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.

On 15 April 2022, a typeform notification landed in a BizGees inbox.

Name: Taya Andreeva. Location: Ukraine. Skills: Business Development, Community Management, Marketing, Videography. Motivation: I am very interested in this area and the possibility of new experience. I want to help the project develop and I will do everything in my power. I am also very talented and creative, I have an analytical mindset — so I think well.

She was 16. She already had a YouTube channel, multiple Instagram accounts, and a client she was running a promotion strategy for. She had applied, entirely on her own initiative, to volunteer with a social enterprise working with post-conflict communities — because she wanted new experience and believed she could contribute something real.

A week later, she was on a Google Meet call with Zufi. A week after that, the war in Ukraine had started.

Four countries. One consistent thread.

What happened next is the kind of story that doesn’t fit neatly into a programme outcome report.

Taya was displaced to Spain, where she was placed with a family and hoped to attend university. That didn’t work out, and she returned to Ukraine — continuing to volunteer with A4R Media Hub during the war, creating content, building skills, showing up week after week from a country under active conflict. Then an opportunity came to move to Ireland. She went, with her parents’ support, and was placed in accommodation with other refugee children.

She wanted to go straight to university. She missed the application deadline. Her English, while strong, needed more time to develop to the level university required. So she enrolled in a further education college instead — not the path she’d planned, but the right one. It built her language skills, her academic foundation, and her confidence. It opened the door to a degree in Design, Technology, and Marketing at university. She has now completed her second year and has just started her first formal internship — at BMW.

Across all of it — Spain, Ukraine during the war, Ireland, FE college, university — one thing didn’t change. A4R was there.

What A4R actually provided.

This is worth being specific about, because “support” is a word that can mean almost anything.

It didn’t mean a one-off introduction or a single mentoring session. It meant four years of continuity — of someone picking up the call, making the introduction, following up, and staying present across a journey that moved through multiple countries and multiple crises.

During her time with A4R, Taya created digital content for the Media Hub — videos for the website, visuals and creatives for social media. Here is an example of a marketing video for our merchandise she created.

She worked alongside student volunteers from Oxford University and King’s College London, interviewing some of them and collaborating with others — giving her a lived understanding of what university life might feel like, long before she got there herself. She was introduced to tech experts in Ireland who helped her settle into life locally. She was connected with multiple mentors — one in Ireland, two in London — who helped her develop her skills at critical points in her journey.

This is a short interview she gave to a GenZ Viber she was working with.

And she designed the current A4R Media Hub logo. The one you see on arts4refugees.com. The one that has appeared on every piece of content in this series. Made by a 16-year-old Ukrainian refugee, volunteering from a country at war, for an organisation that believed in what she could do before she had any of the credentials to prove it.

In Her Own Words

Volunteering with BizGees and Arts4Refugees became one of the most meaningful experiences of my journey. What started as an opportunity to gain new skills and contribute to social projects became something much more personal — a place where I found support, connection, and people.

During my time volunteering, I was mainly involved in creating digital content, including videos for the website and visuals/creatives for social media. I enjoyed using my creativity to help share the organisation’s work and stories with a wider audience. This experience allowed me to improve my skills in content creation, visual storytelling, and communication while working on projects with a meaningful purpose.

Another valuable part of this experience was meeting other student volunteers from different backgrounds. Working together helped me develop my teamwork and communication skills, while also allowing me to learn from people with different perspectives and experiences.

Beyond the professional skills I gained, BizGees became an important source of personal support during a very challenging period of my life. After the beginning of the war in Ukraine, I experienced many changes and relocations, which was emotionally difficult. The founder of BizGees provided me with a lot of encouragement and moral support during this time, showing kindness and understanding when I needed it most.

One of the most special moments was when he introduced me to an amazing woman in Ireland who later became an important connection in my life after I moved there and started university. And also a wonderful marketing mentor in London, who was a great support as well and a very nice person to know and meet. This showed me that volunteering is not only about the work you do — it is also about the relationships you build and the people who become part of your journey.

My experience with BizGees and Arts4Refugees taught me that creativity can bring people together and that even small contributions can have a meaningful impact. I am grateful for the opportunity to have been part of these organisations and for the people I met along the way. The experience helped me grow both professionally and personally and reminded me of the importance of kindness, community, and human connection.

— Taya Andreeva, Viber, A4R Media Hub

What this says about A4R.

Taya’s story is not exceptional because of what A4R did. It’s exceptional because of how long A4R did it.

Most programmes have a defined intervention window — a course, a placement, a mentoring cycle. They are built for emergencies, or for a single transition, and they end when the emergency does or the transition is complete. What Taya needed — and what very few organisations are structured to provide — was something much simpler and much harder: someone who would still be there next month, regardless of which country she was in.

That’s what stability looks like during displacement. Not a fixed address. Not a guaranteed outcome. The presence of people who keep showing up — who make the introduction, follow up on it, and ask how it went. Who believe in what you can do before you have the portfolio to prove it. Who let a 16-year-old design a logo that ends up representing the organisation for years.

Taya is now at BMW. Her logo is still on the website. And she is, at the time of writing, working on her blog post for the Media Hub — in her own words, in her own time, on her own terms.

That’s the whole point of this.

About A4R Feature

A4R Feature is a series of long-form pieces published by the Arts4Refugees Media Hub, telling the stories of the individuals whose journeys have shaped the organisation. Each piece is told in collaboration with the person at its centre.

If you have a story connected to A4R, BizGees, or the communities we work with, we’d like to hear from you.

🔗 arts4refugees.com

A4R Feature — What stability looks like when everything else is moving — was produced by A4R Media Hub in collaboration with Taya Andreeva. Her words appear exactly as she wrote them.

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.

Planting Seeds of Prosperity: Agricultural Challenges in Vietnam’s Post-War Recovery

Rolling fields. Arcyteryx jacket on. Romance with your Easy Rider budding. The Ha Giang Loop is one of the most talked about destinations for backpackers travelling through South East Asia. However, what often goes undiscussed in these travel recommendations is the way of life in the Ha Giang region, and the utility of the region for the country’s economy. Ha Giang is one of the poorest provinces in Vietnam, and yet it is an essential part of Vietnam’s agricultural industry. Rich in rice, maize and fruits, Ha Giang is populated by communities who employ traditional farming techniques to harvest these products. The contrast between these two images of Ha Giang is striking, and this article aims to draw attention to this second, less-discussed picture.

This piece focuses on one of the most basic human needs—food security—and asks how war, policy and environmental damage has shaped Vietnam’s ability to meet it. Agriculture was an essential tool in rebuilding the Vietnamese economy after the war, and a series of different initiatives implemented by the Vietnamese government in this period led the sector on a journey through scarcity to surplus. The effects of the war, however, lingered through this process, and still impacts the agricultural industry today.

The Vietnam War spanned twenty years, officially beginning on November 1st 1955 and ending on April 30 1975. The conflict took place between the divided North and South. The North Vietnamese government aimed to establish a communist system for the country, and this government had the support of some in the Southern Region, known as the Viet Cong. In opposition to this, the government of South Vietnam was vying for a system more closely aligned with the countries in the West. Subsequently, they gained the support of the US, who entered into the conflict in 1965. With the USSR and China pouring weapons into North Vietnam, and the aforementioned US presence in this conflict, the Vietnam War is considered a manifestation of the Cold War.

During this conflict, agriculture was central to warfare. In North Vietnam, produce was reserved for fighters, with the popularised slogan, ‘every grain of rice and every soldier was ensured for the frontline’ prompting a surge in rice farming. Agriculture became a key factor in keeping soldiers alive and strong, and subsequently it became a symbol of strength.

Countering the necessity of food for the war effort, the US involvement in the conflict fought against this production with the employment of chemical weaponry. With multiple different chemicals used, the most famous and impactful of these was dubbed Agent Orange - a herbicide intended to destroy crops and remove vegetation that was helping to cover North Vietnamese soldiers and the Viet Cong. This was the biggest deployment of herbicidal warfare in history. However, Agent Orange was found to produce a toxic byproduct, called dioxin TCDD. This product poses risks to human health, and has been linked to a wide range of complications including cancer and cardiovascular diseases.

These lasting effects of Agent Orange meant that not only did agriculture and farming play an essential part in the war strategy itself, but the employment of chemical weaponry by the US would go on to affect the agricultural systems of the nation for the foreseeable future.

After the war ended, the newly instated communist government turned to agriculture as a means to boost the post-war economy. As part of a wider movement to a centralised socialist economy, the government introduced an initiative to collectivise farmers. Individual ownership of land was revoked from farmers, and instead they were grouped into cooperatives. They were instructed to work on the premise that any surplus crop they produced would be turned in and redistributed centrally. The theory was that this would increase production and resources for the nation. This initiative, however, had the inverse effect. Low incentives resulted in low yields, and low harvest numbers forced the government to start importing food.

The failure of this system was then overridden in 1986 when the Doi Moi reforms were put in place. With the country falling into economic crisis as a result of the centralised economy, the government elected to change their approach, turning to a market-centred, socialist economy. Part of this movement was to decollectivise farming in Vietnam. The state restored private land use rights and allowed individual farmers to sell on the market. As a result of these reforms, the agricultural industry began to flourish. This policy re-aligned incentives — motivated by the idea that they could keep and sell surpluses, production rose quickly. Vietnam moved from importing rice in the late 1980s to becoming a leading exporter within a decade. Looking at rice production alone, for example, in 1989, Vietnam exported 1.4 million tonnes of rice.

This flourishing agricultural industry has only grown in the last 30 years, contributing to the strengthening of the Vietnamese economy post-war. According to The Ministry of Agriculture and Environment of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, in 2025 Vietnamese rice was exported to over 160 countries across the globe.

However, the booming agricultural industry now is not entirely free from the ghosts of the Vietnam War. The use of Agent Orange throughout the conflict has led to long term effects that echo in the agricultural industry even today. Dropping an estimated total of 19 million gallons of chemicals over South Vietnam, hectares of farmland were affected in the millions. One of the problems with the dioxin TCDD in Agent Orange is that its half-life can span up to 100 years. Its persistence means much of the land remains contaminated today, and still unsuitable for farming. Olson and Morton have undertaken research into the impact of Agent Orange on the landscape in Vietnam, and note that dioxin TCDD from the herbicides made its way into the environment in Vietnam. The problem with this chemical is, once it has entered the landscape, it can take between decades and centuries to leave.

Not only does Agent Orange leave the land unsuitable for farming, but Olson and Morton have also explored how its absorption into the soil has resulted in the contamination of marshes, lakes and rivers. As a result of this, it is not only crop directly grown through this land that poses a risk to citizens, but fish and livestock living from contaminated waters and fields. Ingestion of any of these foods can prove seriously harmful. These two levels of localised and lower-level contamination mean some communities have been faced with acute exposure whilst others have lived with elevated long-term risk. As a result of these layers, the agricultural industry is experiencing the effects of Agent Orange on multiple levels.

The scar that Agent Orange has left upon the agricultural industry serves as a reminder of the time in which agricultural production was not flourishing in the way it is now. The war’s environmental imprint complicates Vietnam’s agricultural success story: production and exports have risen, though risks from contamination persist.

Bibliography

• National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Chapter (online): “The U.S. Military and …” in Veterans/Agent-Orange–related volume. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK236347/#:~:text=3The%20U.S.%20Military%20and,nature%20of%20their%20job%20assignments. Accessed 20 Mar 2026.

• Olson, K., & Morton, L. T. “Long-Term Fate of Agent Orange and Dioxin (TCDD) Contaminated Soils and Sediments in Vietnam Hotspots.” (report/working paper). (n.d.). https:// (please supply year, publisher, DOI or link if available). Accessed 20 Mar 2026.

• Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “Vietnam’s agriculture shifts from quantity to quality to win new markets.” https://en.mae.gov.vn/vietnams-agriculture-shifts-from-quantity-to-quality-to-win-new-markets-9039.htm. Accessed 20 Mar 2026.

• WTO Center. “80 years on: Vietnam emerges from rice importer to top 3 global exporter.” https://wtocenter.vn/chuyen-de/28581-80-years-on-vietnam-emerges-from-rice-importer-to-top-3-global-exporter. Accessed 20 Mar 2026.

In this episode Leya discusses the post conflict experience of Vietnam. She highligts the food security issues the local population face decades after the war ended. 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.

Build the Crowd Before You Need the Money

For artists and creators, talent is essential. But talent alone rarely pays the rent, funds the next project, or turns a creative practice into a sustainable career.

Crowdfunding offers a different path.

At its best, crowdfunding is not begging. It is not charity. It is an invitation. It says to the people who already care about your work, your voice, your community, or your mission: “Come with me. Help me build this.”

That invitation can start small. Over time, it can become the foundation for something much bigger.

Start With the Crowd, Not the Campaign

The biggest mistake many creators make is waiting until they need money to start building a community.

A crowd is not something you find on launch day. It is something you build before you need it.

Your first crowd may include friends, classmates, relatives, teachers, collaborators, customers, neighbors, followers, former clients, or people who simply believe your voice deserves to be heard. The goal is not millions of followers. It is direct relationships with people who care.

Social media can help, but it is rented land. Algorithms change. Platforms rise and fall. A follower is valuable, but it is not the same as a direct connection.

That is why one of the first things every creator should do is start a newsletter.

Yes, Start a Newsletter

Email can feel old-fashioned. In 2026, inboxes are crowded, open rates can be frustrating, and everyone complains about too much email. Still, there is no better low-cost, mass-direct communication channel for a creator who wants to build a real community.

For many young creators, the easiest place to start is Substack.

Your newsletter does not need to be fancy. It can include behind-the-scenes updates, new artwork, reflections, event invitations, early access, or notes about what you are learning. The point is to create a home for your community.

Start saying, again and again: “Join my list so I can keep you posted.”

That list may someday help you sell tickets, launch a product, fill a workshop, promote a film, publish a book, or raise capital. For a refugee creator, or for someone helping a refugee creator, this can be especially powerful. A newsletter can help reconnect supporters across cities, countries, and time zones.

Build the crowd before you ask the crowd to fund you.

Use Rewards Crowdfunding as Your First Test

For many creators, the first crowdfunding step should be a rewards campaign.

Supporters contribute money and receive something in return: a print, a signed book, an album download, a ticket, a limited-edition shirt, a thank-you credit, a class, or early access to the finished work.

A rewards campaign can help fund a short film, photo essay, music release, fashion drop, art show, podcast season, digital magazine, community mural, or creative workshop.

But the money is only part of the value.

A rewards campaign teaches you how to explain your work clearly. It forces you to say what you are making, why it matters, who it is for, what it will cost, and why people should care now. Those are not just crowdfunding skills. They are career skills.

A successful rewards campaign also creates evidence. It shows that people care, supporters are willing to pay, and you can deliver on a promise.

That evidence can help you take the next step.

From Creative Project to Creative Business

Not every creative project should become a company. Some work is art for art’s sake. That is good and necessary.

But some creators eventually realize they are building more than one project. They are building a business.

A musician might start a production company. A visual artist might launch a merchandise brand. A filmmaker might build a media studio. A teaching artist might launch an online education platform. A creator with lived experience in an underrepresented community might build a platform that employs, trains, or amplifies others.

This shift matters because funding a project is different from funding a business.

A project has a beginning and an end. A business has a model. It has customers, costs, revenue, operations, and a plan to grow. When you can explain that model, you may be ready to think beyond donations, grants, or rewards.

That is where investment crowdfunding enters the picture.

When the Crowd Becomes Capital

Investment crowdfunding allows ordinary people to invest in private businesses through regulated online platforms. Instead of receiving a poster, ticket, or thank-you gift, supporters receive an investment interest.

The simple distinction is this:

Rewards crowdfunding helps fund a project.

Investment crowdfunding helps fund a business.

In the United States, Regulation Crowdfunding allows eligible companies to raise capital from both wealthy and non-wealthy investors through SEC-registered intermediaries. In the United Kingdom, investment-based crowdfunding also allows people to invest in businesses through regulated platforms, often by buying shares or participating in business-backed investments.

This matters because traditional startup investing has often been limited to wealthy insiders, professional investors, and people with the right networks. Investment crowdfunding opens the door wider.

For creators, that is powerful. Artists already know how to move people. They know how to tell stories, build identity, create meaning, and invite emotional connection. Those are real advantages in crowdfunding.

But investment crowdfunding also requires seriousness. Investors are not donors. They deserve honesty, disclosure, transparency, and regular communication. They are taking risk. They may lose money. A founder should never treat that lightly.

Are You Ready?

A creator may be ready to explore investment crowdfunding when they can say:

• I have more than a one-time project. I have a business model.

• I know who my customers or community members are.

• I have evidence that people will pay for what I create.

• I can explain how this business could grow.

• I am ready for legal, financial, and disclosure obligations.

• I am prepared to communicate with investors after the raise.

• I understand that investors are not just fans; they are partners in risk.

If that list feels intimidating, that is okay. Investment crowdfunding is not the first step. It is a later step.

Start a newsletter. Share your work. Invite people in. Sell something small. Run a rewards campaign. Document the results. Strengthen the business model. Build a team of advisors. Then, when the time is right, explore investment crowdfunding.

Your First Assignment

Here is a simple exercise you can do today.

Write one paragraph answering four questions:

1. What am I building?

2. Who is it for?

3. Why does it matter?

4. How could people help?

Then send that paragraph to five people and ask them: “Is this clear? Would you support it? What would make it more compelling? Who else should hear about this?”

That is how a crowd begins. Not with a viral post. Not with a perfect pitch deck. Not with a million followers.

It begins with clarity, trust, and an invitation.

You do not need to wait for permission from a gallery, label, studio, publisher, employer, investor, or institution to begin building your creative future. You can start by gathering the people who already believe in you, one email address and one honest update at a time.

Build the crowd with care.

One day, that crowd may become the capital that helps you build something much bigger.

Join the conversation

🔗 Read and listen to our latest collaborative drops directly here.

This piece was produced as a guest contribution to the Arts4Refugees Media Hub, in collaboration with the BizGees community and the Gen Z Vibers co-creating it.

Devin Thorpe is the CEO & Founder of Superpowers for Good. They support the growth and development of the impact crowdfunding community, including both investors and issuers. Their founding principle is that cooperation and collaboration are essential for growing the number of impact investors supporting social entrepreneurs and traditionally underrepresented business owners.

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At a Glance - Displaced Syrians are using digital platforms to reclaim their identities following the devastation of the Syrian Civil War. Social media enables refugees to preserve culture, maintain family connections and share their own narratives beyond statistics. While inequalities in access persist, digital spaces offer essential opportunities for belonging, visibility and cultural reconstruction.

Backstory

More than a statistic: How Syrian Refugees are Reclaiming their Voice Online

Culture is made up of many aspects, including language, food, customs, land and values, just to name a few. It exists in both intangible and tangible forms, shaping how we see ourselves and where we belong. However, what happens when war and conflict infiltrates that culture, destroying your land, disrupting the processes of customs and making food and forcing you to flee to places where the language, values and sense of belonging are no longer the same?

For millions of Syrians displaced by the Syrian Civil War, this question is not theoretical, but in fact it is their reality. With more than 12 million Syrians forcibly displaced and millions more still living in unstable conditions, the conflict has not only reshaped the country physically but has deeply fractured its sense of identity. In a context where collective trauma has ruptured national belonging, identity is no longer something stable in Syria, but something that must be rebuilt.

This article explores how displaced Syrians are navigating this loss, not just through physical rebuilding, but through digital spaces. In a world where being seen and heard is increasingly tied to an online presence, social media has become an extremely powerful tool for reclaiming one’s voice, preserving culture, raising awareness and in rebuilding a sense of identity in the aftermath of a conflict.

For many young people in the UK, identity is something we express daily, through what we post, what we wear, the music we listen to and the communities we are a part of, both online and offline. Social media has become a space where we shape how others see us and in turn, how we see ourselves. Now imagine that being taken away, except it’s not just your online presence, but your home, your livelihood, your community and your everyday routines that make up who you are. Considering aspects like choosing what to wear to best represent ourselves as an active daily determining factor of our identities is a privilege. For displaced Syrians, identity is not just about self-expression but about something that requires rebuilding.

War does not just destroy infrastructure, it disrupts meaning. In Syria, years of conflict have fractured what researchers describe as ‘collective identity’. This is the concept of a national identity of a nation as a whole or the shared sense of belonging that binds people together. This rupture is not only physical but deeply psychological, creating collective trauma, where the very idea of what it means to be Syrian is thrown into question. As a Syrian woman, named Fadia, reflected, “our identity as Syrian women has become intertwined with this narrative of war”. It is inevitable for culture to evolve and undergo massive transformations over time, whether it is a culture of a specific city or a whole nation in question. This change is natural and results due to the fact that culture is malleable. It is a dynamic and adaptive system, in which people adjust according to their environments, technologies, ideas and social behaviours. However, what occurred in Syria was far from natural, leading to the loss of people’s identity, as a result of politicization.

In Syria, this disruption was not caused by conflict alone but also by years of political control that shaped how culture could be expressed. Cultural identity was often tied to state narratives, limiting how freely people could explore and share their traditions and perspectives. When conflict escalated, this already fragile cultural space was further damaged, through destruction of cultural landmarks and communities. As a result rebuilding culture is not simply about returning to the past but about redefining what it means to be Syrian in this completely new context. Only recently, in the aftermath of the conflict, have Syrians begun to reclaim these spaces, using art, literature and storytelling to redefine what their culture means. The Ministry of Culture has taken steps to help reignite cultural institutions by co-ordinating exhibitions and festivals and cultural centres have even reopened.

For many displaced Syrians, rebuilding their identity is no longer confined to physical spaces. It is now happening online as social media platforms have become vital tools for communication and survival. Digital platforms that many take for granted in their daily life are necessary lifelines for some, that allow refugees to maintain connections with family, document their experiences and share these stories with a global audience. This is helping to rebuild Syrian culture in many ways, firstly being able to maintain a connection with their family means that they can maintain their language and the recognition of customs, whilst feeling less isolated in a new foreign country. Having the autonomy to be able to document and share their own experiences, displaced people or refugees can take control of their own narrative and show that being Syrian is more than the war and conflict that unfortunately took place.

In many ways, this mirrors how Gen Z already uses digital spaces. Platforms like Instagram or Tiktok are not just for entertainment but where identities are shared and validated. The difference is that for refugees it does not follow a monetary purpose of building a personal brand and gaining followers but about maintaining a sense of self in the face of displacement and possibly raising awareness for their country and its people. What might feel like a casual scroll past a pose could be a lifeline for another person.

Instead of being reduced to statistics, individuals are able to present themselves as students, artists, workers and creators. In this sense, digital spaces fulfil a fundamental human need, which is the need to be heard. As one refugee described, being able to see and speak to their family through social media makes it feel “as if they live with us”, highlighting how technology can restore a sense of closeness even in displacement. Additionally, social media can also further the reconstruction of culture within Syria through raising awareness and online funds and resources.

Beyond voice, digital platforms also help rebuild another essential human need: connection. Displacement often means losing entire support systems, which can even happen overnight, including family, friends and community networks. Social media helps bridge this gap, allowing refugees to maintain relationships and form new ones across borders. Studies show that refugees rely heavily on digital tools to navigate daily life, learn new cultural norms, keep in touch with family and integrate into host communities, with over 80% of Syrian refugees in Turkey in a 2023 social media study reporting increased knowledge of their new environments through social media use.

Belonging is one of the most fundamental human needs and it is also one of the easiest to lose in a conflict. Displacement often means stepping into environments where you could be seen as an outsider, where your language may not be understood or your experiences are difficult for others to relate or respond to. In these moments, digital spaces can offer you a sense of familiarity and community. A shared post, a message from a friend that does understand, hearing your own language online even if it is through a TV show or being able to speak to your family can provide immense levels of comfort and continuity. These small moments help to rebuild a sense of normality, reminding individuals that they are still connected to something larger than their immediate surroundings.

However, digital identity is not a complete solution. Access to technology is uneven and not all refugees have the resources or stability needed to maintain an online presence. Research suggests that many feel the need to appear ‘resilient’ or ‘deserving’ in order to be accepted by host societies, shaping how they construct their identities digitally. This raises important questions on whose voices are truly being heard and whose are left out? While digital platforms offer opportunities for visibility, they can also reinforce inequalities and expectations. It cannot be ignored that some refugees may not even wish to present themselves online.

Despite these challenges, digital identity continues to play a growing role in how post-conflict communities rebuild. As technology becomes more integrated into everyday life, these online spaces may increasingly shape how culture, identity and belonging evolve across borders. For younger generations of Syrians, particularly those who have grown up in displacement, their concept of identity may no longer be tied to a single place, both physically and digitally.

The story of Syrian refugees is often told through facts and numbers, millions having been displaced and billions needed in funding for post-conflict reconstruction, but these figures fail to capture what is also at stake: identity, belonging and their basic human needs of recognition and connection. In the aftermath of the Syrian Civil War, digital spaces have become more than just tools and instead places where people have the opportunity to rebuild who they are. These platforms cannot replace what has been lost but can offer something essential, which is the chance to be seen, heard and to remind the world that behind every statistic is a human story not yet finished.

Bibliography:

Al-Daher, Yaser. “Syria in Transition – the Return of Syrian Culture.” Syriaintransition.com, 2026. https://www.syriaintransition.com/en/home/opinion/the-return-of-syrian-culture.

Aldamen, Yasmin. “Understanding Social Media Dependency and Uses and Gratifications as a Communication System in the Migration Era: Syrian Refugees in Host Countries as a Case Study.” Social Sciences 12, no. 6 (June 1, 2023): 322. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci12060322.

Bachleitner, Kathrin. “Collective Identities amid War and Displacement: Syrians and Syrian Refugees Re‐Imagine Their Country.” Nations and Nationalism, December 14, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12788.

data.unhcr.org. “Country - Syrian Arab Republic,” n.d. https://data.unhcr.org/en/country/syr.

Sciaf.org.uk. “Rebuilding Lives in Syria: Fadia’s Story | SCIAF,” 2022. https://www.sciaf.org.uk/about-us/news/14-rebuilding-lives-in-syria-fadia-s-story.

Udwan, Ghadeer, Koen Leurs, and Amanda Alencar. “Digital Resilience Tactics of Syrian Refugees in the Netherlands: Social Media for Social Support, Health, and Identity.” Social Media + Society 6, no. 2 (April 2020): 205630512091558. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120915587.

In this episode Anachal discusses how displaced Syrians are using digital platforms to recliam their identities given the devistation of the cicvl war there. 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 Number That Doesn’t Add Up

£146 billion. That’s what Britain’s creative industries contribute to the economy every year. They support around 2.4 million jobs—roughly the combined population of Birmingham and Manchester.

Across the Atlantic, America’s arts and cultural industries generate more than a trillion dollars annually. These aren’t niche occupations. They include journalists reporting from conflict zones.

Game designers building virtual worlds.

Architects shaping the skylines of tomorrow.

Fashion designers turning ideas into global brands.

Film makers, musicians, publishers, software developers, advertisers and entrepreneurs whose work begins with the same raw material.

Human imagination.

Here’s the number that doesn’t add up. How can one of the most economically significant sectors in both the UK and the US still find itself described as “non-essential”? The question isn’t whether art creates value. The evidence suggests it already does. The real question is why we’ve become so comfortable treating that value as though it were somehow different from the rest of the economy.

An Economy Built for Counting

Industrial economies changed the world. Over the past two centuries they transformed almost every aspect of daily life. They helped lift billions of people out of poverty, increased life expectancy, expanded education and created opportunities that previous generations could scarcely imagine.

None of this happened by accident.

It happened because societies became remarkably good at measuring what they wanted to improve.

Output.

Employment.

Investment.

Productivity.

Over time, these measurements became the language of progress itself.

They still matter.

Without them, governments struggle to plan, businesses struggle to invest and communities struggle to prosper.

But they were never designed to answer another question.

What is prosperity for?

That isn’t an economic question.

It’s a human one.

Some of the most important things in our lives don’t become valuable because someone measured them.

They become valuable because we experience them.

Perhaps the real blind spot isn’t that industrial economies forgot art.

Perhaps they simply became so good at counting wealth that they stopped asking what wealth was ultimately meant to achieve.

The Value Hidden in Plain Sight

Imagine someone asked you to describe one of the most valuable moments of your life.

Very few people begin with a spreadsheet.

Instead, they remember a wedding.

A concert.

A family meal.

A favourite teacher.

A football match.

A story told by a grandparent.

The first drawing their child brought home from school.

Notice what these memories have in common.

They are rarely defined by what they cost.

They’re defined by how they made us feel.

They strengthened relationships.

Created belonging.

Marked identity.

Captured moments we wanted to hold onto.

Creativity quietly sits inside many of those experiences.

Not because art is separate from everyday life.

But because it has always been one of the ways people make everyday life meaningful.

Long before psychology explained belonging, communities sang together.

Long before branding, people expressed identity through craft.

Long before social media, stories connected generations across time.

Perhaps that’s why every civilisation, regardless of wealth or geography, has created music, art, stories and rituals.

Not because prosperity allowed them to.

Because being human required them to.

What Rebuilding Actually Looks Like

Walk into any community trying to find its footing again, and you won’t just find people waiting for help to arrive.

You’ll find people making things.

Songs. Stories. Games. Recordings.

Small, deliberate acts of creation that don’t appear in a single recovery report, yet somehow still get made.

That’s not sentimentality.

It’s instinct.

Long before anyone measures a community’s recovery in employment figures or growth forecasts, something else is already happening. People are telling each other who they are. What they’ve lived through. What they refuse to let disappear.

It was never separate from rebuilding.

It was the first part of rebuilding.

The Forms Keep Changing. The Need Doesn’t.

It would be easy to assume this instinct only shows up in the obvious places—the songs, the crafts, the things that look like “art” in the way museums display it.

It doesn’t stop there.

Ask a generation that grew up between disruption and Wi-Fi, and creativity shows up somewhere else entirely.

In gaming, young people build entire worlds with rules, geography and history of their own design. Nobody had to teach them why this mattered. They already knew. A world you build is a world where you decide what belongs and what doesn’t.

In podcasting, the format shifts again. A series like What Happens When the War Ends? doesn’t ask people to perform their experience for an audience. It asks them to narrate it, in their own voice, on their own terms. That’s a different kind of authorship than the one most people in difficult circumstances are usually offered, where someone else holds the microphone.

And in citizen journalism, a generation raised on documentation rather than declaration is doing something most economic models still struggle to register: turning lived experience into evidence. Not opinion. Not commentary from a safe distance.

Three different generations of tools.

One unchanged instinct.

A way of saying: this happened, and it mattered, and so do we.

That isn’t decoration on top of survival.

It’s how survival becomes something more than enduring.

Counting What We Can, Valuing What We Can’t

Here’s where the two halves of this story meet.

Britain’s creative industries generate £146 billion a year and support around 2.4 million jobs. America’s arts and cultural industries generate more than a trillion dollars annually. Those numbers are real, and they matter—proof that imagination scales into something economies can count, fund and grow.

But none of the people in this story were creating with a return on investment in mind.

The teenager building a virtual world isn’t doing it for a salary.

The person speaking into a microphone isn’t being paid for their story; they’re being given somewhere to put it.

The young reporter documenting their own community isn’t filing copy for a byline.

It doesn’t mean the £146 billion figure is wrong.

It means it’s incomplete—a measurement of where creativity ends up once it scales, not of what made it worth doing in the first place.

Communities rebuilding after disruption understand something industrial economies forgot to ask: prosperity was always meant to be in service of something. Identity. Belonging. The simple, stubborn fact of being heard.

The Number That Adds Up After All

This is the literacy A4R’s vocational training exists to build in young creators: not just the instinct to make, which every generation already has, but the discipline to turn that instinct into a craft, a platform, a livelihood—something that scales without losing the reason it was made in the first place.

That’s the gap between a generation that creates and a generation that’s equipped to be counted for it.

Vibers get vocational training. They get a Substack, a podcast feed, a game engine, a byline that’s actually theirs. We are the infrastructure between an instinct that’s always existed and an economy that’s only just learning how to measure it.

So maybe the question we started with deserves a second look.

How can one of the most economically significant sectors in both the UK and the US still be described as “non-essential”?

Perhaps it never was.

Perhaps “essential” was simply being measured by the wrong instrument—one built to count output, not to recognise what made the output worth producing.

£146 billion. $1 trillion. 2.4 million jobs.

Numbers like these tell us creativity scales.

The game-builder, the podcast guest finding their voice, the young reporter documenting their own story—they tell us why it was always going to.

Not because prosperity allowed it.

Because being human required it.

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This piece was produced as a guest contribution to 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.

Nearly a decade after the 2016 peace deal with FARC, Colombia shows that ending conflict does not ensure sustainable peace. Former fighters continue to face insecurity, stigma, and unstable livelihoods. Reintegration remains incomplete, as fundamental human needs (safety, acceptance, and self-determination) are unevenly met in everyday life.

Backstory

Peace on Paper, Uncertainty in Practice: Life After FARC

After five decades of one of the longest-running armed conflicts in modern history, the Colombian government and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) signed a 2016 peace agreement that formally ended fighting and committed to transitioning from war to peace, from instability to reconstruction, and from rebellion to citizenship. Formally, the framing holds, ending the conflict and demobilizing close to 14,000 fighters and establishing institutional mechanisms supported by the UN and EU such as the European Union Trust Fund for Colombia and the Agency for Reintegration and Normalization (ARN) to support recovery, stabilization, and reintegration post conflict (ICG 2021, 2) (EEAS 2016, 1). Such efforts depict a clear halt to armed conflict. However, to treat this formal agreement as a definitive end to all forms of violence and instability, is a large misjudgement. Nearly a decade later, Colombia illustrates this reality to be more complicated; its peace is ongoing, uneven, and social, and cannot be reduced to political design. So, how is the illusion of peace actually experienced now? Is it meeting fundamental human needs that make peace sustainable? What does it reveal about human nature?

Colombia is often presented as a post-conflict success story. However, its lingering effects and social fractures still shape everyday life, particularly for those trying to transition and reintegrate. For former FARC members, reintegration and acceptance into society has proved scarce and uneven.

From Demobilization to Dispersion

As part of the reintegration program, former fighters were settled in designated Territorial Areas for Training and Reintegration (TATRs), accessing programmes of education (academic and vocational) and state support (ReliefWeb 2018, 1). They served to help with citizen transition and reintegration, allowing a supported shift from armed life to civilian identity. Despite initial successes, the system suffered from poor infrastructure, limited funding, and security concerns. With limited viable economic opportunities within the zones, most participants left, ultimately hindering the conditions of reintegration (Suárez 2024, 3); by 2024, the majority of former members lived outside such zones, being dispersed across different cities, with only about 16% remaining on site (Sabogal 2024, 609). Consequently, without direct support, reintegration becomes contingent and dependent on variant factors depending on region and presence (or often, absence) of state institutions. In some areas, cooperative projects such as farms employing ex-fighters and other structures have created relative stability. However, in others, they face similar structural inequalities that caused the conflict in the first place. Therefore, stability is no longer dependent on existing structures named in the peace agreement and is instead shaped by where individuals end up and what resources are available.

Persistence of Violence After “Peace”

Despite cited demobilization and terminance of violence, security after war remains scarce. With the dismantling of FARC and direct conflict between the state and the group, power vacuums emerged, now being filled by other dissident groups and criminal organizations such as the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Gulf Clan (AGC) (Helen 2018, 2). This has directly affected former combatants, with over 460 being victims of targeted murders, forcing them out of TATRs, endangering, and displacing them (Sponsel 2023, 2). With delays in housing displaced ex-fighters, many became, according to ex-rebel, Antonio Pardo, “sitting ducks for other armed groups looking to settle old scores,” stating that “there were failures on the part of the government, failures they described as delays. But those delays could be deadly for us,” (Buschschlüter 2022, 3). As community spokesperson Jasbleidy Cabana explains, “the dissidents see us as traitors to Farc’s struggle,” making them victims of persisted violence beyond formal peace (Sponsel 2023, 2). This depicts how the assumption of demobilization leading to security is flawed, and rather makes citizens vulnerable in a society where they are no longer fighters but not fully protected civilians either. Although the war has ended at a national level, the basic human need for security is uncertain for these populations. Peace is not sustainable when safety is inadequate.

The Social Limits of Reintegration

“Most people don’t want us to work for them, because of what we were,” (Brigida 2016, 2). Alongside challenges in security, former members struggle to be accepted into society. Post-conflict transition policies and programs often focus on logistical aspects of reintegration, paying little attention to social inclusion and assuming that economic participation will facilitate reintegration into society. While this assumption is in part valid, it underestimates the depth of social fracturing produced by prolonged and violent conflict which hinders reconciliation. The five decade long conflict has significantly damaged communities, causing collective loss and destabilization. Consequently, distrust is a lived reality between conflict-affected communities and former fighters. Former members face large stigmatization, threats, distrust, and struggle to be accepted into their communities. According to a 2025 Harvard survey, “many choose to conceal their past for fear of being excluded,” and that “70% of respondents report (...) risks tied to their reincorporation, and threats against themselves and their families,” (Duque 2025, 11).

Thus, reintegration must recognize such struggles and focus on policies beyond economic productivity. They must engage with “families, receiving communities, and society,” to provide resources and use “dialogue, compensation, guarantee of nonrepetition, and acknowledgement and repentance for the damage done” in order to create “an atmosphere of acceptance to ensure there are opportunities for former combatants to reintegrate,” (Gluecker 2021, 361, 270). Overall, the human need for acceptance is not easily restored from policy, and requires social interaction and time. Therefore, formal reintegration programs still leave transitioners vulnerable. Sustainable peace does not exist when society does not accept them.

Economic Reintegration and the Search For Agency

Efforts to support economic reintegration have often come unevenly and perpetuate structural inequality. Despite efforts of workforce inclusion, through systems such as Economía Social del Común (ECOMUN), a cooperative with the aim of promoting “the reintegration of former combatants into territories through their cooperatives and associations,” its focus on access to economic activity rather than access to functioning and stable economic systems has limited the development of sustainable and autonomous lives. Although businesses exist, they are unstable and have difficulties generating stable incomes. In agricultural areas, cooperative projects such as farms employing ex-fighters lack sustainable incomes due to fluctuating harvest cycles, prices, social stigma, and inconsistencies (Morales 2022, 6, 7)(Duque 2025, 11). In others, irregular demand, weak value chain positioning, low investment, and an overall lack of social acceptance continuously undermine stability and long-term viability, forcing many to rely on precarious, short-term income strategies with unpredictable income and revert to illegal sectors such as drug trade (Otis 2021, 3). Additionally, former fighters also face systemic barriers associated with financial exclusion, with restricted access to banking services, stigma preventing economic reintegration in communities, and struggles to access “important financial services such as credit and loans,” (Valencia 2022, 3). Moreover, economic focus on efficiency ignores post-conflict realities, where participation is shaped by insecurity, trauma, and health conditions. While programs enable participation and provide some level of income, transition to independent economic actors is not consistently stable; income and market integration remains limited, irregular, and dependent on cooperative structures. Thus, Colombia’s reintegration model hinders self-determination, as agency depends on not only access to work, but the capacity to exercise economic autonomy and stability.

From Distance to Reality

At first glance, the issue may feel geographically, politically, and socially distant to readers. Despite the specific focus on post-conflict Colombia and its effects on ex-FARC members, its dynamics and what it reveals is familiar. The search for safety, acceptance, stable sense of identity, and agency are not unique to post-conflict societies. Despite different contexts, these human needs are in reality, universal. Furthermore, the focus is not only Colombia’s process of rebuilding after long conflict, but what it reveals about real peace, institutions, and human nature universally. The idea of ‘peace on paper, uncertainty in reality’ is present in various different contexts such as, for example, the failure of a simple ceasefire in Syria that did not address key grievances. Peace, therefore, is not about only ending direct violence, but about restoring basic human needs and conditions.

Conclusion

Historically, in fragile and post-conflict societies, it is evident that solely stopping physical harm (through methods of ending conflicts by ceasefires or peace agreements), does not prevent instability, resentment, grievances, or renewal of conflict. In 2015, a survey of scholars identified key elements of sustainable stability beyond violence: well-being, quality of social relations, cooperation, interdependence, access to resources, equality, and human security (Coleman 2020, 4). It is important, therefore, to address all aspects of peace when peacekeeping.

Nearly a decade after the 2016 agreement, Colombia illustrates the complexity of post-conflict recovery and peacebuilding. For former FARC members, progress is evident, but is not complete, involving continuously navigating unstable and uncertain conditions. Reintegration and peace does not occur within a defined timeframe as it deals with deep-rooted societal transformations. Overall, it is evident that peace cannot be fully achieved with a single document or moment. It requires the implementation of “positive peace”, otherwise known as the creation of sustainable, harmonious societies beyond the mere absence of war through attitudes, institutions, and resolution of root grievances (Positive Peace n.d., 1). It is within this condition where human needs such as safety, acceptance, and self-determination are met.

Sources:

Brigida, Anna-Catherine. “Turning Guerrilla Fighters into Entrepreneurs.” BBC News, March 24, 2016. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-35873206

Buschschlüter, Vanessa. “Colombia Ex-Fighters Brew up New Lives After Giving up Guns.” BBC News, April 7, 2022. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-60993769

Coleman, Peter T., Joshua Fisher, Douglas P. Fry, Larry S. Liebovitch, Allegra Chen-Carrel, and Geneviève Souillac. “How to Live in Peace? Mapping the Science of Sustaining Peace: A Progress Report.” American Psychologist 76, no. 7 (November 12, 2020): 1113–27. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000745

Colombia, UN Verification Mission in. “Former FARC-EP Members Are Transforming Their Lives with Education.” ReliefWeb, July 27, 2018. https://reliefweb.int/report/colombia/former-farc-ep-members-are-transforming-their-lives-education

Duque, Juana Garcia. “Peace Advancements and Challenges in Colombia.” ReVista, January 27, 2025. https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/peace-advancements-and-challenges-in-colombia/

European External Action Service (EEAS). “EU Trust Fund for Colombia.” December 12, 2016. https://www.eeas.europa.eu/node/16984_es

Gluecker, Andreas, Andrea Correa-Chica, and Wilson López-López. “The FARC in Colombia: Collective Reintegration and Social Identity Transformation.” Political Psychology 43, no. 2 (May 20, 2021): 359–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12765

Helen, Murphy, and Luis Jaime Acosta. “Violent Rivals Rush into FARC Void in Colombia: A Fractured Peace.” Reuters Investigates, April 26, 2018. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/colombia-peace/

International Crisis Group. A Fight by Other Means: Keeping the Peace with Colombia’s FARC. November 30, 2021. https://www.crisisgroup.org/rpt/latin-america-caribbean/colombia/092-fight-other-means-keeping-peace-colombias-farc

Morales, Mauricio. “From Fighting to Farming: Colombia’s Ex-FARC Seek Alternatives to War.” The New Humanitarian, December 7, 2022. https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news-feature/2022/12/07/Colombia-FARC-alternatives-peace-guerrilla

Otis, John. “Many of Colombia’s Ex-Rebel Fighters Rearm and Turn to Illegal Drug Trade.” WHQR, April 9, 2021. https://www.whqr.org/2020-05-19/many-of-colombias-ex-rebel-fighters-rearm-and-turn-to-illegal-drug-trade

Positive Peace. “What Is Positive Peace?” n.d. https://positivepeace.org/what-is-positive-peace

Sabogal, Laura Camila Barrios. “From Cantonments to Settlements: Lessons for Reintegration of Former Combatants from the Colombian Peace Process.” International Peacekeeping 31, no. 5 (August 27, 2024): 599–637. https://doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2024.2391765

Sponsel, Christoph. “Colombia: Former FARC Fighters Who Signed 2016 Peace Deal Now Live amid Threats and Assassinations.” The Conversation, September 7, 2023. https://doi.org/10.64628/ab.ck4eav3s7

Suárez, Astrid. “Dozens of Former FARC Fighters Abandon ‘Reincorporation’ Village in Colombia after Death Threats.” AP News, August 21, 2024. https://apnews.com/article/farc-colombia-displaced-former-fighters-1bd52aebb43e3464cdb7570c531dad43

Valencia B., Wilson. “Barriers to Entry: Understanding Labor Market Attitudes towards Ex-Combatants and How the Private Sector Can Help.” 2022. https://revistas.javeriana.edu.co/files-articulos/PaPo/27%20%282022%29/77772006009/index.html

In this episode Anh discusses the Vietnamese expereince of rebuolding their country and the kind issues they have been dealing with. 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.

What Comes After the Guns Fall Silent

The hardest, most important security work begins the day the fighting stops — and a generation of young correspondents is already documenting it.

There is a moment, in almost every conflict, that gets very little attention. It is not the outbreak and it is not the ceasefire. It is the long, unglamorous morning after — the years in which a society decides, often without quite realizing it is deciding, whether it will actually become whole again or merely stop bleeding.

I have spent much of the past year reading dispatches from that morning after, written by the young correspondents of the A4R Media Hub. A piece on Bosnia, three decades on, asking what its rebuilding really taught us about recovery economies. A piece on Syria, arguing that the measure of return is not how fast refugees come home but whether there is anything to come home to. A piece on post-genocide Rwanda and the quiet machinery of risk-sharing and resilience. A piece on Lebanon, where a dollarized survival economy keeps daily life moving while the deeper work of recovery stalls.

Read together, these articles do something I find genuinely important. They relocate the question of security away from the place we usually keep it — the border, the budget line, the weapons system — and put it where it actually lives: in whether ordinary people can rebuild a life worth defending.

That relocation is the heart of the work I do, and the heart of the book I have spent the last several years writing. And it is why I wanted to write for this audience in particular.

The thing we keep getting backwards

We have inherited a definition of security that is almost entirely about threat. Security, in this telling, is the capacity to deter, repel, or destroy a danger. It is fundamentally reactive, and it is enormously expensive, and — this is the part we rarely say out loud — it does very little to produce the conditions under which danger becomes less likely in the first place.

The correspondents writing for A4R keep stumbling onto the alternative, because the alternative is what they can actually see on the ground. When a community in Bosnia or Rwanda begins to knit itself back together, the security that results does not come from a fence. It comes from work people can do, from institutions they can trust, from health they can rely on, from a story about themselves that includes a future. Those are not soft accompaniments to real security. They are the real security. Everything else is the alarm system on a house no one can afford to live in.

I have come to think of genuine security as resting on five interdependent pillars: ecological stability, public health capacity, economic equity, democratic infrastructure, and community cohesion. None of them is optional. A society can have a formidable military and almost none of these, and it will not be secure — it will be brittle, one shock away from the morning after. And a society that invests in these five things steadily, before the crisis, buys itself something we badly undervalue.

We undervalue it because prevention is invisible. The pandemic that doesn’t happen, the conflict that doesn’t reignite, the neighborhood that doesn’t empty out — none of these generate headlines, and none of them photograph well. But the economics are not subtle.

Across the research, money spent preventing conflict before it erupts returns on the order of sixteen dollars for every one spent cleaning up afterward. We persist in paying the sixteen.

Why this is a generational argument

Here is what I want to say directly to the younger readers of this platform, because I think it is the most honest thing I can offer. You did not create the polycrisis you are inheriting — the climate disruption, the conflicts, the fraying institutions, the displacement that A4R exists to document. But you are going to be the ones living in the morning after, and, increasingly, the ones doing the rebuilding. And the most encouraging thing I have observed, across a global network of tens of thousands of people working in the impact economy, is that the generation now entering this work is not waiting for permission to begin.

The A4R model is itself a small, sharp example of this. A correspondent learns to report by reporting on something that matters; the skill and the impact are built in the same motion. That is exactly the logic the regenerative economy runs on — the refusal to separate doing well from doing good, training from contributing, the personal from the structural. The young people I encounter are, as a rule, allergic to that separation in a way that older generations had to be argued into. For them it is simply obvious that an economy which destroys the conditions of life is not a successful economy that happens to have side effects.

It is a failing economy that has not yet finished failing.

I coined the term impact entrepreneur back in 2011 to name a person who builds enterprise in service of that recognition — who treats healing, rather than mere extraction, as the point.

Fifteen years later, what was a fringe idea has become a field. And the people now joining that field in the largest numbers are precisely the ones reading platforms like this one.

What the rebuilding actually asks of us

If you take the morning-after seriously, a few things follow that I think are worth naming for anyone deciding where to put their working life.

The first is that recovery is not charity; it is infrastructure. Maud Sayers’s argument about Syria — that you cannot measure return by speed, only by what people are returning to — is an economic argument, not a sentimental one. The capacity to absorb people back into a functioning life is built with the same five pillars, whether you are recovering from a war, a flood, a pandemic, or the slow violence of a collapsing currency.

The second is that prevention and recovery are the same skill, pointed in two directions. The community resilience that lets Rwanda share risk after catastrophe is the same resilience that, built earlier, would have lowered the odds of catastrophe. This is why I have come to believe security should be approached less as a fortress to be manned and more as a service to be delivered — defense reconceived as the active, ongoing provision of the conditions that make people safe, rather than the threat of force against the conditions that make them afraid.

The third — and this is the one I most want to leave with younger readers — is that the work is available now. You do not need to wait until you are credentialed, senior, or certain. The A4R correspondents I have had the privilege of editing this year were not waiting. They picked the hardest possible subject — what happens after the worst happens — and they reported it with rigor and care. That is the whole move. That is how the morning after gets rebuilt: by people who decide, before anyone gives them leave to, that the rebuilding is theirs to do.

Laurie Lane-Zucker is the founder and CEO of Impact Entrepreneur, a global media and community platform serving the impact economy across more than 200 countries, and the proud content partner of the A4R Media Hub. He coined the term “impact entrepreneur” in 2011. His new book, The Impact Entrepreneur Breakthrough: A Field Manual for the Regenerative Economy (Berrett- Koehler), arrives September 1, 2026 — a practical guide to the redefinition of security and the rebuilding work described here. Learn more at impactentrepreneur.com/breakthrough.

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.

Ciao Trailblazers,

We came across interesting news about how you are bringing change into the mainstream. We aren’t talking just about the coffee raves or dry nights out. But, more. Seems you are growing in confidence that you can bring purpose into the main stream, along with an interest in nurtring your human skills - great isn’t it when we figured this out with you before the mainstream!

Anyway, coming back to the updates for the last month. We ran with a number of articles highligting our work with you and what the overall ambiton is for A4R Media Hub. The full collection of the 28 articles can be found here. They cover how our approach to human centered design is keeping the users in mind as we create users cases for our marketplace supporting GenZ with NEET issues and communties recovering from at the same time.

Along with the contribution your work has been making over the years. They range from the work the summer interns did with us, to the viber vocational training programme we co designed with them. Curious to see what we have said? Adain the link is here.

Don’t forget to share them.

Beyond that we have also sharing the articles you submitted to Impact Entrepreneur Magazine as well. Out of the 18 posted we submitted over the last quarter. 4 have been posted now. Here is a list with the links -

1. How much is the Dollar right now? Link here.

2. After the Guns fall silent - Link here.

3. Syria’s Return Dilemma - Link here.

4. Shared Threads of Recovery - 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.

Our next Guest Post is coming out on Thursday - see keep an eye out for it!

Here is a summary -

There are more posts like this in the pipeline. So, look forward to sharing them once a month with you.

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 Bob Marley’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 & the Vibers.

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

It’s never too late to make a difference today. Do good today for the betterment of tomorrow.

Same notification format as everything else competing for your attention this morning. Same bell icon, same rounded card, same green toggle switched on. But the message underneath asks something almost nobody else in your feed is asking — not for your time, your data, or your outrage. Just this: do something good today, and trust that it isn’t wasted.

That’s a bigger claim than it sounds.

Not charity. Not a calculation either.

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

This is not charity. Charity asks for sacrifice — give something away, expect nothing in return except the feeling of having done good. That’s a noble model, and it has its place in the world. It is not, however, A4R’s operating logic. A4R is not asking Vibers, or anyone reading this, to be selfless. Altruism can be part of what happens here. It is not who the Media Hub is.

But the opposite reading is just as wrong, and arguably worse. This is not a cynical instrumental calculation — be good purely because it pays off, run the numbers, optimise your kindness for maximum personal yield. Reduce moral behaviour to a spreadsheet and you’ve lost the thing that made it valuable in the first place. A good act performed solely to extract a return isn’t quite a good act anymore. It’s a transaction wearing a good act’s clothes.

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

Compound interest for your character.

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

Good actions don’t just produce a single, isolated outcome. They build into habits. Habits build into character. Character compounds — the same way money does in a bank account, except the interest payments aren’t cash, they’re trust, competence, and resilience. In business terms, good actions give a return similar to simple interest accrued to money deposited in a bank — except habits pay out more like compound interest, where the return comes not only on what was put in originally, but on everything that interest has already generated.

That’s a reasonably literal description of how character actually works. The first time you choose integrity over convenience, it’s hard and might cost you something. The hundredth time, it’s just who you are — and trust starts moving toward you because of it, not because you calculated that it would, but because that’s what tends to happen when someone has quietly, consistently, become reliable.

Older than the notification format suggests.

Strip away the bell icon, and the idea underneath this card is one of the oldest humans have. Karma. What goes around comes around. You reap what you sow. Different traditions, different vocabularies — circling the same observation: that good acts don’t simply vanish into the past the moment they’re completed. They leave a residue. They shape what becomes possible later, for you and often for people you’ll never meet.

None of those traditions framed this as a financial calculation either. The people who first articulated karma weren’t running a cost-benefit analysis. They were describing how a life actually works when you watch it unfold over decades rather than days. The compound interest metaphor is useful precisely because it’s intuitive to a generation fluent in financial language — but it’s standing in for something a balance sheet can’t fully hold.

The part a spreadsheet can’t capture.

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

Not every good act pays off in a way you’ll ever see or trace. Some of what you put in over a lifetime returns to someone else entirely — a stranger, a future version of a community you’ll never visit, a person three steps removed from you who benefits from a culture of trust you helped build without ever knowing your name was attached to it. If you’re only doing good because you expect a visible, attributable, personal return, you will eventually be disappointed, and you’ll likely stop.

The people who keep going have made peace with that uncertainty. Do good today. Let tomorrow surprise you — or don’t, and do it anyway. That’s the part compound interest can model and karma can only gesture at, but neither one can fully resolve. Some good is just good, with no receipt attached. And the data still suggests, overwhelmingly, that it compounds anyway.

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 good habits compound. It was finding somewhere to make the first deposit. A4R gives young people — many at the NEET crossroads, many carrying complicated histories of displacement — the time, training, and space to start building something: a skill, a piece of published work, a habit of showing up and doing the work properly, day after day.

That’s not charity either. The Vibers aren’t given something for nothing. They’re given an account to invest in, and the tools to start making deposits — in their own integrity, their own craft, their own creative capability — long before any of it has paid off in a way they can point to. Most won’t know the full return for years. Some, true to the metaphysical residue above, may never see it directly at all.

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, there is a quieter accumulation happening. Skill compounding into capability. Integrity compounding into reputation. Good work, done consistently, compounding into a career nobody handed them.

It’s never too late to make that first deposit. Do good today. Let tomorrow surprise you.

Join the conversation

🔗 Read and listen to our latest collaborative drops directly here.

This piece was produced as a guest contribution to 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.

Memoricide in Nagorno-Karabakh: the Fading Identity of the Artsakhtsi

They fled Nagorno-Karabakh, buried loved ones, and rebuilt lives from scratch, eventually gaining citizenship, housing, and work. Now a new threat looms for the Artsakh people: the deliberate erasure of their cultural history. Towns are being renamed, sacred sites destroyed, and with those losses the region’s distinct dialect risks vanishing within a generation. This is a memoricide, a killing of Artsakh history, delegitimising the claims of these people to their homeland.

The Nagorno-Karabakh region is an ethnically Armenian enclave located within the internationally recognized borders of Azerbaijan. Its Artsakh population, which uses a local Armenian dialect, has long identified culturally and politically with Armenia rather than Azerbaijan. That divergence between the inhabitants’ identity and the region’s geographic position has been a central source of tension between Armenia and Azerbaijan, contributing to repeated conflicts over control of the area.

Under Soviet rule, Nagorno-Karabakh was placed within the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic as the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast. In 1988, the region’s ethnic Armenian population began pressing for transfer of the oblast to Armenian jurisdiction; that demand was opposed by both Azerbaijani authorities and the Soviet government. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a full-scale war. In the 1990s, forces from Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia took control of much of southwestern Azerbaijan, including Nagorno-Karabakh and a land corridor linking it to Armenia. A ceasefire followed, but negotiations produced no lasting settlement; the region’s authorities then declared the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, a state that no UN member recognized.

Azerbaijan, supported by Turkey, renewed large-scale fighting in 2020, producing the worst clashes since the early 1990s. Armenian forces suffered heavy losses, and a ceasefire was soon arranged that significantly curtailed Armenian military presence in parts of the disputed area. A further Azerbaijani offensive in 2023 consolidated control: by then more than 100,000 Artsakh people had fled and the self-declared Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh (also known as the Republic of Artsakh) announced its dissolution. No comprehensive peace treaty has been signed; both sides accuse the other of ethnic cleansing, and Azerbaijan says it will not agree to any deal it believes legitimizes Armenian claims to the territory.

The exodus of the Artsakh people from Nagorno-Karabakh is considered one of the most complete displacements in human history. Most found refuge in Armenia, yet further challenges still plagued refugees. Secure, affordable housing is scarce as rents rise under increased demand; legal status and citizenship, essential for stable employment and access to services, are often slow to come. Many have depleted their life’s savings in funding their flight and many report feeling a slight tension with the Armenian population over the added pressure on public services.

Integration with the wider Armenian population is vital if Artsakh refugees wish to re-build their lives; but it comes with a hidden cost. Refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh brought with them a unique dialect, distinct to the Artsakh people. It bears similarities to standard Armenian, but this dialect is now confined to the homes of refugees. While Artsakh people from Nagorno-Karabakh try to keep it alive at home, podcast host Tatevik Khachatryan says that words from the Yerevan (Armenian) dialect are being added to her son’s vocabulary. Education in Armenian schools means that Artsakh children are less able to use their dialect and face the possibility of teasing from other children. As the Artsakh people and the wider Armenian population assimilate, it is likely that the dialect will disappear altogether.

That loss would be more than linguistic. Known as “Mer lyuzun”, our language, by Artsakhtsi, the dialect has ancient roots. It preserves words of classical Armenian missing from the standard tongue, and contains unique sounds and loanwords picked up from neighbouring countries. For people from Nagorno-Karabakh, the Artsakhtsi, this language is a living memory and a source of pride. Losing it would mean losing a piece of identity and those words and expressions which bind their people together.

Language is only one casualty of a wider cultural erasure facing the Artsakhtsi. Their religious sites, monuments and burial grounds, tangible anchors of memory and identity, are being systematically destroyed and replaced. Since Azerbaijani authorities assumed control of the region, satellite imagery has documented the flattening of sacred places: Kanach Zham Church in Shusha lay in ruins, St. Sargis Church in Mokhrenes has been razed and new construction is already emerging. Historic cemeteries in Shusha and the village of Mets Tagher have suffered the same fate; even tombstones have been removed to make room for infrastructure, severing visible links to generations past.

Armenia has a strong Christian identity, claiming to be the first nation in the world to adopt Christianity in 301AD. The reported destruction of historic churches erases their long communal memory. These structures have provided centres for Artsakh communities for generations, holding memories of years and years’ worth of marriages, baptisms, funerals, and festivals. For the displaced people of Artsakh, losing these sites and being having no means to protect them is another step towards cultural identity loss, making the reality of returning increasingly uncertain. If they went back, would they even recognise their homeland?

Beyond the loss of monuments, Artsakh family history is being erased through the removal of tombstones and cemeteries. The heartbreaking reality is that as well as wondering whether their homes still stand; refugees worry that graves of loved ones have been destroyed. Tombstones testify to a family’s continued presence in an area, demonstrating the deep ties to their homeland. The destruction of cemeteries like those in Shusha removes the ability to trace family history or to pay respects to those who have passed away and is just another way in which physical traces of the Artsakh people’s presence in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh are being eradicated.

If Artsakhtsi were to return to Nagorno-Karabakh today, they would find their homeland profoundly altered. Many familiar places have been renamed with Azerbaijani toponyms. Stepanakert, once known for its 19th-century Armenian architecture, has been physically reshaped by new buildings and roads and is now referred to as Khankendi (Azerbaijani: Xankəndi). Stepanakert originally took its name from the Bolshevik revolutionary Stepan Shaumian; removing the name serves to delete erase the history of that place, rendering the past of the Artsakhtsi invisible; it severs the linguistic and historical link between the land and its former inhabitants.

The effects of these changes are profound. Artsakh refugees are finding that the place they considered home can no longer even be found on their documents. Aren Hayrapetyan, a displaced Artsakh, received Armenian citizenship but was horrified when he found that his birthplace was listed as “Azerbaijan”. He says that this is an incorrect reflection of his identity, and he will not swear allegiance to Armenia while his documents label him Azerbaijani. For Aren, seeing ‘Azerbaijan’ on his official documents feels like a state-sanctioned eviction from his homeland, as if the Armenian authorities seek to formalise his displacement.

The home of the Artsakh people no longer exists, it has been systematically renamed, and the places they once knew and loved have been destroyed. Traces of ancestral presence are being wiped out through the destruction of cemeteries, and new infrastructure, part of the ‘smart cities’ project, is replacing it. Nagorno-Karabakh is becoming unrecognisable. Not only is the region which lives in the memory of the Artsakh people is no longer their home on paper, it no longer physically exists. The survival of their cultural history is in jeopardy, further worsened by the inevitable loss of their unique Artsakh dialect, which is already becoming redundant, being supplanted in favour of standard Armenian.

There is hope, however. Several programmes are being developed to salvage cultural memory where possible. TUMO’s Armenian Cultural Heritage Institute, launched in early 2026 uses 3D scans of Artsakh monuments to create virtual reality experiences for refugees and researchers. A similar programme attempts to preserve the “architectural DNA” of the region, to ensure that the proportions of buildings and many of their unique carvings can be preserved and reconstructed in the future. The “We Exist” initiative held a major festival in January of this year to celebrate Artsakh culture, featuring carpet weavers and chefs, to ensure that their “intangible” heritage, like Zhengyalov hats (stuffed flatbread) survives. Furthermore, podcasts and oral-history projects are recording Artsakh dialect before it dies out.

The Artsakh people are fighting their cultural erasure. Their efforts demonstrate their resilience and will to survive. While the physical presence of their homeland may be being altered, digital records form a cultural archive, an indestructible record of cultural history. Likewise, making use of oral records and popular media such as podcasting will continue to make Artsakh dialect accessible to young people. Celebrations of Artsakh culture within Armenia are testament to its living force and ability to reform a broken community. There may be efforts to erase this culture, but the spirit of those who carry it with them are not letting it disappear.

In this episode Harriet discusses the post conflict experience of the Artsakh people of Nagorno-Karabakh. She highligts life after the war there. 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.

A Gen Z Viber at the Arts4Refugees Media Hub made these cards because she wanted her peer group to see this clearly. Not through a clinical lens. Not through policy language. Just the myth, then the reality, side by side. Simple enough to share. True enough to land.

The myth: only soldiers get PTSD.

The reality: everyone is affected by conflict.Two cards. Eleven words between them. And a gap that contains one of the most under-examined mental health crises of our generation.

The myth didn’t come from nowhere. It came from decades of necessary, hard-won advocacy for military veterans — a population that fought publicly and painfully for their trauma to be recognised, named, and treated. That fight mattered. It still matters. And it gave us something invaluable: a shared cultural understanding that conflict exposure leaves a psychological mark. That coming back isn’t the same as being okay.

But somewhere in that process, PTSD became associated almost exclusively with the military experience. With combat. With a life chosen in deliberate proximity to danger. And that association — however unintentionally — drew a line around who trauma belongs to.Chances are you already accept, on some level, that what they went through left a mark. You have a relationship with that truth. Now take that same understanding — and extend it. Because here is what displacement actually looks like. It is not a clean exit from a conflict zone. It is watching your neighbourhood become one. It is losing your home, your community, your sense of safety — not in a defined tour of duty with a return date and institutional support, but in an open-ended rupture with no debrief, no framework, and no cultural script that says what happened to you was traumatic enough to matter.

The majority of the world’s 123+ million forcibly displaced people are carrying significant psychological trauma. Most of it undiagnosed. Most of it unnamed. Not because it isn’t real — but because the systems we built to identify and treat PTSD were designed around a different template. And displaced civilians don’t fit it, so they fall through the gap.Undiagnosed trauma doesn’t disappear. It shapes how people parent. How communities rebuild. How young people who grew up in post-conflict environments understand themselves and their futures. The mental health crisis inside displacement is one of the least visible and most consequential challenges of our time — and it starts with a myth most of us have never thought to question.

That’s why two cards matter. That’s why a Gen Z Viber, still at university, building her skills through real work at A4R, decided this was the conversation her peers needed to have. Not a lecture. Not a policy brief. Just a myth, a reality, and an invitation to look more carefully at both.

If you’ve ever accepted that a soldier can carry trauma home from conflict — you already have everything you need to understand what 123 million displaced civilians are living with. The only thing missing is the conversation.Start the Conversation

Displacement doesn’t end when the conflict does. Explore the stories, research, and co-created content from the A4R Media Hub community — made by Gen Z, for Gen Z, about the issues that define our time.

🔗 Read and listen to our latest collaborative drops directly here.

This piece was produced as a guest contribution to 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.

Click here to Explore Belfast.

Peace Without Prosperity? Child Poverty in Northern Ireland Since the Troubles

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 is widely credited for bringing about the end of ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. It granted Northern Ireland a degree of self-determinism and achieved self-governance, while also beginning a process of demilitarisation. While sporadic violence in Northern Ireland is ongoing, the Agreement was a key step towards peace. However, it did not dismantle deep structural inequalities, resulting in entrenched child poverty- defined by UNICEF as the deprivation of basic needs such as nutrition, shelter, education, and healthcare- in communities most affected by the Troubles.

The Good Friday Agreement arose from three decades of armed ethno-nationalist conflict. Known as the Troubles, the conflict was fought between the overwhelmingly Protestant Unionists on one side and the Catholic Nationalists on the other, and had a seismic impact on the structure of Northern Irish society, which became segregated along sectarian lines, something that we will explore using the example of Belfast.

This segregation was often physical. ‘Peace lines’- large walls separating Protestant and Catholic communities -were constructed to reduce violence, many of which still exist today, such as those between Shankill Road and Falls Road. While effective in limiting direct conflict, these barriers reinforced social and economic isolation. As a result, communities became increasingly insular, and areas already affected by violence experienced deepening urban decay and economic decline.

The Troubles’ spatial impact extended beyond neighbourhood division. Belfast city centre was protected by a ‘ring of steel,’ a network of security measures designed to prevent paramilitary attacks. This ensured the city’s economic core remained relatively stable and attractive to investment, while suburban areas - exposed to violence and military presence- saw infrastructure degrade and businesses withdraw. The urban-suburban division was cemented by many factors. Belfast’s secure city centre attracted investment, while conflict-affected suburbs saw disinvestment and decline. With economic infrastructure, human capital, and business premises degraded by conflict, Belfast’s GDP fell by as much as 20% between 1966 and 1998. As a result, the spatial and economic inequalities created during the Troubles were not resolved by peace, but became embedded in Northern Ireland’s post-conflict landscape.

The late 1990s and early 2000s saw efforts to regenerate Belfast by investing in the city centre and waterfront. However, this only perpetuated the divide between the city centre and peripheral working-class areas. Ken Sterrett, a Northern Irish urban planner and designer, describes the approach to Belfast’s development as neoliberal urbanism, a market-first approach that often results in the most wealthy areas becoming increasingly wealthy while underdeveloped areas are left behind. Furthermore, the unique issues faced by Northern Ireland in comparison to the rest of the UK have meant that councils have been forced to spend much more on public order and public housing than in other parts of the country, necessitated by the ongoing need for policing and intelligence and the legacy of colonial housing discrimination.

Relative peace in Northern Ireland, therefore, has not generated the economic revival that may have been anticipated. These spatial and economic divides did not disappear after 1998, and they continue to shape everyday life. For children growing up in Northern Ireland today, this legacy is particularly stark. For one, it means that the social stratification of the Troubles will often dictate their home, social group, and class. As the Belfast Mobility Project explores, Protestant and Catholic communities remain divided not only in residence but also in movement, with many individuals living and socialising within confined geographic areas. This is a form of spatialised inequality, where the geography of conflict continues to determine life chances.

These divisions are also reflected in patterns of deprivation. Nine of the ten most deprived areas in Northern Ireland are predominantly Catholic, highlighting the persistence of historical inequalities. Consequently, many children grow up in environments characterised by limited economic opportunity, inadequate housing, and reduced access to services. In this way, child poverty is not simply a contemporary issue, but the direct legacy of conflict-driven inequality. Joseph McNeill runs the Ardoyne Youth Club in north Belfast and describes how “the infrastructure and the support from the government is definitely not here at the minute,” and how the children he works with “don’t have the same support mechanisms” as children from wealthier parts of the city. Oral testimony corroborates existing statistics. Around a fifth of Northern Irish children live in relative poverty, according to the Northern Ireland Audit Office (NIAO), and this is cemented by some of the worst childcare provision in the UK; Northern Ireland has the lowest level of nursery provision in the United Kingdom, a barrier to workplace entry for parents.

The consequences of poverty are broad and can be lifelong. In regards to education, the NIAO states that “Evidence shows that the gap in attainment between children growing up in poverty and their peers starts early and lasts throughout school. By the time they reach primary school, children from low-income families are already up to a year behind middle-income children in terms of cognitive skills.” Evidence of academic underperformance in Northern Ireland is clear- the percentage of school leavers with five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C is 37% amongst Protestant boys from low-income households and 47% amongst low-income Catholic boys. This attainment gap reproduces the economic divides created during the Troubles, limiting social mobility across generations. Children who grow up impoverished are therefore less likely to achieve academic success, limiting their ability to break out of the cycle of poverty. As one study described, marginalised groups such as BAME students and students from travelling families were also far more likely to be marginalised within the education system, leading to lower attainment and lessening the ability of these students to escape the cycle of poverty.

The impacts of childhood poverty in Northern Ireland stretch further than the classroom, however. As the NIAO describes, “Research has shown that childhood poverty is linked to higher levels of infant mortality and death in early adulthood, as well as poorer mental health, obesity and chronic illness.” Indeed, children living in poverty are up to four times more likely to develop a mental health condition by the age of 11 than their peers. The health consequences of poverty are unsurprising, when it is considered that by 2024, the number of children in Northern Ireland who lived in households experiencing food insecurity had risen to 130,000. As Joseph McNeill describes, around 70% of the children in the Ardoyne area are recipients of free school meals. The systemic roots of poverty, therefore, can have dire consequences for children and young people. They will often grow up lacking economic stability and security, meaning that they can be vulnerable to food insecurity. Similarly, as education and self-development become secondary to survival, they may lack the ability to achieve their full potential.

Has peace in Northern Ireland brought prosperity, therefore? In short, no. While certain areas of the country have had funding poured into them, neoliberal urbanism has meant that other parts of the country have struggled to develop at all. Peace ended violence, but it did not equalise opportunity, and in Northern Ireland, the geography of conflict has become the geography of poverty. For children growing up in its shadow, the legacy of the Troubles is not history: it is a lived reality.

In this episode Camille discusses the post conflict experience of the Children in Belfast following the Good Friday Agreement. 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.

Have you come across Tiffany Chung? She’s a Vietnamese-American artist who maps displacement — not with data visualisations or policy graphics, but with hand-drawn cartographies that feel like memory. Soft shapes. Fractured borders. Small houses scattered across abstracted landscapes like people mid-journey with nowhere clear to land.

One of our Vibers found her work and couldn’t move on. So she didn’t. Instead she started asking a question that sounds simple until you actually try to answer it: how many people in the world right now don’t have a place that claims them?

The number she came back with was 123.2 million. Forcibly displaced, at the end of 2024. And that was before this year’s numbers came in.

Here’s what struck her — and what she brought back to the rest of us. That number isn’t just a humanitarian crisis. It’s a structural one. The nation state, as a system, was not designed to absorb displacement at this scale. Not the largest countries by land mass. Not the wealthiest by GDP. Not the most politically stable. None of them. The architecture we built to manage human movement across borders was designed for a different world — a world where 123 million people needing somewhere to go was simply not a scenario anyone planned for.

And the forces driving that number aren’t slowing down. Climate change is displacing people before conflict even arrives — failed harvests, disappearing coastlines, water scarcity that turns neighbours into competitors. Conflict then does the rest. These aren’t parallel crises. They’re the same crisis at different stages.

We’re not going to solve that here. That’s not the point. The point is that a Gen Z student, still at university, building her CV through real work at the A4R Media Hub, was the one who stopped, looked properly, and then turned to her peers and said — you need to understand this.

That’s what we do at A4R. We’re a co-creation community where Gen Z journalists, researchers, and storytellers apply what they’re learning at university to questions that actually matter. We work with displaced communities directly. We build real skills — editorial, research, digital, production — while we’re still studying, so that by the time we graduate, we already have a body of work that reflects who we are and what we care about.

If you're at university and you've ever looked at a number like 123.2 million and felt the gap between knowing something and actually understanding it — that gap is exactly where we work.

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Displacement isn’t a distant issue — it’s the defining challenge of our generation. Explore the stories, research, and co-created content changing how young people engage with it.

This piece was produced in collaboration with the BizGees community, amplifying the work of Arts4Refugees Media Hub and the Gen Z Vibers co-creating it.

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Measuring Peace Beyond Conflict: Women’s Recovery in Post-War Ethiopia

In a makeshift clinic in Mekelle, a woman waits three hours for care for a wound that never healed during the fighting. The Pretoria Peace Agreement of November 2022 ended formal hostilities, but it did not restore the services, livelihoods, or daily safety that make life livable. For many women in Tigray and neighbouring regions, the ceasefire marked the start of a different fight: regaining access to healthcare, justice, social belonging, and economic stability. The transition from war to peace has therefore been uneven and deeply gendered, revealing how the end of violence does not automatically lead to recovery.

Post-conflict recovery is often framed in political or military terms. Sustainable peace is not. It is measured at the household and community level: can a woman seek medical care without fear, secure legal recognition for abuses she suffered, find work that supports her family, and be welcomed back into community life? These everyday questions capture the lived experience of peace more accurately than diplomatic milestones or ceasefire monitoring reports. For women in northern Ethiopia, the answer remains: not yet. The gap between formal peace and lived security continues to shape daily life, limiting the potential for long-term stability and reconciliation.

Health and bodily integrity

The physical toll of the war is visible and ongoing. Nearly three-quarters of health facilities in Tigray were damaged, looted, or rendered non-functional. As a consequence, many survivors live with untreated injuries, obstetric complications, and heightened risk of sexually transmitted infections. Women who were pregnant or gave birth during the conflict often lacked skilled medical support, increasing long-term maternal and infant health risks. In rural areas, distances to functioning clinics remain significant, and transport costs or insecurity continue to prevent access.

One striking estimate from post-conflict assessments found that roughly three quarters of documented sexual-violence survivors did not receive timely medical support. Those numbers are not abstract; they are wounds that complicate childbirth, make daily work harder, and carry stigma. Untreated injuries and chronic pain also reduce women’s capacity to work, care for children, and participate in community life. Rebuilding health systems is therefore not only a humanitarian priority but a foundation for recovery, economic participation, and dignity.

Mental health and social reintegration

Psychological harm is equally persistent. Clinicians and NGOs report elevated levels of insomnia, panic, intrusive memories, and social withdrawal among survivors. In areas where mental-health services are scarce, trauma becomes a quiet engine of social breakdown: people withdraw from reciprocal networks, caregivers burn out, and children grow up in households without emotional repair. The intergenerational impact of trauma is particularly concerning, as unresolved distress may shape the wellbeing and socialisation of children for years to come.

Addressing mental health is not an optional add-on; it is essential to restoring the capacity to work, parent, and participate in community life. Community-based support, peer counselling, and culturally appropriate healing approaches are especially important in contexts where formal services are limited. Strengthening these systems can rebuild trust and help restore the social fabric damaged during conflict.

Justice, accountability, and trust

Health without justice leaves many survivors exposed to continuing harm. Without transparent investigations, survivor-centred legal processes, and reparations, suspicion and impunity persist. Reports of renewed localised violence in Amhara and Afar have deepened fears that abuses could recur beyond Tigray, eroding confidence in the peace process. Survivors may be reluctant to report violations if they believe that perpetrators will not be held accountable or that doing so may expose them to retaliation.

Practical justice must include medical-legal referral pathways, access to legal aid, protection for witnesses, and support for community dialogues that centre survivors’ rights and choices. Equally important is the recognition that justice processes should prioritise dignity, confidentiality, and agency. When survivors feel heard and protected, trust in institutions can gradually be rebuilt, contributing to reconciliation and long-term peace.

Social belonging and information harms

Recovery is social as much as infrastructural. Survivors frequently face stigma, shaming, or forced silence. These dynamics can isolate women from their families and communities, undermining their ability to rebuild their lives. In some contexts, women may be blamed for violence they experienced or pressured not to speak about abuse in order to preserve community cohesion.

Online disinformation and ethnic polarisation amplify these dynamics: distorted narratives can isolate survivors, expose them to harassment, or block avenues for reconciliation. Social media and digital communication can spread harmful rumours or deepen divisions, especially in fragile post-conflict environments. Rebuilding social belonging therefore requires local, survivor-led reconciliation processes, safe public messaging that counters stigma, and protections that prevent doxxing and online abuse. Community leaders, religious figures, and civil society organisations can play a key role in shaping inclusive narratives and rebuilding trust.

Economic stability and dignity

Economic recovery enables agency. Many households lost assets and breadwinners; women often absorbed new caregiving burdens while trying to find income in a broken local economy. In rural areas, agricultural disruption, displacement, and destroyed infrastructure have reduced livelihood opportunities. Urban areas face unemployment, inflation, and weakened markets, further constraining women’s economic participation.

Simple interventions — targeted cash assistance, labour-intensive public works that prioritise women, and seed grants for women-led businesses — can create space for recovery. But economic programs must be paired with childcare, health access, and legal protections to preserve dignity and long-term gains. Without these complementary measures, women risk being trapped in informal or precarious work. Economic independence not only strengthens households but also enhances women’s decision-making power and resilience in future crises.

Effective recovery for women requires more than promises or isolated programmes. Rebuilding healthcare, creating legal protections, supporting livelihoods, and addressing mental health must happen together to restore dignity and agency. In practice, this means that clinics must reopen, justice mechanisms must be accessible, and economic opportunities must reach women managing households in fragile conditions. When these systems work in concert, women—and communities—can move from surviving to thriving.

Why this matters

The Pretoria truce removed guns from the streets. It did not, by itself, remove the daily threats to safety, health, and dignity that determine whether people can rebuild their lives. Measuring peace by the absence of conflict is necessary but insufficient. If we want peace that lasts, we must centre the lived realities of women whose bodies, livelihoods, and social ties were broken — and design programmes that restore not only services, but agency, justice, and belonging.

Restoring dignity is not sentimental. It is practical: reach women with health, legal, and economic services, and the whole society becomes more resilient to relapse. Evidence from other post-conflict settings shows that when women have access to healthcare, income, and legal protection, communities recover faster and the risk of renewed violence declines. The test of Ethiopia’s peace will be whether women can access care without fear, seek justice without retaliation, rebuild livelihoods with dignity, and re-enter their communities with belonging rather than stigma. Sustainable peace ultimately depends on whether recovery reaches those most affected by conflict.

In this episode Faiza discusses the post conflict experience of Ethiopia and the restoration of dignity for the women. She is a Citizen journalist with us on a placement organised with Department of War Studies, King’s College, London.

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