’t just unemployed — they’ve stopped looking. Six in ten have never had a job at all.

That’s not a side statistic. That’s the backdrop every Gen Z creator we work with is living against, whether or not they ever mention it.

They Care, and They’re Not Waiting to Be Asked

Here’s what we’ve actually seen, not as a theory but as a pattern: Gen Z is arguably the most civically engaged generation since records on this began. From Kathmandu to Jakarta to Rabat, 2025 and 2026 saw youth-led protest movements reshape governments across multiple continents, organised and broadcast almost entirely peer-to-peer, with young people livestreaming events as they happened instead of waiting for someone else to report them later. Whatever you think of any single movement, the underlying signal is unmistakable: this generation isn’t content to inherit decisions. They want a hand on the wheel of their own future, and they’ve built the tools to take it without asking permission first.

Citizen journalism — ordinary people documenting and sharing what they witness, peer to peer, without a press pass — is one of those tools. It’s not new, but Gen Z is the first generation for whom it’s simply native. A phone, a platform, a story worth telling. No gatekeeper required.

We’ve watched this play out inside our own community at A4R. The young people who came to us weren’t passive participants waiting to be assigned a task. They told us, plainly, that they cared deeply about refugees and communities rebuilding after conflict — that was never in question. But they told us something else too: they also wanted the people they live next door to benefit. Not instead of the global work. Alongside it.

We Went Back to the Drawing Board

We listened, and then we did something about it. A4R Media Hub redesigned its own offering around what our own Vibers told us they needed — and the result is a model built to do two things at once, not one or the other.

The original core is still there and isn’t going anywhere: vocational training that helps Gen Z build real CVs and professional skills while still at university, working alongside communities recovering from conflict around the world, telling their stories with the depth and accuracy those stories deserve.

What’s new is the second half. That same vocational training now also reaches NEET young people in the UK and the US — the more than a million 16-to-24-year-olds in Britain alone currently locked out of education, employment, and training, often the people our Vibers grew up next door to, went to school with, or see every day and used to have no way to reach through our work.

This isn’t a pivot away from the original mission. It’s the same mission, co-designed by the people living it, now wide enough to hold both halves of what they actually care about at the same time.

What This Means for How You Read Everything Else We Publish

Every Ink & Ashes piece you’ve read — on artisans, on displacement, on fast fashion’s hidden costs — was inspired by a Viber using exactly this training: research, verification, the discipline to find a true story and tell it honestly. That training was built first for global, post-conflict storytelling. It’s now also building CVs and professional futures for young people closer to home who never had access to anything like it before.

That’s the whole point of citizen journalism done right, and the whole point of why we changed: not performance, not a viral moment, but a real skill in real hands, pointed at a real gap nobody else was closing — whether that gap sits eight time zones away or two streets over.

We didn’t redesign this because a consultant told us to. We redesigned it because the young people we work with told us what mattered to them, and we believed them enough to rebuild around it.

If that’s a story worth something to you, it only travels as far as you carry it. Tell ten people about it today.

Join the conversation

The A4R Media Hub is co-created by Gen Z, for Gen Z — on the issues that matter most, made by young people who refuse to look away.

🔗 Explore our latest work at arts4refugees.com

This piece was produced as part of the Ink & Ashes series at the Arts4Refugees Media Hub, in collaboration with the BizGees community and the Gen Z Vibers co-creating it.

Thank you for reading an A4R 🎨 Post. Don’t forget to visit our gaming art here. Every purchase scales our impact and pays our bills.

AT A GLANCE - This article examines how Libya's 2020 ceasefire failed to deliver safety for ordinary citizens. Through the 2025 Tripoli clashes, the 2023 Derna floods, and the experiences of migrants and women, it shows that conflict's consequences - violence, neglect, and vulnerability - never stopped.

Backstory

Peace on Paper: The Daily Fight for Survival in Libya

In the Ain Zara area of Tripoli, a 21-year-old women was killed after a shell fell on her family’s house. She was the only female child, surrounded by brothers and due to be wed within the coming months. Upsettingly, this is not a lone story. Brothers Salem and Nagib al-Tajouri were killed in similar fashion that same week whilst other innocent citizens were targeted on the streets and fatally injured (Human Rights Watch, 2025.).

This may seem like a description of a war-torn country, entrenched in conflict but this is in fact a description of Libya’s Capital between 12 and 14 May 2025 – five years after a ceasefire was signed (UN, 2020.).

For the citizens of Libya, peace was never anything more than a promise on paper.

The Failed Ceasefire

Libya has been in a state of turmoil since 2011, where there was an armed revolt against dictator Muammar Gaddafi which resulted in his death of October that same year (Reuters, 2025). Since then, the country has been in turmoil with the rise of rival factions: The Government of National Accord based in Tripoli and the House of Representatives based in Tobruk. After 6 years of regional rivalry, a ceasefire was signed on 23 October 2020, promising a return to democracy with planned elections in December 2021 (Brooke-Holland, 2024.).

There were high hopes for the agreement with Acting Special Representative of the Secretary-General, Stephanie Williams saying:

“I hope that this agreement will contribute to ending the suffering of the Libyan people and enabling the displaced, both outside and inside the country, to return to their homes and live in peace and security.” (UN, 2020.)

This was not the case.

The promised 2021 elections never took place. The interim government overstayed its mandate, reigniting tensions between east and west due to their lack of legitimacy. Within little over a year of the agreement being signed, it had already unravelled and with it, any prospect of the safety it had promised.

The Daily Realities

The 2025 Tripoli clashes provide a valuable insight into how perilous Libya still truly is for the average citizen. Dr Mustafa Fetouri, Tripoli native, writes:

“Residents live under the constant threat of sudden, brutal clashes that have become part of their daily routine for years now. The sprawling capital stands precariously on the edge of renewed violence.” (Fetouri, 2025.)

After the death of militia leader, Abdulghani Kikli, rival factions started to jostle for control over Tripoli, leading to the city being plunged into conflict in May 2025. This meant that again the innocent population had to fear for their lives, even though peace had been promised. Many residents came forward, describing the heavy gunfire that echoed around their neighbourhood whilst others reported seeing “red lights in the sky.” The situation became so precarious that the government enforced a lockdown to make sure residents weren’t caught in the crossfire (Reuters, 2025.).

Dr Fetouri’s writing also highlights something much harder to measure mental trauma. Residents now must live with constant fear of conflict, forever wondering if themselves and their loved ones will survive to live another day. Security, both mentally and physically, is sadly more of a hope than a guarantee.

The lack of unity in Libya hasn’t only made the country more prone to violence but has also deeply hampered the way the country responds to issues, with the 2023 Derna Floods being a devastating example.

In September 2023, Storm Daniel crossed the Mediterranean and wreaked havoc on the coastal city of Derna. The storm had destroyed old dams which exacerbated the flooding, causing the estimated death of 2000 people and a further 5000 people to go missing on the first day (England, 2023.). This is a harrowing tragedy mostly caused by environmental issues, but most of the blame can be placed on the country’s continued conflict. The dams in Derna were built in the 1970s and were in massive need of refurbishment, but the continuance of violence meant no focus could be placed on renovation of infrastructure. It has been estimated that, across the multiple days, 20,000 may have perished. The ongoing rivalry doesn’t just mean more conflict, but it also means the abandonment of other pressing issues that could cause the deaths of thousands (Al-Atrush, 2025.).

The separate factions also made it highly difficult to coordinate effective responses. This is best put by Tim Eaton, Libya expert, who said:

It also made it very difficult for the international community, Britain in particular, to provide aid as they don’t want to show preference to even faction, making it extremely difficult to help the guiltless citizens that deserve help. Journalist Alex Crawford understood the predicament and said:

“There’s got to be some sort of way of getting round this bureaucracy and tiptoeing through this minefield of politics because the actual Libyan people are crying out for aid.” (Baker, 2023.)

Libyans are at constant risk. Even after the ceasefire, conflict has been very present with many uninvolved citizens getting caught in the middle whilst others are forever traumatised. Even in areas when there is very little conflict, their safety is still at jeopardy due to the very little focus there is on things such as infrastructure. There is no assured safety in Libya.

The Most Vulnerable Groups

Not all groups within Libya are treated the same, with migrants, asylum-seekers and refugees experiencing extreme levels of abuse. Many escape to Libya, hoping to escape war torn countries like South Sudan to either, reach Europe or to start a new life in Libya. Instead, many fine themselves trapped in human trafficking schemes whilst young girls and women find themselves facing sexual violence and exploitation. A Kenyan national labelled George outlined his experience:

“They would call our families using different telephone numbers, asking them for money. There was a boy who rebelled — he was beaten and killed. We were told we would be beaten until our people paid the ransom. If they didn’t, they would kill us, abandon us, or throw us into the desert.” (Headly, 2026.)

Having already been touched upon, the rivalling governments makes women much more vulnerable to sexual crimes and even death. Women find themselves prone to the violence of armed groups who are supposed to protect them, meaning there is a lack of people to turn to for help. This has led to increased rates of femicide with the deaths of Khansa Al-Mujahid, Amani Hajja and another unidentified woman in quick succession (Alatrash and Holleis, 2025.).

Libya is riddled with various systemic issues such as abuse of migrants and unfair treatment of women but due to the discord between the East and the West, these issues are put to the side and neglected. These groups already live in apprehension but due to things they can’t control they have to worry further. Their little security is only decreased further.

Conclusion

The ceasefire in 2020 was supposed to make Libya safer and ensure the safety and security of everyone who resides in the country. It has failed to do that as citizens again find themselves at the mercy of conflict. Whilst innocent residents die in Tripoli due to aimless shells, residents in Derna find themselves at risk of being drowned. Migrants find themselves at risk of being trafficked whilst women find themselves increasingly susceptible to sexual crimes.

The agreement has done very little, and peace was nothing more than a promise on paper.

Bibliography

Al-Atrush, Samer. “‘All should resign’: Derna disaster unleashes wave of anger in Libya.” Financial Times, September 15, 2023. https://www.ft.com/content/7cd8d5f0-39a9-4594-b021-e80dcada5ace?syn-25a6b1a6=1.

Alatrash, Islam., Holleis, Jennifer. “Femicides in Libya spark calls for tougher laws.” DW, January 12, 2025. https://www.dw.com/en/libya-femicides-laws-womens-rights-feminism-violence-un/a-74970845.

Baker, Tim. “Libya floods: Civil war makes it ‘incredibly difficult’ to get help to flood victims in divided country, Cleverly says.” Sky News, September 17, 2023. https://news.sky.com/story/libya-floods-civil-war-makes-it-incredibly-difficult-to-get-help-to-flood-victims-in-divided-country-cleverly-says-12963322.

Brooke-Holland, Louisa. “Libya: Political developments since 2011.” House of Commons Library, October 1, 2024. https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-10103/CBP-10103.pdf.

England, Andrew. “Libya flooding leaves hundreds feared dead.” Financial Times, September 11, 2023. https://www.ft.com/content/a05f7b93-7a67-4c76-adac-288f7874c4a1?syn-25a6b1a6=1.

Fetouri, Dr Mustafa. “The excruciating wait: Tripoli on the brink of a war that may never happen.” Middle East Monitor, September 12, 2025. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250912-the-excruciating-wait-tripoli-on-the-brink-of-a-war-that-may-never-happen/.

Headly, Anthony. “Libya: A pattern of systematic human rights violations and abuses against migrants.” OHCHR, February 17, 2026. https://www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2026/02/libya-pattern-systematic-human-rights-violations-and-abuses-against-migrants.

Human Rights Watch. “Libya: Civilians Caught in Militia Clashes.” Human Rights Watch, May 20, 2025. https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/05/20/libya-civilians-caught-militia-clashes.

Reuters. “Armed clashes erupt in Libya’s Tripoli after reported killing of armed group leader.” Reuters, May 13, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/armed-clashes-erupt-libyas-tripoli-after-reported-killing-armed-group-leader-2025-05-12/.

Reuters. “Libya’s crisis: A timeline of events since the 2011 uprising.” Reuters, May 14, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/how-libyas-years-crisis-unfolded-after-2011-uprising-2024-08-28/.

United Nations. “UN salutes new Libya ceasefire agreement that points to ‘a better, safer, and more peaceful future’.” UN News, October 23, 2020. https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/10/1076012.

In this episode Richan discusses the Libyan expereince post 2020 ceasefire and how it failed to deliver peace and security for the ordinary citizens there. He is a Citizen journalist with us on a placement organised with Department of War Studies, King’s College, London.

Thank you for reading an A4R 🎨 Post. Don’t forget to try out gaming art NFT’s here. Every purchase scales our impact and pays our bills.

Look Closely Enough and It Stops Looking Like Chance

Go back through this series and a strange thing happens. A Viber found an artist mapping displacement and couldn’t let it go. Another made two cards about trauma because a myth had been sitting unquestioned for too long. Another wrote about compounding good acts like deposits in an account. Different topics, different voices, different cards — but underneath all of them, the same starting conditions: time to look properly, training to look well, and space to say something true without anyone editing the edges off it.

That’s not luck repeating itself 480 times. That’s what happens when you build the right conditions deliberately, then get out of the way.

We Didn’t Design This Alone

Here’s the part that matters most: A4R didn’t invent this pattern from the outside and hand it down. Our community told us what they actually needed — not in a survey, in real conversations, over real work — and we went back and rebuilt around what we heard. That’s co-design, not as a buzzword but as the literal mechanism: the people the model serves are the ones who shaped it.

What came out the other side reaches further than it did when we started. The same training that builds a CV and a portfolio for a university student working with post-conflict communities abroad now also reaches NEET young people closer to home — people who never had access to anything like this before, doing work that meets them where they actually are, not where a generic programme assumed they’d be.

The Next 480 Are Waiting on Capacity, Not Ideas

The model works. That’s not a hope, it’s a track record. What it’s short of now isn’t a better idea — it’s room. Every new Viber who comes through, every NEET young person this model now reaches, needs the same starting conditions the first 480 got: time, training, space, and somewhere real to publish what they make.

That’s where this gets practical. Every like helps a story reach someone who’d never have seen it. Every share moves it through a network we don’t have on our own. Every follow keeps you in the room for the next one. Every sign-up turns a single moment of attention into an ongoing connection. Every donation adds capacity directly — one more Viber trained, one more NEET young person given a way in, one more story that proves the pattern again.

None of those actions are small next to each other. They’re stages of the same thing: helping a method that already works reach as many people as it’s capable of reaching.

Look Closely Enough and It Stops Looking Like Chance

Go back through this series and a strange thing happens. A Viber found an artist mapping displacement and couldn’t let it go. Another made two cards about trauma because a myth had been sitting unquestioned for too long. Another wrote about compounding good acts like deposits in an account. Different topics, different voices, different cards — but underneath all of them, the same starting conditions: time to look properly, training to look well, and space to say something true without anyone editing the edges off it.

That’s not luck repeating itself 480 times. That’s what happens when you build the right conditions deliberately, then get out of the way.

We Didn’t Design This Alone

Here’s the part that matters most: A4R didn’t invent this pattern from the outside and hand it down. Our community told us what they actually needed — not in a survey, in real conversations, over real work — and we went back and rebuilt around what we heard. That’s co-design, not as a buzzword but as the literal mechanism: the people the model serves are the ones who shaped it.

What came out the other side reaches further than it did when we started. The same training that builds a CV and a portfolio for a university student working with post-conflict communities abroad now also reaches NEET young people closer to home — people who never had access to anything like this before, doing work that meets them where they actually are, not where a generic programme assumed they’d be.

The Next 480 Are Waiting on Capacity, Not Ideas

The model works. That’s not a hope, it’s a track record. What it’s short of now isn’t a better idea — it’s room. Every new Viber who comes through, every NEET young person this model now reaches, needs the same starting conditions the first 480 got: time, training, space, and somewhere real to publish what they make.

That’s where this gets practical. Every like helps a story reach someone who’d never have seen it. Every share moves it through a network we don’t have on our own. Every follow keeps you in the room for the next one. Every sign-up turns a single moment of attention into an ongoing connection. Every donation adds capacity directly — one more Viber trained, one more NEET young person given a way in, one more story that proves the pattern again.

None of those actions are small next to each other. They’re stages of the same thing: helping a method that already works reach as many people as it’s capable of reaching.

This Isn’t an Experiment Anymore

Five years and 480+ Vibers in, the question has changed. It used to be “does co-design with Gen Z actually produce something real?” It does. The pattern proves it, piece after piece. The question now is simpler and bigger: how far can this go if more people decide to help carry it?

That’s the invitation. Not to fund a hope. To grow something that’s already shown what it can do.

Join the conversation

The A4R Media Hub is co-created by Gen Z, for Gen Z — on the issues that matter most, made by young people who refuse to look away.

🔗 Explore our latest work at arts4refugees.com

This piece was produced as part of the Ink & Ashes series at the Arts4Refugees Media Hub, in collaboration with the BizGees community and the Gen Z Vibers co-creating it.

Thank you for reading an A4R 🎨 Post. Don’t forget to visit our gaming art here. Every purchase scales our impact and pays our bills.

After the fall of Bashar al-Assad, over a million Syrians returned home, but return is fraught with hardship. War has devastated infrastructure and the economy, while years abroad have reshaped identities. Many refugees feel torn between two “homes,” facing pressure from host countries yet uncertainty in Syria, making return a complex, often temporary, and deeply personal decision.

Backstory

To Return or not to Return? The dilemma faced by Syrian refugees post-conflict

When Khalid al-Shatta stepped off a plane in Damascus in early 2025 — thirteen years after fleeing with his wife and infant son — he described a feeling that most of us would struggle to name. “The moment Syria was liberated, we made our decision,” he told Al Jazeera (AJLabs, 2025). And when he finally arrived, he felt like he had never left. But there was one difference, he added: a new sense of belonging to the country, the nation, the land. After thirteen years, home no longer felt like home by default. It had to be chosen.

That feeling — the act of choosing a place that was once simply yours — sits at the heart of what is happening to Syria right now. Since the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, over one million Syrians have returned from neighbouring countries and beyond, joining nearly two million internally displaced people who have made their way back to their areas of origin (UNHCR, 2026). It is one of the largest return movements in modern history. But a return movement is not a resolution. For the millions caught between a country that displaced them and the countries that never fully accepted them, the question of where they belong has become the defining human challenge of post-conflict Syria — and it does not have a clear answer.

Home is not what they left it

The war has scattered Syrian people all over. 7.4 million Syrians are internally displaced, and approximately 6 million are abroad, living in countries such as Germany, Türkiye, and Lebanon. Imagine, after years of being forcibly separated from your home, you finally have the opportunity to return. A no brainer, right? Surely anyone would jump at the occasion to come back to their own house, their own community, their own country.

For Syrian refugees it is not so simple.

The nearly 14 year bloody civil war has left Syria devastated. Cities, roads, hospitals, houses, schools have been destroyed. Infrastructure essential to survival such as water management systems and power plants are damaged or missing. The World Bank estimates reconstruction will cost $216 billion — nearly ten times Syria’s annual economic output (Group, 2025). Syria’s economy has contracted by more than 50% during the conflict. Gross National Income per capita was just $830 in 2024, and over 90% of the population lives below the poverty line (Afaghani, 2025). Jobs exist, but wages are often insufficient to sustain a family. Entire neighbourhoods are now rubble. What would once be a Syrian person’s must familiar environment is unrecognisable.

Remain or return?

For those who did choose to return, the experience has been genuinely mixed. “It’s an amazing period, I’ve never experienced the same freedom,” said Osama Mufdi, a Syrian entrepreneur who returned from Europe to open a charity and new business in Damascus (Holyoke, 2025). His experience captures something real: there is genuine energy and opportunity in the new Syria, a sense of freedom that many returnees describe as unlike anything they experienced under Assad.

However, most refugees are unwilling to make a permanent move back to Syria.

Research from the International Rescue Committee (2026), who conducted three rounds of surveys among 17 thousand Syrian refugees in 4 countries, shows that only 29% of respondents said they intended to return. 34% said they had no intention of going back at all and 37% were unsure. There is still little urgency for many people who are thinking about going back; only 9% of those who aim to go back, aim to do so immediately, and 16% to do so within six months. The fact that more than half (56%) of respondents were uncertain about when they would return suggests a significant level of reluctance or reliance on outside variables like better situations in Syria or modifications to the conditions in the host nation. Barriers to return include having suitable accommodation, which only 10% of respondents said to have. Being able to live with the dignity accorded by basic services and infrastructure was said to be the most important aspect, as it was cited by 72%.

Dual identities

What the return debate underplays is the identity dimension – the fact that more than a decade of displacement has changed people in ways that are not easily reversed. Indeed, over 80% of refugees in have lived in their host countries for over a decade (International Rescue Committee, 2026). These people had no choice but to rebuild their lives, working new jobs, building new relationships, learning new languages, ways of communicating, everything. Some became citizens of their host countries; between 2021 and 2023, 143,000 Syrians obtained German citizenship (McGuinness, 2024). Anas Modamani, who arrived in Germany at seventeen, captures this complexity perfectly when he speaks of having “two accessible ‘Heimaten’” (homelands)—a sense of belonging to both Berlin and Damascus (Connolly, 2025).

Indeed, someone who has lived in Berlin for a decade, raised children there, navigated the language, built friendships, experienced both welcome and hostility — that person does not simply “return.” They arrive as someone new, in a place that has also changed, and they have to figure out whether those two changed things still fit together.

Many of the people who did go back to Syria, did so on a temporary basis, and reserve the the possibility of leaving if conditions in Syria worsen. These are generally people with dual nationalities and who have the means to travel back and forth. Kefah Ali Deeb, a human rights activist living in Berlin since 2014, told Euronews; ““After al-Assad fell, I booked a ticket and went back immediately,” saying for her, “it was like a dream” (Holyoke, 2025). However, Ali Deeb did not stay, despite wanting to, deciding to monitor the situation in Syria before moving back, recalling her husband saying “Everything now is chaotic” (Holyoke, 2025). However, the decision to stay or not in Europe may soon be out many non-citizen refugees’ hands.

The political pressure from host countries

In Europe, right-wing governments are leveraging Syria’s political transition to push refugees out. Minister President of Bavaria Markus Sköder, said “If the reason for asylum disappears, then there is no longer any legal basis to stay in the country” (McGuinness, 2024).

The rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) AfD, with its explicit claim that “Islam does not belong in Germany,” created an atmosphere in which Syrian integration is publicly contested. When Assad fell, the push to return became part of the political campaign. Within hours of Damascus changing hands, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel announced that anyone celebrating the new Syria “clearly no longer has any reason to flee” and “should return immediately.” (McGuinness, 2024). Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government hardened migration policy and entered talks with Syria’s interim president about the terms of return.

Syrians are caught between a country that cannot yet fully receive them and host countries that no longer want to fully keep them. And this is before accounting for the economic reality that many Syrians in Germany are, right now, lifelines to family members still inside Syria — sending remittances that substitute for the absence of functional public services. When those remittances stop because someone is pressured into a premature return, the family on the other end loses their safety net.

The final word

Khalid al-Shatta chose to return and felt, finally, like he belonged somewhere. Ali Deeb wants to return and cannot yet bring herself to. Anas Modamani is somewhere in between. They are all, in their own way, doing the hardest possible human thing: figuring out where home is, when home was taken away fourteen years ago and neither the place they left nor the place they fled to has fully held them since.

Bibliography

Afaghani, R. (2025). From Crisis to Recovery: Securing Peace and Stability in Syria and Beyond. [online] UNDP. Available at: https://www.undp.org/syria/blog/crisis-recovery-securing-peace-and-stability-syria-and-beyond.

AJLabs (2025). How many Syrians have returned home one year since the fall of al-Assad? [online] Al Jazeera. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/8/how-many-syrians-have-returned-home-one-year-since-the-fall-of-al-assad.

Connolly, K. (2025). The Syrian refugee whose selfie with Angela Merkel changed his life. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/04/anas-modamani-syrian-refugee-selfie-angela-merkel.

Group, W.B. (2025). Syria’s Post-Conflict Reconstruction Costs Estimated at $216 billion. [online] World Bank. Available at: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2025/10/21/syria-s-post-conflict-reconstruction-costs-estimated-at-216-billion.

Holyoke, G. (2025). Syrians in Europe weigh up going home one year after al-Assad’s fall. [online] euronews. Available at: https://www.euronews.com/2025/11/28/syrians-in-europe-weigh-up-returning-home-one-year-after-al-assads-fall.

International Rescue Committee (2026). Syrians on the Move: Regional Refugee Intentions Briefing - Executive Summary | The IRC. [online] Syrians on the Move: Regional Refugee Intentions Briefing - Executive Summary. Available at: https://www.rescue.org/report/syrians-move-regional-refugee-intentions-briefing-executive-summary.

Jenna Le Bras (2026). Turkey’s economy hit as Syrians return home. France 24. Available at: https://www.france24.com/en/turkey-s-economy-hit-as-syrians-return-home.

McGuinness, D. (2024). Germany’s one million Syrians at centre of fierce political debate over future. BBC. [online] 11 Dec. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy7kxn6p878o.

Osseiran, N. (2025). Hard homecoming: Syrian refugees return to a devastated land. Thomson Reuters. 5 Jun.

UNHCR (2026). Syria Factsheet - January 2026. [online] Available at: https://www.unhcr.org/sites/default/files/2026-03/syria-factsheet-january-2026.pdf.

Vollmer, R., Dinçer, O.B., Şahin-Mencütek, Z. and Engelberth, S. (2024). The Politics of Syrian Refugee Return in Germany: Balancing Rhetoric and Reality. [online] Bicc.de. Available at: https://bicc.de/Cosmos/Peacebits/The%20Politics%20of%20Syrian%20Refugee%20Return%20in%20Germany.

In this episode Maud discusses the Syrian refugee returnee expereince of rebuolding their country and their identities. She is a Citizen journalist with us on a placement organised with Department of War Studies, King’s College, London.

Thank you for reading an A4R 🎨 Post. Don’t forget to try out gaming art NFT’s here. Every purchase scales our impact and pays our bills.

Ciao Trailblazers,

There seems to be a global appreciation that you the GenZ are out to bring positive change where you are in the world. Did you hear about how the Cockroach protesters got the governament to listen to their concerns.

Here our own Taya wrote an blog post about her time with us. She joined us just befoee the war with Ukraine started. Here is more -

For full post - see here.

Over the summer break we will be sharing more post from our Ink and Ashes. So keep an eye out for them.

Don’t forget to share them.

Beyond that we have also been sharing the articles you submitted to Impact Entrepreneur Magazine as well. Out of the 18 posted we submitted over the last quarter. 6 have been posted now. Here are the ones from this month -

1. Mosul’s Circulation Problem. Link here.

2. Peace Needs an Economy - Link here.

If you want to keep up to date on all the articles posted there you can check in on the A4R Media Hub page on the Impact Entrepreneur Platfrom. Link here.

This month we had two Guest Posts as well, both world experts in their field.

1. What Comes After the Guns Fall Silent? Link here. Here Laurie Lane Zucker discussed how traditional security, focused solely on deterring threats, is reactive and ineffective. True security, he argues, is built during the "morning after" conflict. You can find more details about his approach in his new book - The Impact Entrepreneur Breakthrough. Link here.

2. Build the Crowd Before You Need The Money? Link here. Here Devin Thorpe CEO of Superpower for Good is the leading authority on crowd funding, impact investing and social good. He highlights the need to build your crowd before you need to ask for funding. Have a read and let’s see what you make of it.

There are more posts like this in the pipeline. So, look forward to sharing them.

Raw & Real from GenZ - unfiltered updates

Click here to play, listen and learn more about famous refugees from an arty background we all love.

Click here for the podcasts and articles about how communites recovering conflict are coping with their human needs.

Learn more about the exclusive merchandise you can unlock with Khaan’s NFT here

Don’t forget to scale our impact we need your support. You can make a direct donation - these are tax deductible only for US tax payers at the moment. Support us here.

It’s great to have you with us along this journey. Till next month — enjoy our vibers work along the way. 😊

With gratitude,

Zufi, Michael, Jackie, Victoria & the Vibers.

Summary:

• Arts4Refugees (A4R) is a peer-to-peer creator marketplace connecting Gen Z creators (”Vibers”) with post-conflict and displaced communities.

• Ink & Ashes series featured Taya, a Ukrainian volunteer who applied to A4R via We Make Change in April 2022, two weeks before the war began; her story spans four years and four countries of displacement.

• Guest post: Laurie Lane-Zucker (author, The Impact Entrepreneur Breakthrough) on post-conflict security models.

• Guest post: Devin Thorpe (CEO, Superpower for Good) on building an audience before fundraising.

• A4R submitted 18 articles to Impact Entrepreneur Magazine this quarter; 6 published so far, including “Mosul’s Circulation Problem” and “Peace Needs an Economy.”

• A4R also produces podcasts and interactive micro-games profiling refugee artists.

• Exclusive merchandise available via an NFT from Khaan.

• Donations are tax-deductible for US taxpayers via HCB/Hack Club.

A4R 🎨 Monthly is a user supported publication. Don’t forget to tell others about us.

AT A GLANCE - Mostar’s Stari Most bridge, destroyed during the 1990s Bosnian conflict, was rebuilt by 2004 and symbolizes resilience. Though physically restored, the city remains ethnically divided post-war, with visible scars—bullet holes, ruins, mosque destruction—still present. Yet activists like Irma Baralija and local artisans champion Mostar’s multicultural identity, showing enduring commitment to unity despite lasting demographic and political fractures.

‘A Rainbow Arch As High As The Sky’: The Bridge Holding Together A Community.

Put ‘Mostar’ into any social media search bar – like I did – and you’ll find yourself drawn into a visit images of the beautiful Stari Most, arching above the glittering waters of the Neretva river. Each year hundreds of daring tourists attempt to jump from it into the freezing waters below, seduced by the stunning scenery and the adrenaline rush of a 24-metre drop. It makes a great clip for your Instagram, and completing it earns you a page in the special book of those who have made the leap. But don’t forget that the ‘Old Bridge’ also stands proudly as a symbol of the city to which it gave its name; it represents not only the beauty of the city but the character it is determined to show in the face of disaster. Barely over 30 years ago, Mostar was under siege, its streets ravaged by conflict, its people catching pigeons to stay alive, and its bridge in pieces on the riverbed.

The fall of Yugoslavia in 1990 catalysed a complex conflict between the various ethnic, national, and religious groups in the Bosnian ‘melting pot’: Bosnian Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Muslims, Jews and Orthodox Christians. Mostar itself fell under siege first in the summer of 1992, defended by the Croatian Defence Council and the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina against the Yugoslav People’s Army. Once this was lifted, the fragile alliance between Bosniaks (a majority Muslim Bosnian population) and Croats broke down, and another year of violence fell upon the East of the City. Many Muslim families were forced to flee across the river, streets and buildings scarred by bombs and bullets. A community once characterised by cohabitation was broken up by atrocity, and the bridge which had stood as a symbol of this connection crumbled into the river under the weight of artillery fire.

When the conflict ended Mostar began, gradually, to rebuild. Tanks had destroyed three quarters of the housing in the West of the city and much of its infrastructure – it would be no small feat to restore it. International support was significant and UNESCO itself was part of the appeal to rebuild the bridge, launched as soon as fighting stopped in 1994. Works were completed in 2004, and it attained status as a world heritage site the following year. The city had voted to restore the ‘Ottoman Necklace’ in its original style rather than construct a new bridge, its bricks even cut from the stone of the same quarry which had provided for the original in 1566. The decision to do so reflected a commitment, despite disaster, to the values of unity and friendship which the Stari Most had stood for. Architecture had for hundreds of years reminded the people of Mostar of its tolerance and cultural diversity, and would do so again.

Yet the stones were undeniably very clean, very white, and very new. The city could be repaired, but the community could not simply go back. The war had forced its residents to flee, and altered the once diverse makeup of its municipalities; areas that once held slight Croat or Bosniak majorities became almost entirely made up of one group or the other. Many of the refugees never made it back; the International Crisis Group noted that “the narrow Bosniak plurality of 1991” had “become a substantial Croat majority”. Most of Mostar’s mosques were destroyed in the fighting, disfiguring a beautiful skyline once dotted with minarets and providing a definite example of how the built environment itself reflected the demographic shift. Even when reconstructed, the location of those buildings would remind its citizens of how they had been divided.

Today, the memory of war lingers both in the memory of those who lived through it and in the physical spaces they occupy. Those clips of excited bridge-jumpers don’t show the walls pockmarked by bullet holes, the houses reduced to rubble, or the fact that if you were to wander from a path in the mountains surrounding the city you might come across a stray landmine. The legacy of war might be buried under the ground, but the memory of it is not. For most of the population the war is a lived experience, and one they won’t shy away from – its memory grows more important as time passes, because the world cannot be allowed to forget. Signs of what happened remain because they’re important, not because they’ve been neglected. You could, for instance, walk through the Old Town and buy yourself a toy tank or a keyring made of replica bullets, just as a light-hearted souvenir. There’s a reason for that.

Mostar itself is a particularly powerful example of the undying desire for a united community growing from the ground up, its people committed to upholding its multiethnic identity despite political conflict. There were no elections in the city between 2008 and 2020, because there could be no agreement between the Bosnian Croat ethnic-oriented Croat Democratic Union (HDV) and the Bosniak ethnic-oriented Party for Democratic Action (SDA) over a new electoral system. What changed in 2020? As a mother and a Master’s graduate, Irma Baralija sued the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, winning a judgement that forced the parties into the design of new democratic law. Baralija is a brilliant representative of the will of Mostar’s citizens not to be divided along ethno-national or religious lines, and to instead define themselves by their tolerance and commitment to cultural diversity.

This isn’t something you need to be involved in politics to see; go to Mostar for yourself and any tour guide will proudly tell you how their city is the stunning outcome of both Eastern and Western heritage. Better yet, they might take you to a little copper workshop in the Old Town which sits on the Neretva’s bank, just a stone’s throw from the Stari Most. Its owners will show you, amongst their other work, a particular style of copper plate featuring that famous bridge which has come to symbolise their city. On one end of sit the spires of a mosque, on the other the tower and crucifix of an orthodox church. Above the bridge flies a dove with an olive branch: the mark of peace. Bosnia and Herzegovina is decades removed from a war that rocked the nation, but not so far removed that the man who made the plate couldn’t look down the street and picture it lined with rubble and sandbags. It is the resilience of love for the diverse community shown by this man, by Irma Baralija, and by those like them that ensure that those scars of war remind the world of the need for peace.

So be drawn into a visit by the stunning scenery of Mostar’s famous bridge, see it for yourself, see the bullet holes and broken buildings. Hear both the pride with which its people describe the multicoloured history of its amazing architecture, and their reminder of the importance of remembering a war not yet distant in memory. Take in the history you can see around you, and have a go at leaping from the bridge, if you’re sure.

https://theroamingrenegades.com/mostar-discovering-scars-war-rocked-bosnia/

https://see-whistleblowing.org/how-one-mother-brought-voting-rights-back-to-a-post-war-city-a-close-look-at-irma-baralija-and-the-case-of-mostar/

file:///C:/Users/Fin/Downloads/Rebuilding_Mostar_Urban_Reconstruction_in_a_War_Zo..._----_(12_Conclusions).pdf

https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/city-and-architecture/a6453-rebuilding-the-city-mostar/

https://whc.unesco.org/en/story-mostar-bridge/

https://www.dailysabah.com/life/historic-mostar-bridge-defies-war-celebrates-20-years-rebuilt/news

https://reliefweb.int/report/bosnia-and-herzegovina/bosnia-herzegovina-reconstruction-proceeding-slowly-mostar

Bollens, Scott A. (2007). Cities, Nationalism and Democratization. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN978-1-134-11183-1.

In this episode Finabr discusses the post conflict experience of Mostar. He highligts life after the war there. He is a Citizen journalist with us on a placement organised with Oxford University Career Services.

Thank you for reading an A4R 🎨 Post. Don’t forget to try out gaming art NFT’s here. Every purchase scales our impact and pays our bills.