By Sianna Zewdie (Y12)
It is June 22, 2026, and, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will know that the FIFA Men’s World Cup is well underway. In my household, the tournament is best defined by a predictable daily war: the clock strikes six, and the remote is violently ripped out of my hand by my little brother, without even a moment for me to pause my show. That initial skirmish quickly bleeds into another, much louder war over which team to pledge allegiance to. By the opening match—Mexico vs. South Africa—the living room had already turned into an ideological battleground. South Africa, I claimed, was impossible to ethically support, given its modern violent record of systemic xenophobia. My brother scoffed and said I was once again being “overly political”, and I was “so annoying” and “for once, couldn’t I understand that this was not about politics, and rather a celebration of a beautiful sport?” He’d probably be furious that I’m exposing our fight like this, but it’s fine—he’ll never read this anyway, considering that he’s functionally illiterate.
While my brother may not be able to read a room (or a book), his view perfectly captures the great illusion of modern international competition. FIFA sells the World Cup as a pure, innocent celebration of athletic excellence. But behind this ‘beautiful game’ lies a massive engine of geopolitical theater. It is, functionally, a tool used by governments to launder their reputations, mask domestic injustices, and weaponize national pride on a global scale.
The political scientist Joseph Nye coined the term ‘soft power’ in 1990 to describe a country’s ability to get what it wants through attraction rather than coercion: through culture, values and image rather than tanks and tariffs. Nye may have been thinking about Hollywood and Harvard, not football, but nothing on Earth attracts quite like the World Cup. It is broadcast in nearly every country on the planet, with a final match projected to have a viewership of nearly a quarter of the human population, and is capable of making a stadium in Doha or Moscow feel, for ninety minutes, like the center of the universe. That kind of global hypnosis is not something governments merely observe from afar; it is an ideological orbit that they buy, host, and stage-manage. They understand that when you control the lens of the world’s greatest spectacle, you possess the terrifying authority to dictate what humanity looks at—and what it willingly forgets.
Take Argentina, 1978. Two years before kickoff, a military junta led by General Jorge Rafael Videla seized power in a bloody coup, shuttered Congress, suspended unions, and began the Dirty War—a campaign of state-sponsored terror that systematically swallowed 30,000 people. Students, journalists, activists—anyone the regime had branded a threat was dragged from their beds, tortured in clandestine detention centers, and dropped, drugged but alive, from military cargo planes into the Atlantic Ocean. Videla, by his own admissions, had little personal interest in football, reportedly calling it “dull and pedestrian”—and yet, he understood, with chilling precision, how well the pitch could hide the graveyard. The hosting rights had been awarded to Argentina a decade earlier, to a democratic government that no longer existed, leaving the junta free to convert it into a multi-million dollar laundering operation for their image. They spent a fifth of their national budget on stadiums, while the economy collapsed, scrubbed the streets clean of the unhoused and undesirables, and built walls to hide the slums from foreign television cameras.
The most grotesque detail is geographic. The Estadio Monumental—where the Argentina home team would eventually lift the trophy amidst a blizzard of ticker tape and national euphoria—sat less than a mile from the ESMA, the regime’s most notorious torture complex. As the crowd roared for goals, the prisoners inside could hear the cheers through the concrete, their agonized screams drowned out by the ‘beautiful game’. In a twisted display of psychological cruelty, the guards drove prisoners through the ecstatic crowds of Buenos Aires, forcing them to witness public adoration of the regime that was systematically destroying. It remains the ultimate proof that the triumph of this engineered spectacle is not that it makes the world love a dictator, but that it makes them cheer loud enough to forget the dying.
And the dictatorship got exactly what it wanted: a country temporarily united in joy, and a global audience that, for the most part, watched a football tournament and nothing else. It wasn’t the first time a regime had attempted such a transaction—Mussolini’s Italy hosted and won the Cup in 1934, two years before Hitler staged the same theatrical trick with the Berlin Olympics—but Argentina remains the starkest diagnosis of the disease. Here, the cruelty and the celebration were happening within walking distance of each other, unfolding in real time. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who had been marching weekly with photographs of their disappeared children, used the foreign press the tournament brought in to make sure not everyone looked away. And yet, even that wasn’t enough to stop the trophy ceremony—it was just enough to make sure history remembers both things at once: the goal and the grave, the victory and the vanishing, sharing the exact same air.
The modern iteration of this transaction has only grown more clinical, brokered no longer in the shadow of military uprisings but in the sanitized boardrooms of global bureaucracy. Qatar, 2022: a state with almost no organic football culture that spent billions building glistening monuments out of sand, importing an international image alongside a captive workforce. Under the architecture of the kafala labor system, employers held near total dominion over the lives of migrant workers—their right to change jobs, to leave the country, to demand basic dignity was entirely bound to the whims of their corporate sponsors. Investigations pointed to thousands of migrant worker deaths in the construction of World Cup venues in Qatar; officials countered with sterile bureaucratic hair-splitting, offering a far smaller tally tied strictly to ‘work-site accidents’. The exact human cost may never be settled, but the truth of the calculation remains undisputed: Qatar understood, with terrifying accuracy, that the World Cup could purchase a brand of sovereign legitimacy and geopolitical immunity that no ocean of oil had been able to before. They gambled that, for the billions watching, the tournament would exist as football, full stop—that a spectacular goal in the ninetieth minute would effortlessly bury the bodies beneath the stadium.
Russia executed the same play in 2018. Four years after annexing Crimea, while theoretically suffocating under the supposed weight of international sanctions, Vladimir Putin bought a month of flawless global theater. The world was treated to a meticulously curated pageant: gleaming new arenas, smiling locals, and Western pundits marvelling that the bear was not so ferocious after all, that the country seemed warmer, more open, more civilized than suggested in the news. None of it was an explicit lie; it was simply a projection designed to crowd out reality. And it worked flawlessly: the tournament gave Putin the temporary geopolitical cover and normalized prestige he needed, dulling international resistance just four years before he launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The stadium lights didn’t just distract the world; they bought a dictator the time and legitimacy to prepare for total war. And that, precisely, was the point.
That pattern has not slowed down; it has merely dropped the pretense of a conscience. In 2024, Saudi Arabia was anointed as the uncontested host of the 2034 World Cup—the climax of a thoroughly rigged theater piece where FIFA fast-tracked its own bidding process, cleared the board of any realistic competitors, and effectively waived the requirement for a comprehensive independent human rights review. It was a flawless capitulation to a kingdom that has outlawed labor unions, criminalized homosexuality and systematically locked citizens away in desert prisons for the treason of a single tweet.
Yet Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has proved refreshingly, almost brutally honest about the terms of the trade. When asked directly if this multi-billion-dollar blitz was merely a grotesque exercise in sportswashing, he didn’t bother with the traditional script of global unity and sporting innocence; he simply noted that he didn’t care what name the critics gave it, so long as it continued to swell the country’s GDP. That is not a regime in denial about the World Cup’s reputational economy. That is a regime that has recognized that Western moral outrage has a shelf life, but a global brand is permanent. By forcing the world’s most lucrative corporate sponsors, athletes and media conglomerates to descend upon Riyadh, Saudi Arabia does not erase its crimes; it renders them irrelevant. It is the final, cynical evolution of soft power: a kingdom that doesn’t even feel the need to hide the blood, because they have correctly gambled that the moral objections of humanity are entirely powerless against its insatiable desire to be entertained.
It is not only authoritarian states that use the World Cup this way, and it is worth saying that plainly, because the comfort of this critique lies in the lazy belief that soft power only corrupts dictatorships. The truth is far more pervasive: the spectacle is just as useful to the free market as it is to the firing squad.
Brazil in 2014 was a functioning democracy that spent roughly 11 billion dollars constructing architectural vanity projects, while its public hospitals, schools and transit systems withered from chronic, systemic starvation. When protesters flooded the streets under the desperate banner ‘Não vai ter Copa’—‘there will be no Cup’—they carried signs demanding hospitals and schools be built to ‘FIFA standards’. It was a devastating recognition that the global sports cartel merited a brand of rapid, unquestioned financial mobilization that ordinary citizens were denied. And how did the state respond? With tear gas and rubber bullets, shielding the vainglorious stadiums from the citizens who paid dearly for them. Though the demonstrations failed to halt the kickoff, they punctured the comforting lie that the joy of the pitch exists on a separate plane from the misery of the streets.
As the 2026 tournament unfolds across the United States, Mexico and Canada, the exact same corporate amnesia is being staged on a continental scale. Widespread demonstrations over immigration enforcement, mass deportations and astronomical military spending run in parallel with the matches—two irreconcilable realities sharing the exact same calendar. Yet the television broadcasts operate as a fortress of enforced optimism, deliberately declining to connect the stadium lights to the crises unfolding just beyond their glow. It is the ultimate democratic manifestation of the machine: a system so perfectly engineered that it doesn’t even need a dictator to enforce the silence. The broadcast itself becomes the border, policing what is allowed into the frame and what isn’t, ensuring that the collective consciousness of a hemisphere remains safely anasthetized by the ball.
The ultimate proof that this democratic machine is thoroughly political lies in the administrative sycophancy of its leadership. In December 2025, FIFA president Gianni Infantino took to the stage at the Kennedy Center in Washington to hand U.S. President Donald Trump the inaugural, newly minted ‘FIFA Peace Prize’. It was a charged moment of political theater: a global sports syndicate creating an entirely fictional accolade out of thin air, with a shortlist of exactly one, all to flatter the executive of the primary host nation of the next World Cup. The bureaucracy didn’t even attempt to maintain its historic performance of neutrality; they simply leaned into a brazen act of geopolitical brown-nosing, proving that FIFA’s highest honor isn’t earned on the pitch, but bartered in the halls of state power. To listen to Infantino laud Trump’s ‘commitment to unity’ while the host country builds wall-to-wall border enforcement and coordinates mass deportations is to understand that FIFA’s concept of ‘peace’ is entirely untethered from human rights. It is an administrative currency, minted in Zürich and spent in Washington, designed to purchase the permanent goodwill of the world’s empire.
If you want proof that FIFA itself doesn’t actually practice its own gospel of a ‘neutral sport’, you need only look at South Africa. In 1961, the country was expelled from the association over apartheid, after years of the South African Football Association insisting it could field only racially segregated teams. The country was briefly, shamefully, readmitted in 1963, then cast out again in 1976—this time permanently—after the federation’s pledge to send an all-White squad to one World Cup and an all-Black squad to the next in a farcical attempt to turn segregation into a novelty act. South Africa would then remain exiled for sixteen straight years, until readmission in 1992, as the architecture of apartheid was being formally dismantled.
But here’s the problem: the ban did not materialize because some neutral high-minded committee discovered, with regret, that politics had contaminated the purity of the sport. It happened because African football associations organized, rebelled, and forced FIFA’s hand. South Africa had been one of the four founding pillars of the Confederation of African Football (CAF) in 1956—alongside Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan—and was expelled by its own continental peers just two years later, long before Zürich found the moral courage to follow suit. When the CAF forced the initial suspension, then-FIFA president Stanley Rous desperately sought a bureaucratic workaround to prioritize the survival of the game over the survival of human rights, culminating in 1963 in him personally leading a fact-finding delegation to South Africa to investigate the local federation. Upon his return, he shamelessly recommended that the suspension be lifted, hiding behind the paternalistic warning that if South Africa remained exiled, ‘the game could disappear in the country’. To the global bureaucracy, the preservation of the sport was a sacred duty; the systemic torture and legal subjugation of millions of Black South Africans was merely inconvenient background noise.
It was only in 1974, when João Havelange aggressively courted the voting power of the newly independent African bloc to defeat Rous for the FIFA presidency, that Zürich finally abandoned this defensive crouch behind ‘sporting neutrality’. In 1976, years after African Nations had already taken their stand, FIFA finally officially expelled South Africa. The exile was not a sudden awakening of the corporate conscience. It was a cold surrender, proving that the global body only recognized the moral reality of the situation when the political and financial cost of maintaining their fictional ‘neutrality’ became completely unsustainable. And today, every time FIFA chooses to look away, it isn’t hiding behind a rulebook—it is simply admitting that the blood-stained money is worth more than the victim’s humanity.
Nothing exposes this systemic delusion more sharply than the bureaucracy’s current theatrics. Just last week, fresh off a humiliated failure to orchestrate a public handshake between Palestinian and Israeli football executives at their annual congress, FIFA aggressively floated a proposal for a match between Israel and Palestine to open its new under-15 youth tournament in the United States. It is a masterclass in corporate cognitive dissonance, a perverse attempt to engineer a cosmetic photo-op of ‘global unity’ using children on a football pitch, while simultaneously shielding the Israeli federation from any real legal accountability or independent human rights review that might compromise its revenue. Forcing the two teams onto the grass under the guise of an ‘apolitical sanctuary’ is the ultimate political stance—an administrative declaration that the slaughter can continue, so long as the product remains marketable. But the entire stunt collapsed the moment the Palestinian Football Association flatly refused to participate, citing the killing of their athletes and the destruction of their stadiums. That definitive refusal blew the fiction wide open, proving that the game cannot be divorced from the graveyard, and that no amount of administrative maneuvering can force a victim to play along with their own erasure.
Because here’s the thing about claiming neutrality: it isn’t actually a neutral position. It’s a political orientation that happens to favor whoever currently benefits from things staying exactly as they are. When my brother says the World Cup is ‘just’ a celebration of sport, he is not opting out of a stance—he’s taking one. It is the easiest one available, because it doesn’t require him to know anything about kafala contracts, Russian purges, or Argentinian death flights. ‘It’s not that deep’ is what you get to say when the superficiality doesn’t cost you anything. He gets to enjoy the tournament without thinking about whose survival was traded for his entertainment, because the spectacle is designed to outshine the truth.
It is a product as old as empire itself—the eternal return of panem et circenses, bread and circuses. When the Roman satirist Juvenal coined the phrase two thousand years ago, he was mourning a citizenry that had willingly traded its democratic duties and political consciousness for cheap wheat and the blood-soaked thrill of the Colosseum. The calculation hasn’t changed: it has just been upgraded with high-definition broadcasts and global sponsorship deals. Modern sportswashing operates on this exact Roman principle: if you give the public a spectacle grand enough, they will gladly abdicate their moral responsibility to look closely at the architecture holding up the stadium. And, we accept the circus anyway, because it feels better to cheer for a goal than to contemplate a labor camp. It is an exchange where the audience barters away its outrage in installments of ninety minutes, proving that the most effective way to govern is not to suppress people’s voices, but to give them something beautiful to scream for.
This curated amnesia doesn’t just distort the politics of the host states; it manufactures the very identities of the nations on the pitch. Even who gets to count as ‘Brazilian’ or ‘Senegalese’ or any nationality at all turns out to be far more contested than the flag-waving suggests. Take Morocco’s historic run to the 2022 semifinal—the grandest stage any African or Arab nation had ever claimed. Of the twenty-six players on that squad, fourteen were born outside Morocco and raised and trained in France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Canada. Now, in the 2026 tournament, that number has climbed to twenty, culminating in a historic starting eleven on which not a single player had been born inside the country.
This was no organic accident of migration. Morocco built a deliberate, highly clinical diaspora pipeline: anchoring the recruitment in the Mohammed VI Football academy, deploying permanent scouting networks to scour European youth teams for children with Moroccan heritage, and explicitly courting kids raised abroad to choose the Atlas Lions over Europe’s elite. Some of these players have spoken openly about the raw emotional reality of that choice, confessing that growing up Moroccan in Europe meant constantly being reminded that they weren’t quite French or weren’t quite Dutch, no matter how beautifully they played. The national team became, for them, the lone sanctuary where their identity was not contested.
This was explicitly engineered by Zürich: by dismantling its historic lifetime locks and amending its eligibility statutes to allow dual-nationals to switch their international allegiances, it legally sanctioned the harvest. Yet while the federation structurally embraced this borderless identity behind the scenes, FIFA made it clear that the players’ personal expressions of solidarity had strict, legally policed boundaries. During their historic 2022 run in Doha, as the Moroccan players celebrated their triumph over Spain by unfurling the Palestinian flag on the pitch, they ran directly into the teeth of FIFA’s disciplinary code, which rigidly bans any ‘political, offensive and/or discriminatory banners or flags’. The global broadcast network that had happily commodified the team’s transnational underdog story suddenly had to navigate a spontaneous display of pan-Arab defiance. FIFA’s immediate, bureaucratic discomfort exposed the terms of the bargain: the machine will gladly permit you to leverage your globalized identity to win matches and generate viewership, but the moment you use that identical spotlight to signal a real-world, unsanctioned political allegiance, you are treated as a contaminant to the sterile purity of the corporate product.
The easy defense is to delineate the boundary between ancestry and politics. One could argue that it makes perfect sense to permit a borderless, mercenary pipeline of talent while strictly banning political demonstrations on the grass, under the comforting assumption that sports have always been a sanctuary free from statecraft.
But this defense rests on a fundamentally dishonest premise: the belief that a player’s ancestry is a neutral fact, while their allegiance is a political disruption. In reality, the very existence of Morocco’s diaspora roster is the product of brutal, raw geopolitics. Those players weren’t born in Madrid, Paris and Amsterdam by a neutral accident of geography; they are the living legacy of post-colonial migration, economic displacement, and European labor agreements. When they choose the Atlas Lions because they feel structurally alienated by the Western societies that trained them, their jerseys are stained with the politics of identity long before they ever step onto the pitch. So to deny them political agency is the ultimate expression of the corporate circus: you are encouraged to embody the complexities of a globalized world to sell the match, but you are forbidden from acting like a human being within that world once the cameras are rolling.
There is, as always, the convienient plea for insulation: the claim that the sins of the government or the fractures of a society should not be visited upon individual players who have spent their lives training for a fleeting athletic window. It is a comforting argument, but fundamentally dishonest. It treats athletes as historical ghosts, existing in a vacuum completely untethered from the regimes that fund their academies, the flags stitched on their chests, and the state machineries that actively use their bodies as human shields against foreign scrutiny. You cannot demand to be celebrated as a national hero on Tuesday and then claim to be an accidental tourist when that same nation carries out an ethnic purge on Wednesday. When you put the jersey on, you are effectively accepting the transaction: a pedestal for silence.
My refusal to join the chorus for South Africa does not stem from a belief that nationality is an illusion, nor from some clinical indifference to the triumph of African football on the world stage. I refuse because cheering for a national team is, on some level, a quiet endorsement of what that team is currently permitted to represent. The country’s contemporary record on how it treats other Africans within its own borders makes that endorsement far more toxic and insidious than my brother is willing to admit. Since May 2008, when sixty-two people—Black South Africans alongside Mozambican, Zimbabwean and Somali migrants—were slaughtered in a wave of nationwide xenophobic violence, the state has cycled through repeated, rhythmic spasms of what researchers increasingly categorize as Afrophobia. This is a violence meticulously concentrated not against the abstract category of the ‘foreigner’ but against Black African migrants in particular, while white and Asian foreign nationals move through the country relatively unscathed.
Operation Dudula, a vigilante movement that successfully weaponized this resentment to transition into an official political party, derives its name from the Zulu word for ‘force out’. For years, its foot soldiers have systematically blocked migrants from entering public hospitals and schools, raided shops owned by Zimbabweans and Nigerians, and marched under an unambiguous banner: ‘Put South Africa First’. More recently, in 2026, a newer iteration of this nativist playbook under the banner of the ‘March and March’ movement has brought this terror back to the streets of Pretoria, Johannesburg and Durban, culminating in demonstrations that turned predictably violent and, in some instances, fatal. Human Rights Watch and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights have both documented this not as a series of isolated, aberrant incidents, but as a sustained, institutionalized pattern stretching back close to two decades.
So, when South Africa plays, and the television broadcast cuts to a sea of flags and vuvuzelas, while commentators speak warmly about the birthplace of African football joy, I do not see a secular sanctuar. I think of Hillbrow, Alexandra, and Diepsloot. I think about Zimbabwean shop owners boarding up their windows in the dark, and a political movement that exists explicitly to arbitrate which Africans get to belong in Africa’s most industrialized economy and which must be purged. Rooting for a team must mean more than a sentimental attachment to a geography or a flag. It means you are comfortable, even temporarily, being associated with what that place currently is, and I am not comfortable with that. To say so is not an act of injecting politics into something pure; it is a refusal to pretend the politics weren’t already there. They are there today, in Buenos Aires and Doha, in Moscow and Riyadh. They were there when FIFA looked at a map of historical atrocities and somehow decided that Zürich’s ‘neutrality’ was worth the silence.
To acknowledge this is not to deny the genuine beauty of what football can do. There is a real, undeniable spirit of community that the game conjures—a rare, collective vulnerability where millions of strangers can share the exact same breath, the exact same heartbreak and the exact same sudden, explosive ecstasy at the exact same second. That capacity for human connection is not an illusion, and nor is it inherently cynical. But the World Cup was never just a football tournament, any more than a flag is just a piece of cloth. It is one of the largest stages on Earth, and stages never go unclaimed. Someone is always using it: a junta, a monarchy, a federation deciding which Africans get to be African enough, a government hoping ninety minutes of joy will buy ten more years of patience, a network executive clinical to police the boundaries of the frame. The tragedy is not that the community isn’t real. It’s that this genuine communal warmth is the exact fuel the machine requires to run.
My brother will tell you that this perspective is exhausting—that I cannot let a football match be a football match, and this is the precise reason no one wants to watch television with me. He is not wrong that it would be vastly easier not to think about any of this. That is, after all, the entire point of the circus. It is built so that ninety minutes can feel like the only ninety minutes that have ever existed, built so that the collective ecstasy on the screen never has to share space with the blood and scarcity just beyond the stadium gates. So, I understand why he may choose to look away and focus only on the part the cameras want him to see, to numb his conscience one more time to find a hollow sanctuary in the ‘beautiful game’. I suppose it’s just too bad he wound up with a sister who insists on quoting Said and Fanon right when the final penalty taker is starting his run-up.
A Footnote for All Forty-Eight
No one shows up to this tournament with clean hands. Have a look through, country by country, as the anthems play.
| COUNTRY | INDICTMENT |
| Mexico | A state marked by a staggering humanitarian crisis of cartels, corruption and systemic violence. Over 100 000 people have disappeared since 2006, with documented police and military complicity in many cases. |
| South Korea | Hyper-financialized society where state institutions remain deeply intertwined with corporate monopolies (chaebols), labor organizing is treated with hostility, and political factions actively weaponize anti-feminist backlashes for electoral gain. |
| Czechia | A state with a widening wealth gap and systemic economic exclusion of its Romani minority, where influential populist factions and an unregulated digital media environment weaponize anti-refugee rhetoric for political gain. |
| South Africa | See above article. |
| Canada | Indigenous populations died by the thousands in state-funded residential schools, the last of which didn’t close until 1997. Today, the nation still reckons with an ongoing cultural genocide, alongside the deep corporate impunity enjoyed by its mining companies operating globally. |
| Switzerland | A global banking center that accumulated its vast wealth through decades of financial opacity—shielding illicit capital, tax evaders and dictators—while enforcing highly insular domestic immigration policies to restrict integration. |
| Bosnia and Herzegovina | A nation-state politically paralyzed by an unstable, ethnically segregated constitutional structure, where separatist political elites continuously threaten the dissolution of federal institutions. |
| Qatar | An absolute monarchy operating under a highly restrictive labor framework, where migrant workers continue to face documented wage theft, hazardous working conditions and a total legal prohibition on unionization. |
| Brazil | A country where the state consistently fails to protect its indigenous territories and rural workers, allowing heavily armed corporate mining and agricultural networks to violently displace communities and accelerate Amazonian deforestation. |
| Morocco | A constitutional monarchy that utilizes sophisticated surveillance apparatuses to systematically target and jail independent journalists, while enforcing a decades-long military occupation over the Western Sahara. |
| Scotland | A nation seeking self-determination from Westminster, whose historic economic foundation and modern institutional wealth remain deeply rooted in active and enthusiastic participation in the colonial extractions of the British Empire. |
| Haiti | A state facing severe institutional fragility and a total collapse of government structures, where political elites have effectively abandoned the population, leaving urban centers entirely under the rule of criminal coalitions. |
| United States | The global hegemon of the military-industrial complex currently grappling with structural racial inequality, voting rights suppression and the ongoing corporate capture of democratic institutions. That’s not even counting the xenophobia, the wars, the foreign policy…the list goes on. |
| Australia | A commonwealth nation built on unceded Indigenous lands that continues to record profound disparities in Aboriginal mortality and incarceration rates, while maintaining a strict policy of mandatory offshore migrant detention. |
| Paraguay | A state whose state machinery is deeply compromised by institutional corruption, acting as a major hub for contraband economies while facing international scrutiny for protecting illicit money-laundering operations. |
| Türkiye | An authoritarian regime characterized by the systemic dismantling of judicial independence, the widespread imprisonment of opposition parties and independent media voices, and aggressive cross-border military campaigns against Kurdish populations |
| Germany | The industrial center of Europe currently managing severe social polarization, which has fueled a volatile political climate marked by the rapid mainstreaming of hardline anti-immigrant nationalist parties. |
| Côte d’Ivoire | An economy deeply integrated into global agricultural trade that continues to permit widespread child labor within its domestic cocoa-farming sector, prioritizing multinational corporate supply over local labor protections. |
| Ecuador | A democracy mired in a severe internal security crisis driven by transnational narco-cartels, where the state’s reliance on prolonged military emergency decrees has led to reports of extra-judicial violence and civil liberty rollbacks. |
| Curaçao | A constituent country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands that remains structurally dependent on the Dutch crown, while its territory acts as a primary military logistical outpost for the United States to project power in the Caribbean. |
| The Netherlands | A global corporate tax haven that actively facilitates international tax avoidance for multinational corporations, whose domestic electorate recently brought a hardline, anti-immigrant nationalist coalition to executive power. |
| Japan | A stable democracy with highly conservative social frameworks, maintaining an isolationist asylum system that rejects over 99% of refugees while strictly retaining its death penalty. |
| Sweden | A traditional social democracy undergoing a major political shift towards militarized policing and restrictive immigration policies, driven by a failure to integrate marginalized communities facing localized gang violence. |
| Tunisia | The lone success story of the Arab Spring that has rapidly slid back into authoritarianism, under a president who has dismantled the judiciary, jailed opposition and weaponized xenophobic rhetoric against sub-Saharan migrants. |
| Iran | A theological autocracy that utilizes arbitrary executions, mass detentions and total communication blackouts to ruthlessly suppress domestic civil rights and women-led protest movements. |
| Belgium | A federal state experiencing persistent domestic political gridlock and urban socioeconomic segregation, alongside a refusal to pay structural reparations for its genocidal colonial administration of the Congo. |
| New Zealand | A parliamentary democracy dealing with persistent domestic wealth gaps and systemic racial disparities regarding incarceration and mortality rates for Māori and Pacific populations. |
| Egypt | A brutal, highly centralized military dictatorship that has effectively criminalized public dissent, holding tens of thousands of political prisoners while systematically dismantling independent civil society and journalism. |
| Spain | A state marked by intense regional autonomy disputes, using controversial judicial overreaches to penalize Catalan self-determination movements, alongside employing lethal border enforcement tactics at its North African enclaves |
| Uruguay | A regional democracy currently dealing with major political controversies involving high-level passport fraud, state transparency failures and institutional intelligence surveillance. |
| Saudi Arabia | An absolute autocracy using massive sports investments to manage its global image, while continuing to carry out mass executions, suppress women’s rights advocates and strictly criminalize all domestic political opposition. |
| Cabo Verde | An island democracy with a structural economic reliance on foreign aid and European tourism, leaving the local working class vulnerable to massive youth unemployment and extreme food import dependencies. |
| Norway | A nation that funds its highly praised progressive welfare model and sovereign wealth through aggressive state-backed oil and gas extraction, making it one of the world’s leading contributors to climate destabilization. |
| France | A centralized republic locked in deep social polarization, marked by highly controversial pension reforms passed by executive decree, systemic police brutality in marginalized suburbs and the strict surveillance of minority religious expressions. |
| Senegal | A democracy that has seen tense political instability, where state authorities have faced heavy international criticism for employing lethal police crackdowns on youth protests. |
| Iraq | A political landscape deeply paralyzed by entrenched sectarian clientelism and endemic corruption, where state-aligned militias act with near total impunity against youth reform and protest movements. |
| Argentina | A state undergoing a radical economic under president Javier Milei, where aggressive fiscal austerity and deregulation have plunged over half the population into poverty, while stoking intense domestic protests. |
| Austria | A wealthy republic that maintains a rigid policy of geopolitical neutrality to preserve profitable energy and banking ties with eastern autocracies, while experiencing a sharp mainstream rise in hardline anti-migrant nationalism. |
| Jordan | A monarchy operating under the strict restriction of public assembly, where state security forces routinely arrest online activists, union leaders and protesters. |
| Algeria | A military-dominated establishment that systematically suppresses opposition groups, uses sweeping anti-terror laws to arrest peaceful dissidents and strictly restricts independent media operations. |
| Colombia | A nation grappling with the fragile, lagging implementation of its historic peace accords, leading to a dangerous resurgence of localized guerrilla violence and a high assassination rate of community and environmental leaders. |
| DR Congo | A state whose eastern provinces are trapped in a catastrophic humanitarian crisis fueled by local rebel groups, regional proxy warfare and the brutal exploitation of its mineral wealth for global tech supply chains. |
| Portugal | An economy heavily reliant on low-wage service sectors, experiencing a severe housing and cost-of-living crisis, driven by tax incentives for wealthy foreign real estate investors and digital nomads. |
| Uzbekistan | A state transitioning from isolation that retains rigid authoritarian controls, where independent political parties are banned, and genuine public dissent or media scrutiny remains strictly limited. |
| England | A highly financialized economy whose capital city functions as a global laundry for illicit wealth, tax evasion and foreign oligarchic capital, while its domestic public infrastructure faces severe underfunding. |
| Ghana | A nation facing intense economic distress under IMF structural adjustment programs, alongside a sharp legislative crackdown on the fundamental rights of its LGBTQ+ citizens. |
| Panama | A global tax haven engineered to shield the world’s elite from paying their fair share, while serving as the dangerous, unpoliced transit point for desperate migrants crossing the Darién Gap. |
| Croatia | A European border state whose security forces face documented accusations from international human rights monitors for employing violent, illegal pushbacks and violence against refugees along the Balkan route. |
NB: This list is non-exhaustive. Humanity, after all, is creative in its failings.