This issue of What We’re Reading covers the spectacle of the Premier League’s vast and opaque transfer spending, China’s flashy humanoid-robot propaganda, and Kim Jong-un parlaying North Korea’s shells, troops, and nuclear arsenal into leverage over Washington, Moscow, and Beijing.
In the region, we’re looking at what Bashar Al-Assad’s death sentence in absentia means, the curious case of Yemeni politician Naif al-Qaysi’s terrorism designation, the entertainment industry’s manufacturing of depoliticized Arab artists, and a network linking Mohammed Dahlan, UAE state and quasi-state institutions, and Mahmoud al-Habash that has allegedly established, financed, and sustains the Israeli-backed collaborator militias operating in Gaza.
At home, we’re exploring the parallel punishment of Egyptian political prisoners’ families, a rich witness’s account of a chapter in Egypt’s lost editorial culture, state-ownership policy, and a landmark ruling establishing the paternity—and with it, the legal identity—of a child born of rape.
World
Premier League money has lost all meaning amid chaotic spectacle of excess — Barney Ronay, The Guardian
Barney Ronay has found the appropriate language for this summer’s Premier League transfer market: home renovation television, deranged bathroom fittings, and Jack Grealish undergoing an apparently eternal medical at Everton. Chelsea have bought the “vintage copper-plate statement bidet,” Manchester City’s midfield is too big to fail, and everyone seems to be having a wonderful time inside something they can no longer explain.
As Ronay explains, during a housing boom, an owner can make terrible renovation decisions and still sell for more. The market rewards possession, allowing rising asset prices to masquerade as individual brilliance. He unfortunately applies this to the team I [Saher] support, Chelsea, whose managerial churn and chaotic recruitment have coexisted with opportunities to profit from player sales. You can install something unforgivable in the downstairs bathroom and remain a financial visionary, as the important decision was getting hold of the house.
From there, the column moves into transfer deadline day television, where this circulation of assets becomes a shared emotional emergency. Private jets wait on the tarmac, a reporter solemnly announces that nobody knows what a player is thinking.
Fees become evidence of ambition before the footballer has touched a ball; supporters are invited to experience expenditure itself as an achievement, then spend the season discovering what was actually purchased.
Ronay’s extravagantly specific—and hilarious—jokes reproduce the scale of the absurdity. The fixtures, fittings, medicals, and increasingly improbable transfers accumulate until familiar measures of competence stop working. His bewilderment also has a political direction: the fact that supporters cannot decipher the transactions does not mean nobody benefits from them. Broadcasting income, state spending, investors’ expectations, and accounting requirements continue to shape a game presented as spontaneous sporting excitement.
The pleasure is that Ronay keeps letting football back into the column. He wishes Djed Spence well, weighs Arsenal’s attacking options, and enjoys the possibilities opened by new signings. That affection gives the final turn its bittersweet strength. Understanding how the spectacle works does not cancel the pleasure—it makes the terms harder to ignore.
We can laugh at the private jets, get excited about a winger, and still wonder why loving a football club increasingly requires following the movements of somebody else’s portfolio.
China can build kung fu-fighting robots. But it can’t get them to do factory work — Laurie Chen, Eduardo Baptista & Ju-min Park, Reuters
At a robot training center in Liuzhou, an experienced human trainer might need 50 attempts to produce one usable movement from a robot, while a rookie might need 300. Workers wearing headsets guide humanoids through sorting crates and packaging noodles, painstakingly generating the data intended to make their own capacities reproducible.
The promised replacement of human labor begins with an enormous demand for it.
Reuters’ report exposes how much intelligence supposedly simple work requires. A robot trained at one workstation can fail when the lighting, an object’s position, or the surface changes. Gripping fabric and calibrating force on a screw require continuous adjustment. A choreographed martial arts show demonstrates control under prepared conditions, but factory work demands reliability when those conditions vary.
Humanoids also face competition from machines already doing the job. Geely tells Reuters that conventional robotic arms and automated vehicles handle all key tasks on its active assembly line. The problem is therefore more specific than the headline suggests: manufacturers must establish where an expensive machine shaped as a person improves on both human workers and existing automation.
Public investment is advancing much faster than that demonstration, as Chinese government purchases of humanoids and related equipment reached at least 230 million dollars in the first half of 2026, against 6 million dollars in the corresponding 2024 period. Local authorities provide premises, computing support, and data-purchasing vouchers while public entities buy the resulting machines. The Liuzhou center, supplied through an 18 million dollar government tender, has no clear path to profitability, according to its staff.
However, the authors occasionally treat government-created demand as inherently artificial, but their own reporting supports a more discriminating judgment: failed manufacturers could still leave behind cheaper components and durable supply networks. Yet public orders alone establish neither productive usefulness nor a viable business model for the state. Counting machines shipped can conceal the distance between financing experimentation and solving the technical problem.
A pharmacy robot supplies the clearest statement of what employers ultimately want. Galbot says its machine takes about a minute to retrieve and prepare a product. It has not timed that performance against human workers, yet argues that continuous operation could compensate for slower individual tasks.
Still, beneath the kung fu spectacle sits a familiar calculation: a slower worker might still be cheaper if it never needs the working day to end.
Politicization as conflict, public and formatting — Eeva Luhtakallio, Journal of Political Power
In a neighborhood in Helsinki, Finland, seven residents confront 13 government officials with missing benches, poor lighting, and broken paving. One official explains that repairs must await a development plan, at least two years away, to which a resident finally cries out: “But just look at this! Look at this!”
The officials become visibly uncomfortable, then steer the conversation toward flowers.
Eeva Luhtakallio takes this encounter seriously as a beginning of politics. Drawing on Laurent Thévenot and Judith Butler, she identifies three components of politicization: a conflict, a public, and “formatting”—the work of making a grievance recognizable to others. A gesture, photograph, or emotional outburst can communicate something that the approved vocabulary of a consultation cannot accommodate.
Her other example follows a woman identified as Jessika, who posts photographs of herself crying on Instagram. Initially describing them as a personal diary, she gradually recognizes, through discussion with others, that she wants to challenge the platform’s compulsory cheerfulness. The images become a deliberate claim about whose experiences deserve visibility.
The useful intervention concerns where we start looking for politics. Requiring a developed program, an organization, or confidence in public argument can make marginalized people’s first attempts to contest their circumstances disappear from view. Political understanding can develop through acting with others—it doesn’t need to arrive fully formed before anyone acts.
But the neighborhood story also exposes the limits of recognition. The residents’ complaints eventually produced a workshop and a project to paint curbstones and install flowerbeds. Schoolchildren were required to participate. A demand concerning neglected infrastructure became an exercise in “activating” the community. The response shifted attention toward what residents could contribute themselves.
Luhtakallio explicitly acknowledges that no movement emerged and that politicization doesn’t always produce victory. Even so, her evidence invites closer scrutiny of institutional control over the response. Officials could recognize residents’ distress while retaining the authority to redefine what addressing it would mean. Their discomfort did not place resources or decisions in residents’ hands.
Cairo’s tree protection campaigns make this process concrete. By July, the campaign to save El-Zohriya Garden in Zamalek had gathered more than 11,200 signatures, filed collective complaints, and become the subject of litigation over construction inside the 158-year-old garden. Campaigners demanded disclosure of development plans, an environmental assessment, and civil society representation on an independent oversight committee.
In Luhtakallio’s terms, the politicization lay in turning attachment to familiar trees and shared space into an organized challenge over who could authorize their transformation. Petitions and complaints made that attachment publicly legible, confronting opaque decisions brought authority, commercial interests, and residents’ exclusion into the dispute. Defending a garden became a practical claim to participate in governing the city. That does not establish that every participant acquired a new political identity, but it shows residents acting collectively on a question the authorities had treated as theirs alone to decide.
The framework helps us recognize political beginnings without demanding that they already resemble organized movements. The square shows why the next question concerns organization: how people preserve the substance of a demand once institutions begin translating it into something more convenient.
Kim Jong-un, the leader Trump seeks out, Putin relies on and Xi doesn’t want to lose — Inma Bonet, El Pais
North Korea’s diplomatic opening runs through Russia’s ammunition shortage. The author cites estimates that Pyongyang has supplied Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine between eight million and 11 million shells and rockets since mid-2023, alongside the deployment of thousands of soldiers. What years of nuclear negotiations failed to secure, participation in another state’s war has partly delivered: revenue, oil, military cooperation, and a powerful government willing to protect the relationship.
Russia’s 2024 veto of the UN sanctions-monitoring panel’s renewal is the decisive detail. Instead of repealing the sanctions on the isolated nation, Russia helped disable its independent scrutiny while buying the weapons it restricted, and in the process, Kim acquired a customer with both battlefield needs and institutional power over the rules governing his exports.
That arrangement also puts pressure on China. Beijing remains North Korea’s indispensable economic partner, but Moscow’s support makes Chinese displeasure less constraining. Inma Bonet notes that the official accounts of Xi Jinping’s June visit to Pyongyang omitted denuclearization. China has not formally abandoned that objective; it has become less willing to foreground it when doing so might push Kim closer to Russia. The supposed anti-Western bloc contains a competition over who gets to influence whom.
Trump supplies another opening. The US president recently curtailed American participation in joint exercises with South Korea while the North Korean supreme leader’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, was still denying that negotiations were underway. Pyongyang received a concession without committing to talks. Bonet’s account suggests that Trump’s desire for a conspicuous diplomatic achievement has itself become something Kim can bargain over.
The article’s most revealing formulation comes from an analyst who says North Korea can now present itself as contributing to another major power’s security, which captures a successful diplomatic rebranding. The service being rewarded is support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Kim’s greater freedom from outside pressure is being strengthened through participation in a war against another country’s independence.
Bonet also lists “combat experience” among Pyongyang’s returns. Soldiers’ exposure to war—and death—therefore produces a double dividend for the state: their deployment secures Russian support, while surviving personnel return with skills that strengthen its military apparatus. All of this gives the language of national advancement a precise content. North Korea gains resources, trained forces, and bargaining options by committing people to battle.
Calling that increased autonomy is accurate—as long as we specify whose autonomy has increased, and through what transaction.
Region
Sentence Him to Unremarkable Living — Hiba Monzer, Daraj
On August 11, a Damascus court sentenced Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to death in absentia. He remained in Moscow. Hiba Monzer begins with the distance between the severity of that verdict and its practical reach, then imagines a punishment stripped of spectacle: keeping Assad alive, in custody, and subject to the law he placed himself above.
The piece’s force comes from Monzer’s refusal to pretend she is free of vengeance. She wants him diminished and understands why survivors might want him dead. Yet no suffering inflicted on one body can repay what happened inside Syria’s prisons. A trial has another purpose: survivors give public testimony, evidence establishes responsibility, and a defendant who once dictated what everyone else could say must sit through accounts he cannot order erased.
Monzer tests that principle against the proceedings involving Assad’s cousin Atef Najib. Court monitors documented rushed hearings, testimony that failed to connect him adequately to the charges, and an ineffective defense. These deficiencies matter to victims as well as defendants because a verdict delivered without reconstructing responsibility leaves survivors with a punishment and an incomplete explanation of the crimes.
Her comparison with Saddam Hussein, however, needs greater precision. She recalls initially mistaking his humiliation in court for justice, before recognizing the political interference and procedural failures surrounding his prosecution. But his execution did not terminate the entire Anfal genocide trial, as she suggests. Proceedings continued against six co-defendants, but the charges against Saddam himself were dropped, effectively foreclosing his accountability for those crimes without ending the prosecution of others who organized them.
Life on the List — Caitlin L. Chandler, The New York Review of Books
Al-Qaeda had threatened to kill former Al Bayda governor Naif al-Qaysi for discouraging young Yemenis from joining it. Then, in 2016, the US Treasury designated the politician as an al-Qaeda financier. The UN followed in 2017, giving the accusation international reach. His salary became inaccessible, his children faced harassment, and he eventually resigned. Caitlin L. Chandler reconstructs how a designation issued far from Yemen could dismantle a whole career and reorganize an entire family’s life.
The evidence uncovered by his lawyers makes this considerably more than a story about bureaucratic indifference. Money described as terrorist financing came from Saudi Arabia for provincial military operations, an alleged al-Qaeda training camp belonged to the Yemeni army’s 117th Brigade, and lawyer Gavin Sullivan’s team submitted payment records, photographs, and the threatening messages al-Qaeda had sent the man supposedly working for it.
The UN review also could not establish whether intelligence supplied by different countries had been independently collected or merely circulated from one source. That uncertainty exposes a mechanism through which an allegation can acquire the appearance of corroboration as it moves between governments. Chandler reviewed a confidential report that considered at least some false accusations likely intentional, although their precise origins remained unresolved, as secrecy protected the allegations from the person best placed to contest them.
The UN removed al-Qaysi in March 2022, but later that year, Turkish authorities detained him for twelve hours and sent him to Oman. The American designation remained, continuing to obstruct banking and, eventually, tuition payments for his eldest child.
Winning one appeal did not oblige every institution enforcing a separate restriction to release him, and the accusation traveled internationally with greater efficiency than its correction.
Meanwhile, al-Qaysi tells Chandler, American officials continued soliciting his advice on countering al-Qaeda and promised to help remove the designation.
Years passed. His knowledge remained useful to officials of the government whose sanctions prevented him from financing his child’s education, and the reporting makes that contradiction painfully concrete.
A Small Part of Paradise — Jeremy Harding, London Review of Books
The helicopters in Apocalypse Now came from the Philippines’ former dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s military, borrowed when they were not fighting communist insurgents. Jeremy Harding places that arrangement alongside David Lean’s filming in Franco’s Spain and Hassan II’s Morocco.
Christopher Nolan’s decision to shoot parts of The Odyssey in occupied Western Sahara belongs to an established history: Western filmmakers have repeatedly found authoritarian governments exceptionally accommodating production partners.
Harding’s most telling detail concerns the Sahrawi activists and artists who tried to approach Nolan’s production team. Moroccan security kept them away. Around Dakhla, the coast supplied the setting for Calypso and the Lotus Eaters, while the people contesting Morocco’s occupation could not reach the filmmakers using their homeland.
The financial arrangements make this exclusion more than an unfortunate encounter. Morocco offers foreign productions a 30% rebate on eligible expenses, tax concessions, streamlined customs procedures, and airline discounts. Its military has also supplied equipment to film productions. Public resources reduce private filmmaking costs while the monarchy gains international exposure for locations it wants treated as unquestionably Moroccan.
Harding connects the film industry’s arrival to the extraction of Western Sahara’s fish and phosphates and the marketing of its beaches as “southern Moroccan” holiday destinations. Cinema adds another commercial use for territory whose people remain denied self-determination. The political transaction takes place before audiences see a frame, and the production accepts Rabat as the authority capable of making the location available.
Occupation becomes the administrative basis for doing business.
Mohammed Dahlan, Mahmoud al-Habash, and the UAE: The Network that Established, Finances, and Sustains Gaza’s Collaborator Militias — Mujamma Haraket
Mujamma Haraket, an anonymous academic of growing popularity, published a 9,000-word investigation alleging that a network linking Palestinian politician Mohammed Dahlan, UAE state and quasi-state institutions, and senior Palestinian Authority (PA) figures, chiefly Mahmoud al-Habash, Chief Justice of Palestine and Abbas’s religious-affairs adviser, has established, financed, and sustains the Israeli-backed collaborator militias operating in Gaza, namely Yasser Abu Shabab’s “Popular Forces” and successors.
It builds on an earlier paper of his which traced how the Center for Peace Communications (CPC), “a US-registered organization established in 2019 to cultivate Arab societal normalization with ‘Israel’ through media, education, religious institutions, and civil-society networks,” and the Jusoor News media ecosystem rehabilitated collaborator figures in Western outlets.
Jusoor News, he explains, was born in March 2024 with the renaming of the Arab Council for Regional Integration social media. The council is a London-based “normalization initiative” established in 2019.
“Its inaugural conference on 19–20 November 2019 brought together approximately 30 journalists, politicians, diplomats, artists, and religious figures from 15 Arab countries to oppose the boycott of ‘Israel’ and promote direct Arab–‘Israeli’ civil relations,” Mujamma Haraket writes.
He then adds a detailed chronology tying al-Habash to militia funding, medical evacuations to Ramallah, and relocating militia commanders’ family members, plus al-Habash’s roughly two-decade documented relationship with UAE aid institutions and an alleged 2008 letter linking him directly to Dahlan.
The piece is extensively footnoted with a real bibliography; still, Mujamma Haraket is occasionally careful to flag the limits of the evidence, such as noting a UAE-plated vehicle photographed with a militia commander doesn’t prove state supply.
It is extremely dense and, at times, confusing, but entirely worth the read.
Elissa and Arab Emotional Capitalism: The Broken Heart Industry — Fouad Ghorbali, Sifr
This essay is a genuinely materialist account of how Arab pop culture manufactured depoliticized subjects.
At a Carthage concert in August, an audience member tossed a Palestinian keffiyeh at Lebanese star Elissa, who was singing on stage, only for her to toss it back. And while the internet raged about whether Elissa is “with or against Palestine”, Tunisian sociologist Fouad Ghorbali asks a different question: what kind of cultural industry produced an artist who can occupy such enormous emotional real estate in millions of lives without her presence resting on any collective narrative?
Ghorbali tells us that this moment exposed a gap between an old political expectation of the “Arab artist” and a new star-system built on an entirely different logic.
He traces this back to the 1990s, arguing that the decline of pan-Arab and socialist projects, Gulf capital’s entry into media (Rotana as the paradigm case), Beirut’s re-emergence as an image/advertising/fashion laboratory after its civil war, and satellite television’s dismantling of state monopoly over cultural space as instrumental in the current star economy.
Song shortened, became clip-friendly, tied to body/fashion/individual stardom, with Elissa’s career being one of the fullest expressions of this shift.
He draws on Eva Illouz’s “emotional capitalism,” the idea that the market does not merely “sell love” but reorganizes how intimacy itself is imagined: the self as a project to manage, heartbreak as material to process into self-improvement, breakups as sites of “recovery” and self-worth calculus.
Ghorbali compares this, of course, to the older romantic sentiment of Umm Kulthum, Warda, and Abdel Halim, which focused on waiting, fidelity, and endurance as moral nobility, versus the newer “did I deserve better?”
This shift is, of course, a product of neoliberalism’s redistribution of responsibility for suffering onto the individual. Ghorbali adds that there’s also an element of gendered labor, with women doing the emotional labor to sustain relationships in addition to this new post-breakup “work on the self”.
He concludes by saying that political pain is not censored from Arab pop so much as it has simply been made “unmarketable” next to a heartbreak that can be repackaged endlessly and sold back to millions.
“The issue is not that a broken heart is any less real than a broken homeland; both are real. The question is: how did we arrive at a time when Arab mass culture is so adept at giving the broken heart a language, an image, an industry, stardom, and a market, while the broken homeland sometimes seems to be crashing onto the stage from the outside?” Ghorbali wrote.
“At this juncture, the keffiyeh becomes a question addressed to us all—not just to Elissa: what has become of societies that long knew how to sing of their collective wounds, to the point where politics must now be hurled by the audience onto the stage just to reclaim a place among the songs?”
Egypt
Grieving alone, the parallel punishment for political prisoners’ families — Mai El Mahdy, Mada Masr
There has always been, among most of the populace, a belief that the prison system swallows the lives of its occupants alone. But the prison is an institution, not a building. It is the state’s primary punishment mechanism, and its shadow extends beyond the brick walls and barbed fences to engulf the families of those imprisoned in its abyss. A parallel punishment.
While not technically part of a series, this is Mai El-Mahdy’s third consecutive essay exploring the psychology around political detainees, grief, and punishment, having previously written Frozen Grief: On the Wounds Borne by Former Detainees in Egypt and Exile Does Not Mean Salvation: On the Double Wound of the Egyptian Detainee Upon Leaving the Country.
Families of political detainees, particularly women, carry the brunt of the responsibilities left behind when their fathers, brothers, husbands, or sons are thrown behind bars. Dual-income households become single-income households. Single-income households have no income at all. Prison visits alone are a heavy financial burden, costing anywhere between 4,000–8,000 Egyptian pounds in a country where the national minimum wage is 8,000 pounds.
The ambiguous loss of a loved one, a family member, is punishment. The additional general and financial responsibilities are an additional punishment.
But the psychological punishment is the worst.
El-Mahdy explains that the political detainee is absent but not dead, so the ordinary rituals of mourning are unavailable; yet the family is expected to continue living as though nothing decisive has happened. Their grief has no recognized social form. Worse, it may be dangerous to express it. A complaint, a public statement, even an account of what has happened can carry consequences for the person inside. Silence therefore becomes part of the punishment.
Which El-Mahdy names as disenfranchised grief and suffocated grief.
And while the state attempts to make every family’s suffering appear singular and therefore powerless, the families answer by discovering its commonality/“universality”. They built support networks where they can not only share their grief, but understand it as each other’s.
“It must be stated clearly that these families’ grief is legitimate, and that the fault lies with the detention itself, not with them. As for whether they will bear this sorrow alone—that is not determined by repression alone, but also by those reading these lines.”
‘No regulation exists:’ Suez Canal becomes gateway for invasive species in the Mediterranean — Samuel Forey, Le Monde
At dawn in Port Said, Samuel Forey watches fishers haul in their nets while ships approach the Suez Canal. Among the mackerel is a silver-cheeked toadfish, a Red Sea species that reached the Mediterranean through the waterway. This toxic predator also damages fishing nets. The infrastructure carrying global commerce has delivered another expense to people working nearby.
Forey reconstructs the interaction between the canal and a sea increasingly hospitable to species arriving through it. Overfishing depleted native populations, coastal construction damaged habitats, the Aswan High Dam reduced freshwater and sediment reaching the Mediterranean, and warming made winters less of an obstacle to tropical species.
Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi’s Suez Canal expansion operates within this accumulated transformation. The ecological damage cannot be explained by the presence of unfamiliar fish alone.
The author’s chronology becomes too abrupt, however, when he attributes the disappearance of the Bitter Lakes’ salinity barrier to the 2015 expansion. Research published before that project already described the barrier’s erosion through dilution and successive enlargements, and while El-Sisi’s expansion intensified a process built into decades of infrastructure development, treating 2015 as a sudden rupture obscures that longer history of lackluster decisions and its consequences.
That tension should govern the proposed remedies. Forey discusses protected marine areas, canal locks, and using desalination brine to restore a salinity barrier. These proposals raise questions about financing, effectiveness, and the distribution of restrictions that the piece leaves largely unanswered. Fishers asked to reduce their catch would face an immediate livelihood cost. Meanwhile, the Canal Authority, shipping companies, and coastal developers possess different resources and powers to shape the conditions producing the damage.
Conservation that concentrates enforcement on the people easiest to police, without addressing those larger decisions or supporting lost incomes, would reproduce the inequality already visible from the Port Said beach.
The Story of Two Newspapers: Al-Badeel & Midan Masr — Alaa Khaled, Al Manassa
Novelist and critic Alaa Khaled provides a short but rich witness’s account of a chapter in Egypt’s lost editorial culture, focusing on two short-lived Egyptian newspapers: al-Badil (2007–2009, briefly revived 2014–2015) and the two-issue Midan Masr (2012).
Khaled, who wrote a weekly culture column for al-Badil, builds his argument from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities—the idea that a newspaper resembles a novel whose author has abandoned the plot, and readers must trust an “absent author” to hold things together.
Al-Badil’s founder, Mohamed El-Sayed Said, a leftist journalist and editor, shaped the paper’s voice; that voice was later diffused among contributors like Wael Abdel Fattah and Khaled El-Balshi.
When the paper went digital in 2010, Khaled says authorial coherence dissolved into what he calls a “many-headed narrator.” This shift, he argues, was completed in Midan Masr, a self-funded, unpaid, deliberately plural “opinion journalism” project born of Tahrir Square’s own polyphony.
Egyptians’ forays into independent journalism, particularly in the last three decades, are rich and deeply interesting. Al-Badil was one of the most important—if not the most important—of the 2000s, becoming a star-studded paper in a very short time and covering an impressive range of stories with a level of diligence that is obviously missed today.
Khaled’s eulogy was published in one of the few independent Egyptian outlets running today, which begs some thinking about what could be said about our current independent media.
State-ownership policy: Sweet talking the IMF into privatization mirage — Bessan Kassab, Al Manassa
In April 2022, El-Sisi promised to raise 40 billion US Dollars over four years through asset sales, including stakes in military-owned companies. Beesan Kassab follows that promise through successive IMF reviews and finds an increasingly elaborate apparatus for postponing the confrontation it implied. Selling military businesses would redistribute power within the regime, and announcing their sale helped secure financing without immediately disturbing that power.
The composition of the proceeds matters as much as the shortfall. Kassab puts projected privatization receipts under the current IMF program at roughly 7.2 billion dollars, around half attributable to the Alam El Roum land deal. Selling land can supply foreign currency while leaving the institutions controlling production substantially intact. At the same time, an asset sale total tells us little about which centers of economic power have actually surrendered anything.
Her strongest evidence concerns the government’s machinery for monitoring state businesses. The new ownership unit’s database covered only companies governed by the Public Business Sector Law. Reporting on a wider group of 230 enterprises, including military companies and firms transferred to the sovereign fund, remained a promise for November 2026, and the unit presented as an advance toward comprehensive oversight still lacked information on precisely the businesses whose opacity made oversight necessary.
Kassab makes bureaucracy politically intelligible: new procedures can demonstrate activity to creditors while deferring decisions that threaten powerful owners. But her portrayal of an exhausted IMF risks understating the lender’s agency. The Fund completed another review despite acknowledging slow divestment, which more or less suggests an accommodation with the regime’s priorities; bureaucratic obstruction alone cannot explain the creditor’s continued consent.
Essentially, the article exposes how military ownership survives the government’s promises to creditors.
But its findings also invite a further question: what would it take to make these enterprises answerable to the people whose labor and resources sustain them?
Proving the Paternity of a Child Born of Rape: A Legal Precedent in Egypt Raises Questions — Merehan Fouad, Daraj
In 2018, Amal Abdel Hamid, 18, was kidnapped and raped by a man whose marriage proposal she’d rejected. Nine months later, she gave birth to a daughter with no legal identity, not even a birth certificate, because Egyptian courts historically rejected paternity claims for children born of rape, citing the hadith-based principle “al-walad lil-firash” (the child belongs to the marital bed).
Amal, a barely legal child, was kidnapped and raped, then beaten by her uncles, then forced into a marriage to conceal the “scandal,” and, for years, punished by the state’s laws, which allowed neither an abortion nor a paternity claim for her child.
Perhaps, to add insult to injury, her rapist was sentenced to only one year in prison.
However, in a landmark ruling in May 2026, Mansoura’s appeals court ruled (case No. 9829/75), establishing the child’s paternity to her biological father via DNA evidence, and had the child registered in birth records.
What feminist researcher Merehan Fouad does exceptionally here is emphasize how law is a tool of both patriarchal and class discipline. A poor rural woman with no institutional leverage had to become a media spectacle with a viral confession video and months of on-screen interrogation before the state would reopen her closed case.
Justice was, is, rationed by her capacity to generate public pressure.
The state denying reproductive choice and then denying legal identity to the resulting child, Fouad explains, are two faces of the same logic: using survivors’ bodies to enforce religious-nationalist norms about family structure regardless of the material cost to women.
The question here, however, should not be about this “legal precedent”. We should be asking: What material conditions make cases like Amal’s so punishing to litigate in the first place?
If you have not read it yet, check out this week’s labor dispatch from The Cairo Report:
Egypt, The New Republic: Minimum wage violations, factory safety failures & pension poverty
This issue of The Cairo Report examines how Egypt’s industrial policy continues to subsidize and de-risk private investment while workers carry the costs of low wages, insecure contracts, unsafe workplaces and an eroding pension system. T&C Garments, one of the country’s largest apparel exporters, is lobbying for lower social-insurance contributions and…
*What We’re Reading is a fortnightly list of the stories behind the headlines, read through the lens of class and power. In your inbox every other Wednesday.