Introduction

In 1978, an American researcher Linda Gail Arrigo sat across from RCA’s personnel manager at the company’s Taoyuan plant. The manager described how RCA had called on the KMT party-state’s martial law authority to suppress a factory strike, and how the company had deliberately structured its wage package to push unwanted workers into quitting voluntarily. Arrigo documented these conditions in her field notebooks, which the Taiwan Garrison Command secret police soon seized. Arrigo eventually demanded her notebooks back. But the workers whose conditions she had documented, the tens of thousands of young women handling chlorinated solvents without adequate protection on twelve-hour shifts, would wait decades before anyone recorded their story. By then, thousands had developed breast, liver, cervical, colorectal, and ovarian cancers (Teng 2007).

These events belong to a history that Taiwan’s semiconductor historiography has consistently told as two separate stories. One takes place on the shop floor and in the dormitory. Semiconductor firms recruited young Taiwanese women from rural areas and placed them into export-oriented electronics production lines. They rewarded these young women for their speed, dexterity, and obedience. The other occurs in conference rooms and breakfast shops. Technocrats, engineers, and corporate interlocutors plotted Taiwan’s leap from low-tech export manufacturing to high-tech semiconductor production, particularly through the 1976 Radio Corporation of America (RCA) Project (ITRI 2023). Within Taiwan’s semiconductor industry historiography, the second dimension of state strategy and technology transfer has too often eclipsed the first.

Contemporary discourse reinforces this imbalance. Government and policy narratives routinely foreground Taiwan’s dominance in leading-edge manufacturing and the strategic significance of its firms. After all, Taiwan produces over 90% of the world’s most advanced chips and over 60% of all semiconductor foundry revenue (USITA 2025). Popular works like Chip War likewise privilege top-down technological development and capital investment (Miller 2022). Many Taiwanese regard the industry as 保國聖山, “a sacred mountain that protects the country” (Hsiao 2025). Such strategic framing can make labour harm appear politically inconvenient or even risky to acknowledge.

There is nothing inherently wrong with describing Taiwan’s semiconductor industry as strategically critical. But when such narratives become the default historiography, they risk reproducing a familiar erasure. The marginalised women and migrant workers who made the “strategic” sector possible disappear, and the authoritarian governance that oppressed them becomes invisible.

The scene that opens this paper illustrates what that erasure concealed. In the late 1960s, the authoritarian Kuomintang (KMT) regime invited RCA to build some of Taiwan’s first semiconductor assembly, testing, and packaging (ATP) facilities. The young women whom Arrigo encountered at RCA’s Taoyuan plant worked twelve-hour shifts handling chlorinated solvents like trichloroethylene, tetrachloroethylene, and trichloroethane without adequate ventilation or protective equipment. They lived in company dormitories enclosed behind checkpoints, often guarded by KMT military police. Their enterprise unions had no real independence. Decades later, thousands of these women developed cancers. The litigation that followed would expose not only the toxic contamination but also a systematic pattern of corporate evasion, manufactured scientific doubt, and regulatory complicity that the martial law regime had made possible.

This paper argues that these are not two separate stories about technological triumph and labour exploitation. They are a single history. The same institutional architecture that enabled the celebrated 1976 RCA technology transfer also governed the shop floors where women assembled transistors under coercive conditions. The same martial law apparatus that promised multinational firms “political stability” suppressed the worker organising that might have revealed toxic hazards in real time. The nineteen engineers who trained at RCA’s U.S. facilities and returned to build Taiwan’s first integrated circuit demonstration factory did not work in isolation from the labour regime that recruited, housed, disciplined, and ultimately poisoned the women on RCA’s production lines.  They worked atop it.

Yet existing accounts consistently separate these dimensions. The technology transfer literature treats labour as a factor endowment. Labour history treats semiconductor upgrading as a separate institutional story. Taiwan’s transitional justice framework largely sidelines state-enabled corporate violence against factory workers. Why has Taiwan’s semiconductor historiography reproduced this separation? What did the KMT’s martial law apparatus do inside export electronics factories to shape recruitment, dormitory life, wage discipline, and occupational risk? And if the labour regime was integral rather than incidental to Taiwan’s technological ascent, what does that imply for the vast public investments now justified through similar “national interest” framings?

Historiography and Methods

This divide reveals itself in existing scholarship. Linda Gail Arrigo’s 1985 analysis of women workers in Taiwan’s multinational electronics factories remains the most important contemporaneous account of how martial law shaped factory life (Arrigo 1985). Based on late 1970s fieldwork, Arrigo linked piece-rate incentives, dormitory surveillance, and KMT military police to the broader structure of export-oriented industrial policy. But Arrigo was writing in real time. She could not trace the regime’s toxic consequences, its legal afterlife, or its relationship to the semiconductor upgrading story that had barely begun. Paul Jobin’s recent work addresses what Arrigo could not: the decades-long trauma of RCA’s former workers, the epistemic violence of contested causation, and the psychological toll of protracted litigation (Jobin 2025). Jobin explicitly connects RCA’s offshoring to Taiwan’s later semiconductor dominance. Yet his analysis, grounded in medical sociology, does not reconstruct the institutional machinery that made toxic exposure systematic rather than incidental. Together, Arrigo and Jobin supply this paper’s two essential poles. What neither does, and what no existing work has attempted, is to show how the same martial law apparatus that enabled celebrated technology transfer also foreclosed the worker voices who might have identified occupational hazards in real time.

Three additional bodies of scholarship fill out the analytical frame. Ming-sho Ho’s work on Leninist party-state control and labour federation politics documents how the KMT embedded its organisational apparatus within factories (Ho 2006), though it does not extend this analysis to occupational health or semiconductor upgrading. Contemporary World Bank reports reveal the de jure incentives offered to foreign investors while naturalising “political stability” and “cheap and industrious labour” as development inputs (IBRD et al. 1967). Taiwan’s transitional justice scholarship, focused largely on White Terror killings and imprisonments (Executive Yuan 2024), has not recognised how authoritarian infrastructure functioned as labour control within export factories. The RCA case illustrates why labour regimes deserve recognition as a distinct site of transitional justice reckoning.

Theoretically, the paper draws on: developmental state theory to frame how the KMT courted and constrained industry (Wade 2003; Amsden 1992), global value chain theory to examine how lead firms’ standards shaped local labour practices (Gereffi 2018), labour process theory to interpret piece-rate discipline and manufacturing consent (Braverman 1974; Burawoy 1982), feminist political economy to foreground gendered recruitment and dormitory governance (Arrigo 1985; Hsiung 1996; Kung 1995), and postcolonial critical theory to interrogate how institutional frameworks exploit workers and their bodies (Spivak 1988; Ricaurte 2022). These frameworks guide the primary source analysis.

The paper’s methodology relies extensively on primary sources that exist only because the regime’s concealment was imperfect. A post-martial law Taipei District Court verdict concerning RCA Taiwan documents toxic solvent use, groundwater pollution, and differential access to safe drinking water (Sung and Chen 2015). Thirty-five semi-structured interviews from research trips to Taiwan, South Korea, and the Philippines in 2024 and 2025 provide direct recollections from former RCA workers, migrant labourers in contemporary ATP supply chains, lawyers, labour organisers, NGO supporters, and scholars. Collected oral history records further document factory labour norms in 1960s-1970s industrial Taiwan, highlighting long shifts, forced overtime, workplace deaths, and the absence of recourse (沈德盛 2023).

A final point concerns scale. Numerous multinational and domestic actors shaped Taiwan’s ATP labour regime, but RCA is analytically central for two reasons. It was both a foundational company in Taiwan’s semiconductor origin story and a source of toxic contamination whose legal afterlife produced unusually rich documentation. That documentation retroactively illuminates workplace practices otherwise concealed by corporate and martial law secrecy. RCA thus serves simultaneously as a case of authoritarian-era multinational offshoring and as a window into the broader characteristics of early ATP labour regimes.

Building the Institutional Preconditions for Electronics Export

Martial law fundamentally conditioned Taiwan’s Cold War labour regime. During the White Terror period from 1947 to 1987, the KMT kept Taiwan under an official state of emergency, curtailing political rights, stifling opposition, and suspending many civil liberties (國家人權博物館 2017). These included the regime’s political killings, imprisonment, and torture of an estimated 140,000-200,000 dissidents, and broader persecution of ethnic Taiwanese intellectual elites (Cheung et al. 2022). The KMT’s rule extended into the workplace, where the authoritarian government effectively banned independent labour organising and treated worker dissent as a communist security threat (Jamison 2022). Even after martial law was lifted in 1987, the idea of “labour-capital harmony” continued to pervade Taiwanese politics (Huang 2001). But the labour regime that RCA and similar foreign firms would exploit did not emerge from martial law alone. It was built through a sequence of interlocking institutional developments: economic reforms designed to attract foreign capital, spatially bounded export zones that concentrated and governed production, a legal architecture that fragmented worker power, and a coercive security apparatus that backstopped the entire system.

Constructing the Investment Architecture

Taiwan’s ATP labour regime did not come from “culture” or market pressures alone (Deyo 2003). It arose from a martial law-era institutional environment built to facilitate export industrialisation in the late 1950s and 1960s. Incentivised by promises of further U.S. aid and ambitions of integrating Taiwan into global manufacturing networks, Taiwan pursued market liberalisation. By August 1960, KMT officials finalised a “Plan for Accelerated Development” that reduced tax burdens and removed industrial expansion constraints (Irwin 2021). These policy changes, paired with currency devaluation, significantly increased export-focused foreign and domestic investment.

The KMT’s reform package was comprehensive and deliberately sequenced (Wade 2003). Exchange-rate adjustments, tariff liberalisation, and a 1960 investment statute offering tax incentives and foreign exchange entitlements collectively constructed what contemporary economists recognised as an explicitly FDI-oriented policy architecture. As Yu Ching Jao observed at the time, these measures were designed for the “encouragement of foreign investment” (Jao 1976), a framing that treated foreign capital not as a byproduct of growth but as growth’s prerequisite. Export processing zones (EPZs) extended this logic spatially, bundling cheap land, infrastructure, and reduced bureaucracy into physically bounded zones optimised for multinational entry.

International development institutions reinforced this framing. A 1967 World Bank appraisal of the China Development Corporation catalogued Taiwan’s investment incentives, including tax holidays, customs duty deferrals, and duty-free import provisions. It attributed the island’s rapid growth to “political stability, appropriate Government policies, heavy American aid and the diligence of the economically active population” (IBRD et al. 1967). That language normalised repression as stability and managed low wages as diligence. By rendering authoritarian labour control legible as a technocratic input, such appraisals lent institutional legitimacy to a development model whose profitability rested on foreclosing worker agency.

Two features of export electronics made this particularly consequential for labour regimes. First, ATP depended on large numbers of low-paid workers rapidly performing repetitive tasks, requiring not merely low wages but wage discipline. This required a workforce whose compensation could be held below productivity gains without triggering collective action. Second, the EPZ framework of processing imported materials for re-export meant that Taiwanese labour was the primary site of value creation within the zone. Yet the governance structure ensured workers captured the smallest share of that value. Cold War geopolitics, economic reform, and labour control thus converged in a single developmental logic that made Taiwan particularly attractive to foreign electronics firms due to its authoritarian labour structure.

Export orientation evolved from a purely economic idea into an administrative form. Later Taiwanese semiconductor narratives often celebrate research and training organisations (Hsiao 2025). The earlier story of how the KMT built export-oriented industrial spaces and politically managed labour within them is equally important.

Export Processing Zones and the Spatialisation of “Industrial Peace”

EPZs were one of the most consequential spatial tools within Taiwan’s export strategy. KT Li, Taiwan’s “godfather of technology” (Saxon 2001), visited the free port city of Trieste in 1962 (Irwin 2021). Soon after, Li opened one of the world’s first EPZs in Kaohsiung in March 1965 (NYT 1967). The Kaohsiung EPZ offered firms tax and duty exemptions alongside purpose-built infrastructure for electronics, precision machinery, and related sectors (外交部 2022).

The Kaohsiung EPZ and its successors in Taoyuan, Taichung, and elsewhere by the early 1970s are typically narrated as investment promotion instruments (Haggard and Zheng 2013). They were also labour governance instruments, concentrating over 100,000 women at peak employment within bounded spaces where the state could regulate customs flows and human mobility (Kuo 2010). Some workers were underage girls who borrowed other people’s ID cards to gain entry (王諺玫 2009), likely hazardous child labour given the hours and chemical exposure (勞動部 2024). EPZ gates, dormitories, and checkpoints enclosed a workforce whose mobility could be monitored. Police classified EPZ employees as “special surveillance objects” (Chang 2023), collapsing industrial management into security enforcement. Workers were pushed into extensive overtime and chronic solvent exposure with little recourse (Jobin 2010). The EPZ administration’s dual mandate compounded the problem: the same authorities that promoted foreign investment also adjudicated labour disputes (Taiwan Panor. 1980), systematically favouring corporate interests over worker protections. Taiwan’s Control Yuan later criticised EPZs for courting investment while running their own labour inspection centres (高涌誠 and 王幼玲 2024).

While global value chain scholarship highlights how lead firms govern production networks by setting supplier standards (Gereffi 2018), the KMT state itself helped Taiwan’s EPZs institutionalise those requirements. The KMT state did not just invite multinationals, but it embedded their operational logic into local governance. The state was deeply responsive to and integrated with corporate priorities, yet it maintained just enough autonomy to enforce industrial priorities (Evans 1995). Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and EPZ authorities embodied this duality, being highly responsive to multinational investment and production requirements yet also steering firms toward export targets and technology transfer goals. While institutions like the World Bank narrated EPZs as technical policy innovations (IBRD et al. 1967), they also functioned as authoritarian governance laboratories. Within these zones, the authoritarian state could refine labour control mechanisms while maintaining a facade of modernisation.

Corporatist Law and the Fragmentation of Worker Power

EPZs provided the spatial framework for Taiwan’s labour regime, but the legal system provided its structural scaffolding. While labour unions formally existed, they were legally constrained in a corporatist manner that fragmented worker power while preserving a veneer of representation. Taiwan’s Labor Union Law limited unions to individual plants and stipulated mandatory membership (S.-J. Chen et al. 2003). The law also required factories to have at least 30 workers for unionisation and divided legal unions into categories that limited sectoral bargaining powers (勞動部 2022). Industry-wide or independent unions, along with the right to strike, were banned outright. From 1947 until 1987, no legal strikes occurred in Taiwan, and KMT authorities swiftly crushed or defused any collective worker actions (Winn 1987). As a Taiwanese commentator put it, “Totalitarian rulers do not adhere to [the right to strike]. They regard strikes as rebellions to be suppressed. Taiwan’s former regime was no exception” (Huang 2001). Even within permitted single-factory unions, management or KMT loyalists often occupied leadership roles, earning these organisations the moniker 閹雞工會, “castrated chicken unions” (Huang 2001), for their lack of real bargaining power. During the martial law era, unions served as “auxiliary institutions of industrial peace… [and] administrative arms of the government for the implementation of national policies.” Some even helped the KMT mobilise workers to win sham elections (S.-J. Chen et al. 2003).

Administrative mechanisms further constrained workers’ voices. When ministries disagreed over worker protections, the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ export promotion priorities often took precedence over labour reform. The Ministry of Interior sometimes made superficial gestures for “internal reform and protection of workers,” suggesting that women workers should get mandatory breastfeeding time in 1978 (Arrigo 1985). But in practice, these policies would hardly help Taiwan’s largely unmarried young factory women. The KMT even set up a special organ within the Ministry of Economic Affairs to arbitrate foreign corporate disputes separately from public litigation within the Ministry of Justice, making labour disputes less visible and publicly contestable (Arrigo 1985). Single enterprise unionism thus fragmented worker power, while administrative channels diverted grievances from public arenas where they might have gained traction.

Leninist Discipline on the Shop Floor

To implement their labour control regime, the KMT ironically built a Leninist party-state apparatus in workplaces (Ho 2007). Despite their purported opposition to communism, the KMT’s Bureau of Labor and the official Chinese Federation of Labor embedded KMT party cell representatives and secret police within large factories (Ho 2006). These secret police officers from the Taiwan Garrison Command served as 安全室主任, “chief of security” (Hsin-Hsiang Chen 2025). Such extrajudicial processes surveilled and quelled unrest often before worker organising efforts became public. Workers were expected to resolve grievances through state-approved channels, if at all. For example, a worker might complain to a company welfare officer or at a labour-management meeting, but these mechanisms had no real power independent of management. Any attempt to organise outside the official structure risked severe punishment. The KMT brutally killed all who tried to form independent committees or protest. After all, on February 28, 1947 alone, the KMT killed up to 28,000 Taiwanese over a government tobacco monopoly dispute (Forsythe 2015). This repression extended to dissenting foreign academics and journalists as well, some of whom the KMT even murdered extraterritorially (J. Pan 2021).

The state’s enforcement of occupational safety and health regulations followed the same logic of performative governance. Martial law allowed foreign firms like RCA to draw on a remarkably compliant workforce. The legal architecture constrained workers de jure. The enforcement and security apparatus ensured their de facto subordination (Minns and Tierney 2004). Even after Taiwan enacted its first weak industrial labour code, the government “did not strongly require employers to comply,” so even state-owned enterprises often failed to correct violations (何明修 2021).

Only crisis compelled the KMT to legislate. In 1972, roughly a dozen workers at a Philco plant in Tamsui, which assembled electronic components for Ford, died agonising deaths from liver diseases caused by inhaling industrial poisons (國立歷史博物館 2020). The incident compelled the KMT to enact the 1974 Labour Safety and Health Act (林宜平 2011), Taiwan’s first major occupational safety statute. Yet penalties were so minimal that employers learned it was cheaper to ignore the law than to comply (Winn 1987). As RCA’s own inspection record would later demonstrate, meaningful enforcement never followed.

In Taiwan’s export electronics sector, “industrial peace” meant far more than the absence of strikes. It rested on interlocking mechanisms of spatial enclosure, legal fragmentation, administrative diversion, coercive surveillance, and performative regulation that together made refusal costly and collective action nearly impossible. Taiwan’s industrial relations encompassed more than simply employer-worker relations. They were state-mediated relations designed to reduce publicity, delay resolution, and constrain the arenas in which workers could speak.

“If the Prosecutor is Too Annoying, We’ll Just Change Him:” Factory Life in the 1960s

Oral histories from Taiwan’s broader industrial milieu confirm that workers felt these institutional weaknesses on the factory floor. In an interview record, Shen Desheng recalls that in the 1960s, factory work often ran on a two-shift system from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. Base wages were low, making overtime pay indispensable, and factories provided inadequate industrial safety protections. Given these circumstances, Shen recounts a fatal elevator accident that occurred under “normal” conditions. Then still a young manager, Shen personally held the bleeding worker and transported him to Mackay Hospital in a three-wheeled cargo cart. No ambulance came, and no emergency protocol existed. The company did not initially regard itself as responsible, and Shen recalls that “there was not yet labour consciousness and labour rights” at the time. Next, when a prosecutor arrived to investigate the safety failure, the managers said 檢察官如果太囉唆，就換一位, “If the prosecutor is too annoying, we’ll just change him” (沈德盛 2023). Capital was insulated not merely by weak enforcement or toothless statutes but by the capacity to override the judicial process itself. 

If Shen’s account illustrates how individual firms avoided regulatory scrutiny, Arrigo’s account of a sit-down strike at General Instruments Taiwan reveals how the state enforced that impunity at scale. After the factory manager failed to issue a customary Autumn Festival bonus, thousands of Taiwanese workers sat idle and refused to work (Arrigo 1985). The American manager soon called the KMT military police to suppress the strike. Under martial law, leading labour disturbances was a capital crime. This episode illustrates that for multinationals, Taiwan’s promise of “political stability” meant not only minimal protests, but also access to a state apparatus capable of quickly extinguishing emergent dissent.

These accounts are not specifically about RCA, but they establish the operative conditions in which RCA built its ATP labour regime. By the late 1960s, Taiwan’s factory life was already characterised by long hours, minimal safety protections, and managerial authority reinforced by social hierarchy and state coercion. The authoritarian regime had scaffolded investment incentives, concentrated export zones, and cultivated the “stable” political environment that constrained collective bargaining. RCA is significant not only because it used these conditions, but because it consolidated them into labour structures that outlasted both the company and martial law.

U.S. Trade Policy, Geopolitics, and RCA’s Turn to Taiwan

RCA’s Taiwan expansion in the late 1960s emerged from U.S. trade policy, Cold War geopolitics, and domestic labour instability. These forces helped craft a transnational production network in which companies offloaded coercive labour discipline to authoritarian governments.

The U.S. tariff code’s offshore assembly provisions were critical to this system. By allowing firms to export components for overseas assembly and pay reimport duties only on foreign value added, these provisions did not merely accommodate global production networks. They actively constructed them as economically rational (Feenstra et al. 2000). By 1970, as U.S. Tariff Commission data confirm, substantial shares of American semiconductor imports by value had already entered under offshore assembly provisions (Sutton et al. 1971), evidence that production fragmentation was not a corporate improvisation but a legally structured outcome. Taiwan had become one of the principal destinations within this architecture, receiving U.S. components for assembly and shipping finished goods back under preferential duty treatment. Offshoring, in other words, was not simply something firms chose to do in response to wage differentials. It was embedded in trade law, statistical categories, and formal policy channels that made the dispersion of production across sovereign borders a codified feature of American industrial strategy.

Such U.S. policy architecture complicates narratives that reduce offshoring simply to cheap foreign labour. Cost differentials mattered, but they operated within legal and tariff infrastructures that made global assembly legible and profitable. Successive rounds of GATT negotiations reinforced these dynamics. The Kennedy Round in the 1960s and the Tokyo Round in the 1970s lowered trade barriers on finished electronics (Kageenu 2022), further incentivising U.S. firms to shift labour-intensive assembly to locations where they could arbitrage wage differentials against tariff reductions.

Domestic conditions sharpened these incentives. U.S. electronics manufacturing wages rose nearly ten percent per year through the 1970s, (DeSilver 2018) and the politics of labour recruitment grew increasingly contentious. American chip firms had experimented with recruiting feminised and racialised workforces that they thought were inherently suited to delicate assembly. But this framing fell apart when workers organised. The American Indian Movement’s occupation and shutdown of Fairchild’s Navajo reservation plant illustrated how U.S. production sites were vulnerable to political disruption (Nakamura 2014). Thus, electronics companies relocated their facilities offshore to places with “political stability,” lower wages, and less militant workers. For RCA specifically, this began first by hiring Eastern European immigrants in Camden, New Jersey, followed by Scotch-Irish Americans in rural Indiana, then African Americans in Memphis (Cowie 1999). Only after RCA had exhausted “desirable” sources of labour in the United States did it offshore to places like Mexico and Taiwan (Nakamura 2014).

Underwritten by authoritarian governance, Taiwan offered such stability. The U.S. government actively encouraged offshoring to Taiwan. As the KMT regime was representative of “Free China,” significant American aid already went to Taiwan. Private American investment would further serve U.S. Cold War priorities by stabilising Taiwan’s anti-communist regime through export-led growth (CFR 2025). Therefore, American aid officials and Taiwanese planners collaborated to establish export processing zones and attract U.S. firms. Declassified U.S. cables confirm Washington’s interest in Taiwan’s EPZ experiment as a replicable model (US Embassy ROC 1973). For firms like RCA, Taiwan’s appeal lay not only in low wages or export incentives, but also in a U.S.-backed authoritarian KMT regime that reduced labour disruption risk.

RCA’s Labour Regime on the Shop Floor

Authoritarian labour laws and export-oriented institutions established the preconditions for Taiwan’s electronics labour regime, but RCA and similar multinationals made that regime concrete on the shop floor. Their practices operated across three registers of control: spatial and demographic governance over recruitment, housing, and movement; economic and organisational discipline through wage structures and corporatist unionism; and epistemic control through performative regulation and suppressed accountability. RCA’s Taiwan operations are especially revealing because of the company’s foundational role in Taiwan’s semiconductor story and the unusually rich evidentiary record left by its later litigation.

Dormitories, Checkpoints, and the Gendered Workforce

Managers controlled almost all aspects of workers’ lives, spanning recruitment, training, housing, incentives, and time management. Employers consciously used martial law to secure control over the factory workforce. Arrigo details how unions, media, military police, and personnel office hierarchies facilitated such control (Arrigo 1985).

Gender was a key element of managerial recruitment. RCA specifically sought young women, valued across the export electronics sector for their supposed dexterity and docility (Nakamura 2014; Jobin 2025). However, Taiwan’s particular configuration was shaped by migration, dormitories, and authoritarian labour governance, evolving into an ATP labour regime with distinct disciplinary mechanisms.

Gendered recruitment intersected with family and rural-urban migration patterns. Patriarchal family structure often permeated factory women’s lives. Although young factory women typically worked temporarily before marriage, their earnings played a crucial role in sustaining family livelihoods and financing the education of younger siblings (Arrigo 1985). Such temporality reduced the likelihood that these factory women would organise and bolstered managerial power over a constantly rotating workforce. Many young women who got jobs at one of RCA’s “model factories” were often privileged 外省人, “waishengren/mainlanders,” who fled with the KMT and considered themselves lucky (Former RCA Worker 2026, 2). KMT-affiliated youth programmes had conditioned them to follow authority. If anyone stepped out of line, covert agents, informants, or police would quickly harass or blacklist her (Y. Chen et al. 2019).

Dormitories extended managerial control beyond the factory confines. Managers misleadingly narrated dormitory housing as a benevolent employee “benefit.” Arrigo initially describes the RCA dormitories as “model” facilities with airy halls, clean bathrooms, and house mothers (Arrigo 1985). But this welfare “perk” disguised constant surveillance, curfew enforcement, and social control. The dormitories were “enclosed in a compound next to the factory, with a single gate and checkpoint [often guarded by KMT military police] where all must sign in and out” (Former RCA Worker 2026, 2). Given their low wages, many women workers had scarce alternative urban housing options. Panoptical dormitories thus became factory extensions, allowing managers to secure punctuality, normalise long shifts, constrain collective organising, and continue supervising workers. Managers justified dormitories through paternalistic rhetoric of “care” and protection of women’s virtue (Kung 1995). The “meager dormitory environment and lack of privacy” became a severe strain over time (Arrigo 1985).

State and corporate actors also presented the factory-dormitory complex as an extension of the family and school, summed up in the slogan 以廠為家，以廠為校, “take the factory as your home, the factory as your school” (陳信行 2006). This ideology treated factory women as those in need of discipline and uplift, legitimising their tight regulation in company housing (Hsiung 1996). Materially, these measures served to limit factory women’s autonomy. The KMT’s ideology of moral order dovetailed neatly with employers’ need for a disciplined, trouble-free labour force.

Figure 1. A Taiwan factory dormitory during Arrigo’s late-1970s fieldwork (Arrigo 2025). Bunk beds at close quarters with no partitions and a single entry point made every occupant visible to house mothers and security officers.

But the “model” dormitory benefits were temporary. Following the 1974 oil crisis, multinationals shifted toward cheaper, more provisional dormitory arrangements (Arrigo 1985). Having already established a framework of residential control and surveillance, managers cut back on the expensive benefits while retaining the disciplinary infrastructure.

Wage Design as Coercion

Managers did not merely rely on walls. They also converted wage structures into instruments of compliance and punishment. Managers often attached substantial “bonuses” to base wages, which workers forfeited for “offenses” like being five minutes late, taking sick leave, or refusing overtime (Arrigo 1985). Because overtime pay was calculated on the no-bonus base wage alone, the effective overtime rate was far lower than the multiplier implied. Further piece-rate pay frameworks, along with speed and quality output targets, allowed RCA managers to exploit workers without overtly appearing coercive. This is where labour process theory is particularly applicable (Braverman 1974). Gamified production, quotas, and performance pay bonuses enabled workers to discipline themselves.

An RCA personnel manager even explicitly admitted to Arrigo that he had invoked the KMT party-state’s martial law authority to suppress a factory strike (Arrigo 2025). The manager also proudly described how RCA deliberately designed its wage package to coerce overtime compliance. If workers refused overtime, the resulting pay reduction was structured to “piss the workers off” enough that they would quit voluntarily. This psychological manipulation served a precise fiscal purpose. By inducing voluntary departures rather than issuing dismissals, RCA avoided paying severance and could arbitrarily lower its labour costs by approximately six percent (Arrigo 2025). The manager’s candour transforms the structural account of state-corporate alignment into a documented management strategy in which KMT martial law enforcement and wage design operated as complementary instruments to optimise labour cost.

Wage structures that individualised punishment and reward also fragmented solidarity, particularly when combined with dormitory governance that isolated workers from family and subjected them to surveillance. With collective action foreclosed, workers’ primary coping strategies tended toward keeping bonuses, individual bargaining, quitting, or other informal tactics rather than collective disruption. When individual grievances did surface, often regarding excessive overtime or harsh dorm rules, they usually led to minor concessions or dismissal. Workers perceived as troublemakers were fired (賴建寰 2012). Such heavy-handed governance caused union and strike rates to remain very low even after they became legal following Taiwan’s democratic transition (Congju 2019).

Rather than serve workers, RCA’s enterprise union furthered this corporatist control. One particularly telling anecdote concerns RCA workers discovering that their managers deducted union dues from their already low wages. Several women subsequently submitted their resignations, prompting an American manager to respond, “You want to organise a union, not me” (Hsin-Hsiang Chen 2025). The exchange demonstrates that unions could categorically exist but remain opaque and imposed upon workers, revealing the precise condition of enterprise-level unionism under authoritarian corporatist frameworks. In interviews decades later, former RCA workers recall that during the 1970s, they could not speak up and that there were “not really” unions or support structures available (Former RCA Worker 2024). One worker noted that she had to express discontent through RCA’s internal hierarchy “or face severe punishment” (Former RCA Worker 2024).

Performative Regulation and Knowledge Suppression

Beyond helping suppress labour movements, the KMT’s regulatory enforcement regime also served foreign capital. When RCA was later found to have repeatedly violated the Labour Safety and Health Act, the general manager was convicted but fined only NT$6,000 (Hsin-Hsiang Chen 2025), roughly US$150 (UPenn 2026). The fine was so insignificant relative to the cost of compliance that it amounted not to deterrence, but to tacit permission.

The inspection record at RCA’s Taoyuan plant confirms this pattern. Between 1975 and 1991, government agencies conducted nine inspections and documented 53 violations (Sung and Chen 2015), including failures to install local ventilation, label toxic organic solvents, and provide legally mandated health examinations. Yet 16 years of documented noncompliance produced no meaningful remediation. The violations were recorded and left unaddressed, creating an appearance of oversight while production continued. RCA’s management knew its groundwater was contaminated, purchased distilled water for executives but not workers, and repeatedly failed to remediate violations after formal notice. Such choices only made economic sense where noncompliance carried no real consequences.

The same logic of performative oversight extended to how the KMT suppressed external documentation. The U.S. Embassy told researchers like Arrigo to stop investigating labour conditions and engaging with the tangwai (anti-KMT opposition) (Arrigo 2025). Despite holding U.S. citizenship, Arrigo had her field notes on RCA factory conditions seized by the Taiwan Garrison Command secret police. Agents reviewed and stamped every page before returning the materials.

Figure 2. Arrigo’s field notebook, seized and stamped page by page by Taiwan Garrison Command, with seal visible at bottom left (Arrigo 2025). Handwritten entries record company names including RCA, General Instruments, and Texas Instruments, wage figures, and references to “double accounting.”

The suppression of labour discourse extended beyond individual researchers to academic institutions. In 1978, Arrigo helped organise a labour conference at Tunghai University where RCA’s personnel manager and other industry figures described worker discontent and managerial strategy (Arrigo 2025). The department chairman intended to publish the proceedings, one of the few contemporaneous records of multinational labour practices under martial law. The publication never appeared. The government soon installed former Central Police University president Meiko Wong as Tunghai University president (Tunghai Univ. 2016), and the proceedings were buried. Arrigo was then “shut out” by the U.S. Embassy that had already urged her to stop the research. The resulting archival silence was not neutral. It was produced by the same state-corporate alignment that operated on the shop floor.

Feminisation, dormitory governance, enterprise unionism, and performative regulation enabled Taiwan’s electronics export sector to maintain a stable labour supply, constrain bargaining, normalise intense work rhythms, and externalise occupational risk. RCA’s Taiwan presence benefited from, and depended on, this hierarchy of discipline and risk distribution. The U.S. tariff regime, Cold War security posture, and Taiwan’s managed labour force served as complementary infrastructures. The United States provided the legal pathway for fragmented production. Taiwan provided a politically disciplined and gendered workforce. And both states collaborated in ensuring that the conditions under which that workforce laboured remained difficult to study, publish, or contest.

Figure 3. Women assembling television components at an RCA Taiwan factory (Teng 2007). No gloves, masks, or ventilation hoods are visible. Originally published in Taiwan Panorama to project industrial modernity.

The RCA Project and the “Technology Transfer” Labour Regime

Yet to characterise RCA as simply an exploitative extractor would be as misleading as celebrating it solely as a modernisation vector. RCA was both a pioneering foreign investor that helped Taiwan build its industrial base and a company whose labour control mechanisms and poor occupational safety practices left lasting physical and mental scars on its former employees. This duality is constitutive of how authoritarian developmental regimes legitimised themselves. The KMT’s claim to legitimacy required economic modernisation through modern facilities, increased exports, and employment. But maximising profitability required RCA to control costs, discipline workers, and externalise risk. The canonical story of Taiwan’s semiconductor ascent, centred on the 1976 RCA technology transfer project, was built atop this labour regime rather than apart from it.

Nineteen Engineers and a Founding Myth

Taiwan’s semiconductor history is often structured around a mid-1970s shift from labour-intensive assembly to higher-value production, with the “RCA Project” as its central milestone. The canonical account describes a four-year, roughly US$10 million initiative led by Minister of Economic Affairs Sun Yun-suan to transfer RCA chip technology to Taiwan (Patterson 2015). A retrospective from the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) highlights a 1974 meeting at which seven men, including Sun and RCA Laboratories Director Pan Wen-yuan, planned Taiwan’s semiconductor development (ITRI 2023). In 1976, ITRI signed a technology transfer and licensing contract with RCA, then sent 19 Taiwanese engineers to RCA facilities in the United States for integrated circuit design and manufacturing training. On returning in 1977, they helped build Taiwan’s first IC demonstration factory, whose 70% yield surpassed RCA’s roughly 50% yield in New Jersey (ITRI 2023). The project helped produce Taiwan’s first local chip company, United Microelectronics Corporation, spun off in 1980. Yet as these engineers absorbed RCA’s expertise, they also encountered and adapted its labour control techniques, which later travelled into indigenous chip firms (Hsiao 2025).

What the Pilot Line Required

But the pilot line’s success depended on institutional conditions the canonical narrative leaves unexamined. Three specific dependencies make this concrete. First, the RCA Project’s pilot IC fabrication line required a workforce already habituated to the exacting procedural discipline of electronics production. This work required contamination protocols, microscopic component handling, time-sequenced process steps, and quality inspection routines. That workforce did not materialise spontaneously. It was produced over the preceding decade through the KMT-RCA labour regime. The EPZ-based electronics sector, organised through feminised recruitment, piece-rate incentive systems, and dormitory governance, trained tens of thousands of young women in precisely these capacities. Their daily work assembling and testing transistors, capacitors, and television components under RCA and similar multinationals constituted a vast, informal training infrastructure in standardised precision manufacturing. When the 19 ITRI engineers returned from RCA’s U.S. facilities in 1977, they did not build the demonstration factory alone. They staffed it with workers drawn from this existing labour pool, operators whose compliance with procedural standards had been shaped not by semiconductor-specific education but by years of managed factory discipline. The pilot line’s celebrated 70% yield was thus not simply a triumph of transferred engineering knowledge. It also reflected the quality of a workforce whose precision and obedience had been institutionally produced through martial law labour structures.

Second, the RCA Project required political predictability across a multi-year timeline, a condition that technology transfer’s substantial upfront costs and delayed returns make especially sensitive to disruption. RCA and the KMT state had to guarantee that training investments, intellectual property transfers, and pilot-line construction would not be jeopardised by labour conflict, political instability, or public controversy over working conditions (S.-J. Chen et al. 2003). Authoritarian labour governance directly supplied this guarantee. The interlocking mechanisms of union control, security surveillance, and strike prohibition ensured that the labour disruptions, which had plagued RCA’s domestic operations from Camden to Memphis to the Navajo reservation, were structurally precluded in Taiwan. This insulation from shop floor conflict constituted a subsidy to technology transfer that never appeared in fiscal accounts but was no less consequential for the RCA Project’s success. It is difficult to imagine RCA committing proprietary IC manufacturing processes to a country where those processes might be interrupted by the very workforce executing them.

Third, the canonical narrative implicitly treats the RCA Project as an upward trajectory away from labour-intensive production toward a high-skill national economy, as though technology transfer and labour exploitation occupy different historical phases. But semiconductor production has never shed its dependence on labour-intensive ATP. Even as the ITRI pilot line demonstrated Taiwan’s capacity for front-end wafer fabrication, the island’s electronics sector continued to expand its back-end assembly, testing, and packaging operations. The RCA Project did not eliminate the need for a controlled, low-cost ATP workforce. It added a new layer of high-value production on top of it. The same institutional architecture that governed ATP, including EPZ spatial enclosure, dormitory housing, constrained unionisation, and administrative mediation, continued to operate alongside and beneath the new semiconductor fabrication facilities. Indeed, as Taiwan spun off UMC in 1980 and later established TSMC, these firms replicated many of the managerial techniques their founders had absorbed during the RCA era. Those techniques encompassed not only IC process engineering but also the labour governance practices that had made RCA’s Taiwan operations profitable. The layered division of labour between capital-intensive fabrication and labour-intensive ATP was not a transitional phase but a structural feature of semiconductor production (Warf 2020), one that the RCA Project’s institutional descendants inherited and perpetuated.

The RCA Project sat atop the labour regime, drawing on a disciplined workforce the regime had produced, a political stability the regime enforced, and a layered production structure the regime sustained. In turn, its success legitimised the very state-capital alignment that had made ATP exploitation profitable.

Afterlives: Toxicity, Litigation, and the Persistence of Managed Labour

What Democratisation Made Contestable

Taiwan’s democratisation, along with the growth of environmental and labour NGOs, shifted what could be publicly contested. Jobin’s study of hazards and protest in Taiwan describes how rapid industrial development under authoritarian KMT rule was effectively a “slash and burn” policy, and it treats electronics hazards as emblematic of the paradox of “clean” industry (Jobin 2010). Dramatic catastrophes often affect public image much more than chronic pollution and health risks. The same study explicitly frames RCA’s Taoyuan plant pollution and worker cancers as part of the larger story of Taiwan’s electronics boom and the struggle for visibility. From this perspective, the RCA case illustrates how invisibility sustained earlier labour regimes. It also shows how coalitions of workers, activists, and experts have redefined the legal and scientific contestation of toxicity for a renewed labour struggle (Hsin-Hsing Chen 2023).

RCA’s Toxic Legacy and Contested Causation

Structural labour violence is not always immediately visible. In electronics, chemical exposure is one of the most consequential and insidious forms. Throughout its decades of operation in Taiwan, RCA used chlorinated solvents like trichloroethylene (TCE), tetrachloroethylene (PCE), trichloroethane (TCA), and methylene chloride as degreasers and cleansers on its production lines (Sung and Chen 2015). Workers absorbed these chemicals through inhalation, skin contact, and contaminated drinking water, while the solvents leached into surrounding soil and groundwater. These solvent concentrations exceeded legal limits, and the soil contamination reached extreme multiples of remediation standards. More than 80,000 workers, mostly young women, passed through RCA’s Taiwan factories during the three decades before the company shifted to water-based cleaning methods in the early 1990s (Jobin 2025). For the entirety of that period, the labour regime’s discipline, speed requirements, and dormitory containment kept production flowing without meaningful interruption or scrutiny.

Figure 4. A remediation notice at RCA’s former Taoyuan site, photographed during a January 2026 field visit (Former RCA Worker 2026). The sign designates an active groundwater pollution remediation project, ongoing more than 30 years after RCA’s closure in 1992.

RCA’s handling of these hazards followed a pattern of substitution rather than elimination (Sung and Chen 2015). TCE served as the main degreaser, later replaced by PCE, then by TCA. Each swap exchanged one toxic compound for another. The company knew its groundwater was contaminated and that activated carbon filters in shop floor drinking fountains could not remove hazardous pollutants. RCA purchased distilled water for management but not for “common workers.” The industrial risk distribution thus mapped onto occupational hierarchies: workers bore significant toxic exposure while management insulated itself. Corporate paternalism and internal messaging in the RCA Home Magazine, the company’s factory publication, celebrated welfare and modernity while obscuring such risks (Hsin-Hsiang Chen 2025). Interviews with former RCA women factory workers confirm that, at the time of their employment, they had no idea their workplace was contaminated (Former RCA Worker 2024, 1).

Evidence of contamination first surfaced through an unlikely channel. Around the end of 1986, Taiwan’s Investment Commission was notified that RCA’s parent company had changed hands through a U.S. merger, transferring ownership to General Electric (GE) (Li 2025). GE subsequently sold the operations to Thomson. Ironically, this corporate succession triggered the first pollution investigations, as environmental consulting firms conducted site contamination assessments as standard due diligence during mergers and acquisitions. Public evidence suggesting RCA had used toxic contaminants in its former factory therefore emerged at the very end of Taiwan’s martial law era, three decades too late for many factory women (Jobin 2025). RCA’s Taiwan factories closed in 1992, but the contamination they left behind was only beginning to become publicly visible.

The litigation that followed proved extraordinarily difficult. Former RCA workers filed suit in 2004, but proving disease causality decades after exposure posed immense evidentiary challenges (Jobin 2025). RCA’s Taiwan successors claimed that “we don’t have anything at all—we have no data because everything was burned down” (Hsin-Hsiang Chen 2025), and the company itself no longer existed in its original form. Anticipating liability from the emerging pollution revelations, RCA Taiwan colluded with its parent entities, Technicolor and Thomson, to remit over NT$3.2 billion, roughly US$80 million (UPenn 2026), in company assets to banks in France and other foreign jurisdictions between July 1998 and January 1999. The Taipei District Court later identified this transfer as a “fraudulent transfer of assets and malicious evasion of debt” (Sung and Chen 2015), deliberately designed to decrease the company’s capitalisation below its anticipated liabilities to the poisoned workers. The same transnational corporate architecture that facilitated offshore production was repurposed to offshore accountability. Global value chains, in this light, are not merely mechanisms for optimising labour arbitrage but structures through which corporations can disaggregate legal liability across jurisdictions.

RCA’s litigation strategy extended beyond jurisdictional complexity to manufacturing scientific doubt (Sung and Chen 2015). Its legal team retained Dr. Steve Lee, an oncological radiologist, to testify on causation. The court found him unqualified in epidemiology and toxicology, the fields relevant to chemical exposure and disease. Despite the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifying trichloroethylene as a Group 1 carcinogen, Lee claimed RCA’s operations did not cause the workers’ cancers. The judges condemned his testimony as an “attempt to confuse and mislead” the court, made with the “obvious intention to deceive.” The episode shows how corporations can weaponise credentialed expertise against sick workers. What Jobin calls “epistemic and psychological violence” operated through a specialist whose credentials lent superficial authority to claims outside his competence (Jobin 2025). Workers denied safety information and collective voice could not produce contemporaneous exposure records that would have simplified causation decades later. The epistemic violence of the courtroom thus extended the epistemic closure of the shop floor. Despite hundreds of plaintiffs, multiple lawsuits, and more than a decade of litigation (Li 2025), the former RCA workers ultimately secured compensation.

After years of hearings, the Taipei District Court ruled in favour of hundreds of RCA worker-plaintiffs and ordered compensation on April 17, 2015, in what became Taiwan’s first class-action labour lawsuit (Sung and Chen 2015). Court decisions from 2015 onward recognised multicausal links between the chemicals and diverse cancers and illnesses, culminating in a 2022 Supreme Court decision recognising the psychological stress caused by past exposure (Jobin 2025). A Taiwan High Court ruling in January 2025 ordered further compensation (BHRC 2025). The RCA case forced courts to confront corporate liability for long-latency disease amid missing records and contested epidemiology. The legal struggle became bound up with martial law transitional justice debates over what it means to prove harm with decades-long causal chains.

Figure 5. Former RCA workers outside the Taipei District Court after the April 2015 ruling (H.-H. “Indy” Liu and Chu 2015). The banner reads 勝訴, “victory,” but the placards bear photographs of deceased former workers who did not survive the litigation.

The Transitional Justice Gap

Yet the transitional justice framework within which that legal struggle unfolded was not designed to accommodate cases like RCA’s. Taiwan’s post-democratisation reckoning with the White Terror has overwhelmingly centred on discrete acts of state violence. These include the execution and imprisonment of political dissidents, the persecution of Taiwanese cultural and intellectual elites, and the ethnic dimensions of mainlander-dominated authoritarian rule. The 2018 Transitional Justice Commission focused on rehabilitating political victims, declassifying political archives, and removing authoritarian symbols (Executive Yuan 2024). These were necessary interventions. But they defined authoritarian harm primarily through a political persecution lens that renders labour suppression largely invisible.

The RCA case exposes a category of martial law violence that does not fit this template. It was not a single act of state terror but a slow, cumulative, corporate-statist co-production. The state security apparatus enabled RCA to expose workers to toxic chemicals for decades. The specific underlying mechanisms include Garrison Command secret police quietly embedded in factories, corporatist unions that neutralised worker voice, and administrative mediation channels that shielded corporate liability from public scrutiny. But the women who absorbed chlorinated solvents on RCA’s production lines were not political dissidents. They were workers whose capacity to identify, contest, or even understand occupational hazards was systematically foreclosed by the same authoritarian infrastructure that imprisoned democracy activists. Their cancers and chronic illnesses represent an embodied archive of martial law governance that conventional transitional justice categories struggle to recognise. The framework’s categorical design reproduces the epistemic exclusion Spivak identifies (Spivak 1988). The vocabulary of recognition structurally cannot accommodate cumulative, corporate-mediated, and embodied harm.

Compounding this analytical challenge, many police and military records concerning factory-level surveillance, labour informant networks, and corporate-security coordination remain classified or were destroyed during Taiwan’s political transition (Su 2025). Despite lifting martial law in 1987, the KMT only allowed direct presidential elections in 1996, giving them ample time to destroy evidence of their more insidious and less visible abuses (總統府 2026). The absence of these records is not simply an evidentiary gap, but it is itself a product of the regime’s logic of concealment. Reconstructing how the secret police operated within export electronics factories thus requires archival triangulation. This paper thus combines surviving field notes seized and stamped by the Garrison Command, court documents produced decades later through litigation, oral histories from former workers and researchers, and corporate materials that inadvertently document workplace conditions. Such fragmentary reconstruction is methodologically imperfect, but it is the only available means to render visible a form of authoritarian harm that was designed to leave no trace.

Contemporary political dynamics further constrain accountability. The KMT, which administered the martial law apparatus documented in this paper, controls Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan following its 2024 electoral gains (Dotson and Levine 2024). That institutional continuity helps explain why Taiwan’s transitional justice process has not extended to labour dimensions of authoritarian governance and why archival disclosure concerning factory-level surveillance remains limited. Cases like RCA’s, where the state co-produced with multinational capital an enduring regime of toxic exposure and labour exploitation, demand an expanded conception of transitional justice.

For historians, the RCA litigation is not merely an epilogue. It reveals the hidden premises of earlier developmental narratives. When corporate statist structures disciplined workers through dormitory enclosure and constrained voice, they could neither identify nor contest toxic risks in real time. Toxicity was not a byproduct but a structured risk externalisation, which the labour regime’s compliance architecture helped conceal. Decades later, coalitions of workers, activists, and experts carried that struggle into courts, epidemiological studies, and public campaigns, redefining the terms of contestation. Even today, under the auspices of the Taoyuan County Original RCA Corporation Employees Caring Association, former RCA factory women are fighting to clean RCA’s contaminated Taoyuan factory site and turn it into a workers’ rights museum (Former RCA Worker 2026).

RCA’s role, then, cannot be reduced to either “technology transfer” or “exploitation.” It was both an institutional partner in upgrading narratives and an exemplar of how export electronics production could be organised under authoritarian governance through feminised labour, limited voice, and risk externalisation. These two dimensions operated simultaneously, not sequentially. Separating them, as existing historiography has done, reproduces analytically the very concealment that the martial law regime enforced politically.

Modern Continuities: The Labour Regime Beyond Martial Law

If the labour regime described above was only an effect of authoritarian rule, democratisation should have dismantled it. Martial law ended in 1987, independent unions became legal, and direct presidential elections followed in 1996. Yet the regime’s logic survived in two directions: within Taiwan, where Southeast Asian migrant labourers increasingly filled assembly, testing, and packaging (ATP) roles once occupied by young Taiwanese women, and across the broader semiconductor geography, where value-chain pressures reproduced comparable labour outcomes without direct martial law. RCA was not an isolated episode. It was an early template for offloading risk onto workers with the least political leverage.

From Factory Women to Migrant Workers

The workers who now fill many of these roles come primarily from the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia (勞動部 2026), though many more remain undocumented (Beltran 2025). Interviews from 2024 show the persistence of long shifts, dormitory dependency, broker control, and constrained mobility. A Filipino migrant worker at a TSMC supplier in Hsinchu described a twelve-hour evening-shift rotation, six days per week, employer-provided dormitory housing, and monthly pay of about NT$35,000 (Migrant Worker 2024a). Her broker controlled her bank account, deducted wages, confiscated her passport, and prevented her from switching jobs (僑務委員會 2026). Another migrant worker reported comparable hours and continued dormitory-fee deductions even after moving into external housing (Migrant Worker 2024b; Niece 2024). Brokerage endures because it transfers recruitment, documentation, housing, and dispute-management costs from employers onto workers (Transparentem 2025). Democratisation did not abolish coercive labour discipline. It marketised it.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how dormitory governance could intensify into explicit confinement. During Taiwan’s 2021 outbreak, the KMT-controlled Miaoli County restricted migrant workers to travel only between dormitories and factories while others moved freely (Templeman 2018; Davidson 2021). Migrant worker advocates described the result as workers being “locked up” in dormitories (Van Hung 2024). When workers objected, Miaoli’s KMT magistrate asked, “You tested positive, and even died because of the virus. Why talk about human rights now?” (Chien and Qin 2021). The party that constructed Taiwan’s corporatist labour and EPZ governance apparatus still administers the inspection, mediation, and dormitory oversight machinery through which migrant workers must seek recourse (臺北市政府全球資訊網 2025).

Gendered bodily discipline also persists. At Compal Electronics, a major Apple and Google contractor, thousands of Vietnamese workers protested extreme overwork, illegal pay deductions, and inhumane rules (吳睿騏 2020). One rule reportedly fined pregnant workers US$6,000-7,000, roughly a year’s wages (Van Hung 2024; Electronics Watch 2024). Where martial-law managers justified dormitory surveillance as protection of women’s “virtue,” contemporary subcontractors directly penalise reproduction itself. In both cases, the female body is governed as productive capacity whose pregnancy, illness, or fatigue becomes a violation of the labour regime’s terms.

Migrant workers also lack the democratic leverage that might force enforcement. Non-citizen workers cannot vote or engage in election-related work in Taiwan (Everington 2023). Although they formally possess labour rights, broker-mediated employment, employer-tied visas, language barriers, and deportation risk constrain collective action (A. R. Pan 2023; Tseng 2025). Official discourse can also naturalise this instrumentalisation. In 2024, Labour Minister Hsu Ming-chun justified plans to recruit workers from northeast India by noting their “similar skin color and diets,” Christianity, and aptitude for manufacturing (Madhok and Chang 2024). As Nakamura shows in her study of Fairchild’s recruitment of Navajo women, firms and states routinely recast whichever vulnerable population is cheapest and most captive as naturally suited to electronic assembly (Nakamura 2014).

The New Southbound Policy (NSP) extends this brokerage function into foreign policy. Under industry-academia programmes, Southeast Asian students have been recruited to Taiwanese universities and then channelled into electronics and semiconductor factory shifts, while brokers extract fees and schools depend on student-worker revenue (H. Liu 2025). The 2024 U.S. Trafficking in Persons Report found that traffickers exploited relaxed NSP visa rules to subject Southeast Asian students to forced labour (AIT 2024), and Taiwan’s National Human Rights Commission concluded that weak oversight enabled disguised labour importation (高華謙 2025). The KMT once recruited rural Taiwanese women through promises of wages and mobility. The NSP recruits foreign students through promises of education. In both cases, intermediaries convert aspiration into disciplined industrial labour.

Semiconductor interests often outweigh these workers’ claims. Taiwan’s chip industry has acquired “sacred mountain” national security status (Hsiao 2025), generated more than US$165 billion in 2024 revenue, and accounted for 20.7% of GDP and 60% of exports (USITA 2025; G. Chen 2025). Migrant workers report that local labour authorities prioritise operational continuity over complaints about hours, dormitories, and brokers (Niece 2024). The justification has shifted from anti-communist stability to national security. For workers, the effect is similar.

Value Chains as Labour Discipline

The same logic has travelled beyond Taiwan through semiconductor value chains. Buyer-driven production networks allow lead firms to govern suppliers through standards, pricing pressure, and the credible threat of relocation rather than ownership (Gereffi 2018). When a few dominant buyers command advanced chip orders, specialised suppliers face quasi-monopsony. Margin pressure then flows downward into wages, hours, safety investment, and recruitment practices. No actor needs to consciously reproduce RCA-era labour control. The value chain only needs to reward the same cost-minimising practices that authoritarian institutions once enforced directly.

South Korea illustrates this continuity within a democratised political economy. Samsung and SK Hynix dominate global memory production through subcontracting regimes that mirror Taiwan’s supplier hierarchies (Y. Lee and Cha 2026). Korean chaebol firms historically suppressed independent labour organising with state support, and Samsung did not permit an enterprise union until 2019 (Seol 2024), after activists had exposed hundreds of cancers, chronic illnesses, and deaths among semiconductor workers (SHARPS 2018). Even reforms such as Korea’s 52-hour workweek cap and new subcontractor-bargaining legislation have not undone the underlying incentives (Jang et al. 2025). Smaller suppliers employing undocumented workers from China and Southeast Asia use piecework frameworks that encourage excessive hours and circumvent legal limits (Chun 2025). Lead firms need not suppress unions directly when pricing power ensures that the subcontractors employing the most vulnerable workers cannot easily tolerate them.

The Philippines reveals a spatial and administrative version of the same mechanism. Philippine export zones, modelled partly on Taiwan’s Kaohsiung EPZ, concentrate electronics ATP production under the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (UNIDO Vietnam 2015; PEZA 2020). Despite constitutional labour protections, union density in electronics remains around six percent (PSA 2016). When workers at one Metro Manila ATP plant organised, the subcontractor closed the facility and relocated nearby with a non-union workforce (Philippine Supreme Court 1999). Electronics organisers also face police visits, red-tagging, and violence, including the murder of organiser Dandy Miguel near a Nexperia ATP plant in Laguna (CTUHR 2022; Nexperia Union 2025; Human Rights Watch 2024; Stephanie 2023). Contractualisation fragments solidarity further: seven in ten Philippine electronics workers are temporary agency hires despite years at the same plant (Oliquino 2016). A 2017 factory fire prompted passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Standards Act, but inspections remain rare and fines weak (Salamat 2017; EILER 2018; CTUHR/IOHSAD 2025).

These cases do not replicate Taiwan’s martial law regime. They show how its labour outcomes can be reproduced through different institutional routes. PEZA’s investment-first mandate, subcontractor flight after unionisation, Korean supplier piecework, and Taiwan’s broker-mediated migrant labour all serve a similar structural function: they reduce the capacity of workers at the bottom of the value chain to contest risk. The foundational architecture of semiconductor profitability, first consolidated in Taiwan under authoritarian conditions, remains durable because it has been embedded in markets, contracts, and production networks.

Counter-Archives and Transnational Solidarity

These shared patterns have also generated transnational counter-movements. Taiwan’s TAVOI, which helped organise the RCA litigation, built ties with South Korea’s Supporters for Health and Rights of People in the Semiconductor Industry (SHARPS) (Former RCA Worker 2024, 1; Wang 2025). SHARPS emerged after Hwang Yu-mi’s 2007 leukaemia death at a Samsung fabrication plant and campaigned for more than a decade over occupational cancers and fatalities (SHARPS 2025). In the Philippines, the Institute for Occupational Health and Safety Development (IOHSAD), the Metal Workers Alliance of the Philippines, and the GoodElectronics Network have documented chemical exposure and built worker-led safety committees (CTUHR/IOHSAD 2025).

GoodElectronics has become the main transnational platform linking these struggles. In 2025, it moved its global secretariat to a Philippine-based coalition, shifting the network’s centre of gravity toward the Global South (GoodElectronics 2025a). That year, GoodElectronics, IOHSAD, and the Asian Network for the Rights of Occupational and Environmental Victims convened a Manila session where organisers from Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines exchanged testimony on chemical poisoning and strategised around ILO Convention 170 ratification (GoodElectronics 2025b).

Artistic work has extended these counter-archives beyond labour circles. At the Manila session, organisers screened Eunhee Lee’s Colorless, Odorless (2024), which combines leaked clean-room footage, archives, and testimonies from Korean and Taiwanese semiconductor workers to make invisible hazards visible (GoodElectronics 2025b; E. Lee 2024). The film has since circulated through institutions in Barcelona, Taipei, Copenhagen, Kuala Lumpur, and Beijing.

Such coalitional and cultural work embodies TAVOI’s insistence that “our bodies are our only evidence” (GoodElectronics 2025b; Ricaurte 2022). These networks do more than protest. They build alternative archives, scientific literacies, and public narratives that challenge the industry’s image as clean, efficient, and progressive. RCA thus leaves a double legacy: it helped legitimate Taiwan’s semiconductor upgrading, but it also anchors a counter-history of industrial hazard and labour exploitation that continues across East and Southeast Asian supply chains.

Conclusion

This paper has argued that RCA and the KMT developmental state co-produced Taiwan’s electronics labour regime, and that this regime was not incidental to Taiwan’s semiconductor ascent but constitutive of it. The same institutional preconditions that enabled technology transfer also enabled labour exploitation. The canonical story of the 1976 RCA Project as a triumph of technocrats and engineers obscures the gendered, coerced, and chemically poisoned workforce upon which that project depended.

The implications extend beyond historiography. More than US$500 billion in semiconductor subsidies announced since 2020 rest on the premise that chip production serves the national interest (Ravi 2022). Yet national-interest framings repeatedly subordinate worker welfare to production targets. Public subsidy programmes still do not sufficiently condition funding on enforceable occupational safety standards or organising protections, and chemical exposure rules cover only a fraction of substances used in fabrication (Rodrigo 2024). When governments invoke “national security” to shield chip firms from scrutiny, they echo the KMT’s earlier use of anti-communist stability to suppress labour contestation (OECD 2025).

For Taiwan, this history also raises unresolved transitional justice questions. The official framework has focused primarily on political persecution, leaving state-sanctioned labour exploitation at the margins. Recognising the poisoned women on RCA’s lines as victims of authoritarian governance would not diminish political persecution cases. It would reveal how martial law operated not only through spectacular repression, but also through the ordinary reproduction of factory discipline that made export growth profitable.

Finally, this paper challenges how societies narrate technological achievement. Taiwan’s semiconductor achievement and its labour costs are not competing narratives. They are one integrated history. The engineers who built TSMC and the women who assembled RCA’s transistors inhabited the same political economy. Acknowledging the latter does not diminish the former. It shows what technological achievement required, and at whose expense.

That acknowledgement is urgent because the evidence is disappearing. Former RCA workers are now in their sixties and seventies; some died during litigation. Researchers’ seized notes remain largely unpublished, surveillance records remain classified or destroyed, and migrant worker organisers document contemporary reproduction without secure preservation. Counter-archives built by TAVOI, SHARPS, GoodElectronics, and allied organisers show that workers already know what dominant narratives obscure. The task is to ensure that their evidence is not, once again, seized, stamped, and filed away.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the former RCA workers, labour organisers, legal advocates, scholars, archivists, and mentors who made this research possible.

Funding

This research received support from the Yale Brady-Johnson Grand Strategy Program, the Yale Blue Center for Global Strategic Assessment, the Yale Council on East Asian Studies, the Yale Council on Southeast Asian Studies, the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, the Yale History Department, Grace Hopper College, the Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and the Obama Foundation.

CRediT author statement

Ethan Chiu: Conceptualisation, data curation, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, writing – original draft, and writing – review and editing.

Declaration of interest

The author reports no competing interests to declare.

Ethics and consent statement

This research involving human participants was reviewed by Yale University’s Institutional Review Board and determined exempt under IRB Protocol No. 2000037477. Interview participants were adults who voluntarily agreed to participate after receiving study information about purpose, risks, confidentiality protections, and the right to withdraw. Participants gave informed consent before interviews. Interview material is anonymised or described by role where identification could compromise privacy, confidentiality, or safety. No directly identifying interview material is published without consent.

Data availability statement

Most interview data supporting this article are not publicly available because disclosure could compromise participant privacy and confidentiality. Publicly available sources are cited in the references.

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Introduction

On January 1, 1959, dictator Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba, leaving Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement in power. This marked the end of years of guerrilla warfare and popular uprising against the violent oppression of the Batista regime. In a matter of days, Castro entered Havana and began to establish a provisional government. In the four years to come, Havana and the island at large would undergo a series of agricultural, educational, and urban reforms. Castro’s government was in search of a way to materialize the revolution in Cubans’ daily lives; it was in that moment that housing and the built environment acquired political significance. In the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, not many understood that “in a matter of months and in the context of the Cold War, the Soviet Union would displace the United States as Cuba’s main political ally and trading partner.”¹ And so, Cuba rapidly bore witness to the importation of Soviet urban planning principles like standardization and collective services, the transfer of institutional planning to the Ministry of Construction of Cuba (MICONS), and the adoption of Soviet housing infrastructure and neighborhood layouts.² Determining the effectiveness of early Soviet urban planning in Havana after the revolution requires the examination of Soviet development precedents from 1922 to the Khrushchev era alongside an exploration of Havana’s urban design inspirations before and after 1959. It is also essential to study the progression of Havana’s newly acquired structures as Soviet influence and financial aid increased as a means of arriving at a measure of success in a client-state context. While Soviet urban planning in post-1959 Havana offered a framework for socialist engineering, its selective adaptation to Cuban conditions produced an uneven and ultimately unstable built environment that revealed as much about the limits of Soviet transfer and economic constraint as it did about the island’s revolutionary ambition.

Early Soviet Urban Planning

From the perspective of Cubans observing these transformations, Soviet principles were inextricably linked to socialism. After a more careful analysis of the historiography of mass affordable housing, this connection becomes less evident. What came to be known as the Soviet concrete panel housing system in client states like Cuba was not necessarily uniquely “socialist”. In the United States, for instance, Levittowns were built as early as 1947. These constructions were a post-World War II remedy; when veterans returned to American soil, “adequate housing was almost non-existent, so the government turned to developer William Levitt, who created this country’s first large-scale suburban housing complex on New York’s Long Island, christening it ‘Levittown’.”³ Like the mikrorayony, Levittowns were composed of rapidly constructed and simply designed identical affordable living spaces. Similarly, Western Europe was faced with the need for reconstruction of towns virtually destroyed and rendered permanently uninhabitable. In 1950, the First Housing Act was passed in West Germany, which “established the concept of ‘social housing’ and laid out a program of construction of 300,000 dwelling units each year up to 1956.”⁴ The speed, standardization, and affordability we associate with Soviet mass housing were well in existence before Khrushchev. The distinction between these earlier versions of centralized urban planning in capitalist cities and their Soviet counterparts, therefore, lies in the state purpose and social programming attached to it. Soviet construction was meant to integrate collectivist services and identity, redefining communal living as well as family life.

Early Soviet existence was centered around the idea of striving to build a new world. The material reimagining of the country’s landscape was tied to the idealism of revolutionizing and altering everything else. Soviet citizens saw themselves as “participants in a historic process of transformation, their enthusiasm for what was called “the building of socialism.”⁵ Construction plans were not just for the purpose of their utility. Instead, the Soviet Union characterized building through its relationship with lived space: privacy, communal services, queues, childcare, domestic labor. These goals were rooted in events that preceded the existence of the Soviet Union. Richard Stites notes, “In the Russian Revolution, architects and town planners had visions of reshaping an entire nation, of aligning the structures and anti-structures with high-speed economic development plans, of providing “social condensers” for the nurturing of a new socialist race of people.”⁶ This process involved the consideration of distance, in both a physical sense (population density) and a communal one (privacy and time spent in the home).  

The success of this vision had a symbolic element, as the foundations for the Soviet model were being conceived in the 1930s. The “General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow” was intended to set a precedent, and “provide a model of the socialist capital for foreigners and Soviet citizens to marvel at.”⁷ And, indeed, the Soviet urban planning model came to be an example for aspiring socialist countries like Cuba.⁸ “By 1963, almost every aspect of Cuba— including its political system, social structure, foreign relations, trading partners, and cultural production— had been transformed profoundly,…[reflecting] a period of heroic idealism.”⁹

But these ideals were soon met with the reality of different conditions on the ground, including the need to accommodate intergenerational family living—customary in Cuba—and access to communal services like groceries and personal items. At the onset of adopting socialist planning strategies on the island, the state of urban development revealed the remnants of the American presence that had been dominant just a few years earlier.  

Havana, being the capital of Cuba, was naturally in the midst of a modernizing urban project before the Revolution. At the time, the goal was to develop in order to accumulate capital and increase profit from the tourism sector.¹⁰ Plan Piloto (Pilot Plan) was overseen by Town Planning Associates, a design firm in New York City. It detailed the renovation of space in a modernist context, such as recommending that “a web of streets and green spaces must tie together the distant parts of Havana’s center.”¹² This direct context of innovative planning (1955-1958) prevents us from simply attributing modernist intervention in Havana as a product of “Sovietization”. That being the case, the years of 1959-61 encompassed rapid deviations from previous plans to reflect socialist policies. Felipe J. Prestamo became the first director of the Department of Physical Planning, which was established in 1960 to oversee city planning processes.¹³ In a paper he wrote years after immigrating to the United States, Prestamo recounts that “it became evident that the main concern of the government was to modify the dominant role of the city of La Habana”, essentially decentralizing the country and redirecting resources away from the capital.¹⁴ Beyond departing from the pre-revolutionary, market-oriented planning, this shift laid the institutional groundwork through which Soviet models of spatial organization would later be selectively adopted or resisted within the Cuban context. 

Figure 1. Urban comparison map from Plan piloto de La Habana.¹¹

Tracing the development of key Soviet urban planning principles requires visiting the places in which they were first tested, before being formulated and exported during the mid-twentieth century. These visions of standardization, zoning, and community living were tested and tried under the New Economic Policy (NEP). Baku, Azerbaijan, for instance, was a formerly capitalist city whose urban landscape transformed from 1924-1927.¹⁵ In her book Spatial revolution: architecture and planning in the early Soviet Union, author and professor Christina E. Crawford argues: “Although the 1935 General Plan for Moscow has been cited as the working model for the Soviet city, Baku in the mid to late 1920s was its proving grounds… [they included] provision of housing, walkability, and collective services.”¹⁶ Crawford’s assessment positions Baku as not just a precursor to later Soviet plans, but an experimental testing ground in which planners began to confront the challenge of translating socialist ideology into spatial form. Their material aspirations advanced under real economic and social constraints.

Figure 2. Baku Plan, 1927.¹⁷ 

Under the guidance of Aleksandr Ivanitskii, a professor and engineer by training, the 1927 General Plan for Baku came to fruition. It advocated regionalism, housing and industry were recognized as inextricable, linkages across urban space and into the periphery were crucial, public institutions and services were evenly distributed, planting plan to ensure quality of life.¹⁸

These early Soviet experiments revealed both the ambitions and limits of socialist urbanism; during the postwar period, these principles were actually consolidated into a standardized and transferable model. In the Khrushchev era, much like other post-WWII countries, the USSR faced the need for reconstruction at an unprecedented pace. Nikita Khrushchev came to power in 1953, after Stalin’s death. Although his ascendancy to power came eight years after the end of the war, there remained a severe housing crisis. Under his leadership, the Soviet Union embarked on a process of modernization. “‘Khrushchev modern’ signified grand transformations in both the form and meaning of Soviet dwelling.”¹⁹ Even thirty years after Baku, the Soviet identity and its building blocks continued to be altered. “Standardized designs (tipovye proekty) dating from the early 1950s that kept buildings to a minimum of four to five floors so that elevators were not required, and stipulated that kitchens be small and ceilings low, also enabled construction workers to erect buildings more quickly and inexpensively—two key aims of housing construction.”²⁰ Khrushchev’s campaign to perfect industrialized buildings expanded the availability of rapid, cheap, and replicable housing.

In addition to these structural components, the Soviet envisioning of an urban model accounted for the planning of space and communal services. These strategies were overseen by Gosplan, the Soviet government agency responsible for central economic planning. L. M. Sabsovich, a prominent urbanist during the first five-year plan, was responsible for the most ambitious urbanist scheme. He envisioned “the coordination of all food producing operations in order to transform raw food products into complete meals, deliverable to the population in urban cafeterias, communal dining rooms, and the workplace.”²¹ This transformative political project also became a heavily social one. Sabsovich and other Urbanists wanted to free women of domestic labor—cooking, childcare, education—and therefore redefine longstanding gender norms. The pursuit of social equality as part of a collective welfare pushed previous restrictions on the private household and cultural life. The doctrine of the “social condenser” was meant to do away with “excessive privatization, hoarding, inwardness, egoism, and coziness” characteristic of the bourgeois domestic way of life.²² During Khrushchev’s reforms, the proposed “microdistrict… grew out of similar ideas in the 1920s and early 1930s for the socialization of everyday life in the designs for the dom-kommuna (house commune).²³ Although physical structures evolved to reflect technology and demand, the idea of shared social space was a core component of Soviet planning. 

A fundamental component of these plans was their search for the fulfillment of a utopian environment, an ambition that repeatedly collided with economic constraints and material shortages. As Sheila Fitzpatrick notes, “the utopian vision of the 1930s was of a human and natural world transformed through industrialization and modern technology.”²⁴ Unfortunately, the conditions necessary to realize this were largely absent. Bureaucratic inefficiencies, limited resources, and shifting state priorities led to the neglect of residential housing construction and manufacture of consumer goods. The industrialized future that Soviet citizens were promised was only partially attainable, a fact that did not stop the heirs of revolutionary utopianism from trying. Stites expresses their fervor, stating “those who took utopia down from the light blue skies of Russian fantasy into living experimentalism enriched the revolutionary process… they attempted to bring the theory alive in a physical setting.”²⁵ The drive to design socialist life encompassed the encountering of a persistent tension between conviction and material realities.

An integration of economics and politics emerged at the core of Soviet state planning beginning with the New Economic Policy (NEP), a series of measures that brought developments that were hard to reconcile with Bolshevik visions.²⁶ Under NEP, capitalist concepts of profit were introduced to the planned economy model of the Soviet Union, a necessary making of concessions to kickstart policy-making. These constraints persisted, eventually shaping the USSR’s Cold War economic strategy. Professor and historian Oscar Sanchez-Sibony found that Soviet global influence during this period depended not only on ideology but also on what the USSR could practically finance, supply, and sustain abroad; “exporting” the Soviet models was inseparable from economic capacity.²⁷ These limits were correct in the Cuban case, where the merging relationship between both countries was based on the USSR’s “economic limitations” and “political objectives”.²⁸ Planning functioned as a negotiated process based on contingency, in which ideological ambition was continually recalibrated against material capacity, geopolitical priorities, and economic constraint. What the Soviet Union could transfer to Cuba, therefore, was not a fully realized socialist blueprint, but a selective assemblage of planning practices shaped as much by necessity as by doctrine.

Havana after 1959

It is therefore important to understand the context in which the Cuban Revolution emerged and its ambitious promises of change through reform for the Cuban people. Nationalism on the island is rooted in a long history of colonial struggle. In 1902, when the country finally gained independence from Spain, it was met with another reality: a dependence on the United States and its market to sell its sugar.²⁹ Shortly after, the Platt Amendment was signed alongside the new constitution, leasing a portion of Cuban land known as Guantánamo Bay to the U.S. indefinitely, which has since become infamous for its role as a U.S. naval base, former CIA black site, and detention center.³⁰ Both symbolically and physically, the U.S.’s imperialism was evident, as it wielded the power to “intervene in Cuban affairs whenever order was threatened.”³¹It was based on the subsequent societal dynamics that developed over the course of six decades that the Castro-led revolution triumphed. In the search for affirming their national sovereignty against the United States, the support of the Soviet Union became crucial. The USSR provided material support as well as an alternative to capitalism.

One of the major methods of enacting this shift in political theory and international alliances was an extensive plan for national development, especially the transformation of the urban landscape. In 1961, mass organizations like the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) were established and tasked with overseeing the reparation of individual homes, thereby creating “‘increased participation among the people in all activities related to public matters.’”³² The first plans for urban reform combined the economic and social aspects of revolutionary Cuba, sometimes even exaggerating the role of centralized programs to actualize socialism into everyday urban life.³³ This first stage of development was put into effect after a consolidation of power by the Revolutionary Movement, culminating in the first socialist master plan for Havana (1963-64).³⁴ The plan, meant to decrease the population growth rate, included the diffusion of certain industries to other parts of Cuba. It also accounted for a need to increase green space and is credited with the idea of the Metropolitan Park (Parque Metropolitano).³⁵

During this time, Cuba had been sending engineers to the Soviet Union to adopt their infrastructure practices. Victor O’Reilly, for instance, was a Cuban engineer who was in Moscow in 1963 “taking a course on prefabrication”.³⁶ After the natural disaster of Hurricane Flora that year, “Khrushchev proposed to donate a factory to produce housing, with a production rate between 1400 and 1700 dwellings per year—which was the I-464 system.”³⁷ Issues quickly arose, however, as the design of the housing was intended to suit Russian conditions. And so, a selective implementation of the Soviet KPD large concrete panel housing system was set in motion with the help of a Cuban commission.³⁸ This was just one of many ways in which the Soviet Union and Fidel’s Cuba were becoming inextricably linked to one another. Cuban architects and engineers engaged in a process to modify panels to their own social contexts.

While some initiatives were born out of Cuban revolutionary priorities, others came as a result of direct Soviet instruction. Regardless, they reflected an emerging affinity with socialist spatial thinking that would only deepen in the years that followed. These efforts led to the much more socially ambitious Master Plan of 1971. Prepared by architects in the Institute of Physical Planning, the plan was centered around making improvements to the 1963-64 version, including “location of housing zones near production, teaching, and research centers.”³⁹ This reinforced the construction of apartment buildings through centers of work and the national urbanization project.

Figure 3. Map insert from The 1971 Master Plan.⁴⁰ 

The 1971 plan worked with a greater awareness of Havana’s problems and attempted to give special planning attention to areas that needed it, emphasizing “both shopping areas and services as well as workplaces and housing.”⁴¹ Havana’s planning logic was increasingly mirroring socialist aspirations of urban integration, where residence, labor, and everyday life would become linked. The division of districts into “cells and productive units,” an approach with origins in 1966, was derived from Stalinist plans for the USSR before World War II.⁴² Not only was this aimed at reorganizing the country’s capital city, but also at testing how socialist ideology could be embedded in lived space. 

The final stage of the transition from a market economy to a socialist model was evident with the passing of Cuba’s first Five-Year Plan in 1975. As noted by Prestamo, “this plan included the organization of local authorities, Poder Popular (Popular Power), modelled after the Soviet reforms of 1965.”⁴³ This move formalized a Soviet-style administrative logic in Cuba, embedding centralized planning into local governance and institutionalizing mass participation as a mechanism of socialist legitimacy. Simultaneously, the delegates of the Cuban congress approved a platform stating “that socialism in Cuba is irreversible” and that Cuba would “strengthen its ties with the Soviet Union and the Socialist world.”⁴⁴ These declarations crystallized both ideological alignment and material dependency, confirming that Cuba’s urban and economic future was being shaped through the frameworks and expectations of the Soviet bloc. However, the Cuban government also inherited the problems of the Soviet model, including an incompatibility between socioeconomic development plans and urban design programs.

Havana’s post-1959 trajectory reveals how anti-imperial sentiment and socialist internationalism converged to create a revolutionary built environment. In seeking an alternative to U.S. dependence, the Cuban leadership turned to the Soviet Union for support that ranged from credit and trade to prefabricated mass housing, neighborhood units organized around work and services, and comprehensive master planning. But these models never materialized as a simple blueprint. Cuban planners selectively adopted, adapted, and sometimes resisted Soviet techniques in order to accommodate local family structures, climate, and existing urban fabric. By the mid-1970s, an imported model had been forged, while the contradictions and limits that accompanied it had only begun to surface.

Soviet Transfer: Havana on the Ground

From the early 1960s onward, Havana’s landscape was reshaped in materially visible and socially transformative ways. Its residents witnessed the construction of completely new communities like Cojímar and Alamar in the city’s eastern outskirts. These physical changes were accompanied by social reforms, particularly in education and childhood development. Across the city, círculos infantiles (state-run early childhood centers) were set up to promote structured child development. The founding of the Lenin College Preparatory School in Havana (IPVCE) in 1972 bolstered a technocratic socialist elite; conceived as “a prestigious leadership-training boarding school… specialising in science and technology,” it trained many of the country’s professionals in the decades that followed.⁴⁵ Meanwhile, Tarará, a once gated town in east Havana, was repurposed at first into a children’s pioneer camp for primary school students, subsequently, in the aftermath of the 1986 Chornobyl disaster, into a medical complex for children impacted by the nuclear accident.⁴⁶ These reforms were symptoms of a Soviet partnership in Havana’s spaces and institutions. 

Beyond a political alignment, Soviet-Cuban relations took on a tangible dimension through the physical presence of Soviet power on Cuban soil. Almost immediately after the establishment of relations with the USSR, Cuba’s affinity for the Soviet Union took on a concrete strategic dimension, as it housed a number of Soviet military bases and intelligence installations. Among the most significant was the Lourdes SIGINT facility, an “electronic intelligence listening post at Lourdes on the outskirts of Havana” that was fully operational by the late 1960s.⁴⁷ This relationship was further cemented by visits to Havana from senior Soviet officials. In February 1960, Soviet Deputy Prime Minister Anastas Mikoyan visited Cuba, an event that “marked the first official state visit by a high-ranking Soviet representative to Cuba.”⁴⁸ His presence formalized the alliance and also underscored how rapidly Soviet influence became embedded in Cuba’s physical landscape.

In the meantime, Cubans continued to endure housing crises and an alarming gap between the ambitious plans set forth by the revolutionary government and their unlikely realization. As mentioned, the efforts to modernize living conditions inspired by Soviet-style planning led to the construction of multi-family, multi-storey concrete housing meant to embody progress. Yet these developments frequently disrupted existing social and environmental relationships in Cubans’ livelihoods. As architect from the José Antonio Echeverría Technological University (CUJAE) Dania González Couret notes, “the rural population were accommodated in multi-family, multi-storey concrete buildings, losing their connection with the land, animals and nature.”⁴⁹ Additionally, the new settlements failed to deliver the necessary social services promised by modernization. Residents “lacked the benefits of urban services and facilities, so experienced the negative aspects of both urban and rural life,” revealing a lived contradiction between ideological aspiration and material reality.⁵⁰ The projects that emerged after socialist influence served to further compound housing inequality.

Along with these spatial and military transformations, Havana’s public service infrastructure was also reshaped under socialist planning. The revolutionary government, often drawing upon Soviet models of centralized provisioning, sought to expand and rationalize access to electricity, potable water, sanitation, and other essential urban services as tangible markers of socialist progress. In reality, while selected neighborhoods benefitted from infrastructural improvements, many others faced persistent shortages, unreliable water supply, intermittent electricity, and deteriorating hygiene conditions. Barrios insalubres (shantytowns) were characterized by having “flood plains and under high-voltage power lines.”⁵¹ These inconsistencies revealed the inherent fragility of state-led modernization and the strain placed upon Havana’s networks by rapid expansion and limited resources. In the years to come, albergues (transitional homeless shelters on the streets) would be the only refuge for those whose dwellings had serious structural issues, reinforcing patterns of scarcity that would continue to fashion Havana’s urban experience well beyond the Cold War period.

Today, Havana stands as a reflection of the once-aspirational—and soon thereafter abandoned—hopes of Cuban socialism. Citizens continue to live in the Soviet apartments of the 1960s, except now they are stripped of their original paint. The once-modified facade panels from Soviet-inspired panel factories, carrying “Cuban design adaptations,” are no longer noticeable.⁵² Several buildings across the city have either been repurposed or abandoned. Recreational community spaces, such as parks, are marked by rusted benches and peeling playground equipment. Public institutions, too, struggle to function under their current conditions. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Periodo Especial (Special Period; period of economic crisis in Cuba beginning in 1991), they operate within reduced spaces. Even the Lenin Vocational Pre-University Institute of Exact Sciences is a symbol of structural decay; only two of the six institutional buildings remain functional.

The remnants of these urban plans are reflective of the disillusionment at large among the Cubans who envisioned the reconstruction of the very fabric of their society through the fulfillment of socialism. Their path to building a new world akin to that of Soviet citizens has been riddled with many practical setbacks and economic underpinnings. The undertaking of a national planning project, informed by Soviet spatial ideals, eventually clashed with Cuba’s reality. In most of these buildings, the exterior peeling facades coincide with intermittent water and power supply; these inconveniences have become an ordinary part of a Cuban’s everyday experience. For many Habaneros (the people of Havana), a tension has emerged between their nostalgia for the early period after revolutionary triumph and the endless frustrations in the years to follow. 

Conclusion

When analyzing the phenomenon of Soviet influence in a decolonial world, Mervyn Bain, a senior lecturer in International Relations at the University of Aberdeen, observes: 

Many countries in the developing world that had newly gained their independence were attracted to Moscow because the Soviet development model from the 1930s had brought about rapid modernization and industrialization; and in the Western Hemisphere, Russia lacked a colonial past in the traditional sense, unlike other European powers like France, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom, among others.⁵³ 

Cuba’s post-1959 trajectory reveals precisely the kind of ambivalent relationship Bain describes. Havana, a country deeply entrenched in its colonial past, did not simply imitate Soviet planning out of ideological devotion. Instead, the revolutionary state, in need of a development model capable of materializing social change at a pace that matched its political ambition, turned to the Soviet Union. This new partner distinguished itself from former colonial rulers that had long taken advantage of populations in the Caribbean and Latin America. The Soviet Union was positioned as a power that actually understood the Cuban struggle and followed through on its solidarity with newly decolonizing nations. Throughout the course of this relationship, urban planning principles transferred from the USSR to Cuba were much more than technical; they became a way to signal sovereignty and effectively distance Cuba from its North American past.

The built environment was the physical embodiment of the terrain on which post-revolutionary aspiration and geopolitical alignment converged. Soviet precedents with roots in the New Economic Policy of the 1920s brought with them a distinctive understanding of space as something that could be engineered to reshape social life. Castro and his revolutionary leadership were also intent on creating a new kind of citizen and society; on this shared goal did the ideas of the Soviets strongly resonate. In Cuba, the prospect of housing blocks represented environments in which collective identity could be fostered, and socialist belonging could be ultimately lived. The establishment of schools, early childhood centers, new neighborhoods on Havana’s outskirts, and vast administrative projects reinforced a sense that the future could be planned and inhabited in advance. Nonetheless, the very qualities that made Soviet urban planning appear attractive—its scale, speed, and alleged efficiency—also contributed to the struggle that later emerged when attempting to execute Soviet practices. Cuba’s adoption of Soviet-inspired planning had to work with existing modernization plans and was constrained by the island’s persistent economic fragility. The process of “transfer” was never linear. To account for the actual differences in the Cuban society and economy, the assumption of Soviet principles was adaptive and negotiated: Cuban engineers modified imported prefabrications to suit local conditions; state planners mediated between imported models and the city’s existing urban fabric; and residents continuously molded the spaces they inhabited through their everyday practices.

The failures of Soviet-style planning in Havana were rooted in broader structural conditions: the economic strains of the Cold War, Cuba’s dependency on Soviet aid, the fragility of central planning under scarcity, and the mismatch between abstract urban theory and lived experience. The Soviet Union promised industrial capacity and ideological solidarity without being capable of fully providing the sustained economic support required to maintain the massive infrastructural plans it helped set in motion. After the end of the Cold War and the ensuing collapse of Soviet backing, Havana’s project was left without the means to materially sustain itself. The city’s Soviet-era neighborhoods, decaying institutional buildings, and compromised infrastructure remain ingrained as part of the island’s physical landscape as active, lived environments. These structures bear witness to a moment when architecture and planning were expected to transform society, and when socialist alignment appeared to offer a path to modernization that deviated from capitalism and empire. But the reality of Havana’s post-1959 built environment stands as both testimony and warning, and planned utopias like it leave material legacies that outlive their first political projects as well as continue to shape the social conditions of the people who must live within them.

References

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Havana, Photo by Pedro Szekely | Image sourced from Flickr | CC License, no changes made

¹ Luis Martínez-Fernández, Revolutionary Cuba: A History (University Press of Florida, 2014), 46.

² Roberto Segre, “Medio siglo de arquitectura cubana (1953-2003): Variaciones sobre el tema del Comunismo,” Revista de historia y teoría de la arquitectura, 7-28.

³ John Petrakis, “Wonderland’ Surveys Levittown, the Prototypical Postwar Suburb: North Sports Final, CN Edition,” Chicago Tribune (1963), October 4, 1998.

⁴ Robert G. Wertheimer, “The Miracle of German Housing in the Postwar Period,” Land Economics 34, no. 4 (1958): 340.

⁵ Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 68.

⁶ Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 190. 

⁷ Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 69. 

⁸ Pedro Ignacio Alonso, “How a Soviet Concrete Panel Housing System Came to Cuba and Chile,” Journeys and Translations, no. 14 (2016). 

⁹ Luis Martínez-Fernández, Revolutionary Cuba, 46.

¹⁰ Paul Lester Wiener, José Luis Sert, and Paul Schultz, Plan piloto de La Habana: directivas generales, diseños preliminares, soluciones tipo (Havana: Town Planning Associates, 1959), 32.

¹¹ Paul Lester Wiener, José Luis Sert, and Paul Schultz, Plan piloto de La Habana, 34. 

¹² Paul Lester Wiener, José Luis Sert, and Paul Schultz, “Plan for Havana, Cuba,” Ekistics 8, no. 45 (1959): 9–15.

¹³ Felipe J. Prestamo, “City Planning in a Revolution: Cuba, 1959-61,” Planning Perspectives 9, (1993): 191.

¹⁴ Felipe J. Prestamo, “City Planning in a Revolution,” 192. 

¹⁵ Christina A. Crawford, Spatial revolution: architecture and planning in the early Soviet Union. (New York: Cornell University Press, 2022), 17-18. 

¹⁶ Christina A. Crawford, Spatial Revolution, 83.

¹⁷ Christina A. Crawford, Spatial revolution, 102.

¹⁸ Christina A. Crawford, Spatial revolution, 117.

¹⁹ Christine Varga-Harris, Stories of house and home: Soviet apartment life during the Khrushchev years, (London: Cornell University Press, 2015), 28.

²⁰ Christine Varga-Harris, Stories of house and home, 31. 

²¹ Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 199.

²² Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 201.

²³ Steven Harris, Communism on tomorrow street: mass housing and everyday life after Stalin, (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2013), 193. 

²⁴ Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 67. 

²⁵ Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, 10.

²⁶ Alan Ball, “Building a new state and society: NEP, 1921–1928,” in The Cambridge History of Russia, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 171.

²⁷ Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, Red globalization: the political economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to Khrushchev, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 65-80. 

²⁸ Radoslav Yordanov, “The Long Misunderstanding: Cuba’s Economic Ties with the Soviet Bloc,” Journal of Cold War Studies 25, no. 4 (2023): 24. 

²⁹ Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban revolution: origins, course, and legacy, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3. 

³⁰ Ada Ferrer and ProQuest, Cuba: An American History, (New York: Scribner, 2021), chapter 14.

³¹ Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution, 4. 

³² William Thomas Kelly, “Revolución Es Reconstruir: Housing, Everyday Life, and Revolution in Cuba, 1959-1988,” (Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey, School of Graduate Studies, 2021), 67.

³³ Joseph L. Scarpaci, Roberto Segre, and Mario Coyula, Havana: Two Faces of the Antillean Metropolis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 131. 

³⁴ Joseph L. Scarpaci, Roberto Segre, and Mario Coyula, Havana, 146. 

³⁵ Joseph L. Scarpaci, Roberto Segre, and Mario Coyula, Havana, 147.

³⁶ Pedro Ignacio Alonso, “How a Soviet Concrete Panel Housing System Came to Cuba and Chile,” para. 2.

³⁷ Pedro Ignacio Alonso, “How a Soviet Concrete Panel Housing System Came to Cuba and Chile,” para. 3.

³⁸ Pedro Ignacio Alonso, “How a Soviet Concrete Panel Housing System Came to Cuba and Chile,” para. 4.

³⁹ Joseph L. Scarpaci, Roberto Segre, and Mario Coyula, Havana, 151.

⁴⁰ Joseph L. Scarpaci, Roberto Segre, and Mario Coyula, Havana, 150.

⁴¹ Joseph L. Scarpaci, Roberto Segre, and Mario Coyula, Havana, 151. 

⁴² Felipe J. Prestamo, “City Planning in a Revolution,” 204.

⁴³ Felipe J. Prestamo, “City Planning in a Revolution,” 207.

⁴⁴ “Cuban Communist Party Votes Guidelines of First 5-Year Plan,” New York Times, December 22, 1975, 14.

⁴⁵ “La Lenin Transnational: Schooling and the Reproduction of Elites in Socialist Cuba,” COMPAS, 2014.

⁴⁶ Alin Ulloa, civil engineer and graduate of the Lenin School and CUJAE, interview by the author, Miami, Florida, December 15, 2025. 

⁴⁷ Mervyn J. Bain, “Havana and Moscow, 1959–2009: The Enduring Relationship?” Cuban Studies 41, no. 1 (2010): 133.

⁴⁸ Radoslav Yordanov, “The Long Misunderstanding,” 28.

⁴⁹ Dania González Couret, “Sustainable urban development. Cuban challenges,” International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development 14, no. 1 (2022): 410. 

⁵⁰ Dania González Couret, “Sustainable Urban Development,” 410.

⁵¹ Mario Coyula and Jill Hamberg, “Havana, Cuba,” The Challenge of Slums: Case Studies for the Global Report on Human Settlements, 2003: 11.

⁵² Hugo Palmarola and Pedro Ignacio Alonso, “Tropical assemblage: The soviet large panel in Cuba,” Beyond imported magic: Essays on science, technology, and society in Latin America (2014): 166.

⁵³ Mervyn J. Bain, “Havana and Moscow, 1959–2009: The Enduring Relationship?” Cuban Studies 41, no. 1 (2010): 128.

On December 5, 2025, in a Washington ballroom draped in the flags of nations, FIFA President Gianni Infantino stepped to the podium and handed the President of the United States- Donald Trump a golden trophy the size of the World Cup itself, as requested by the White House. “This is what we want from a leader,” Infantino told the room, bestowing upon Trump the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize, an award invented weeks earlier after Trump was passed over for the Nobel Peace Prize, and which the White House had reportedly demanded be literally as large as the real thing. No nomination process, no independent committee, no transparency. FIFA’s Human Rights Advisory Board was not consulted. FIFA’s own governing council had not been informed. The world’s most powerful sports body had, in a single ceremony, collapsed the distance between a self-professed champion of global unity and an administration that, within months, would bar the fans of four qualifying World Cup nations from entering the host country. 

This is a prime example of democratic sportswashing, a phenomenon for which international law has even fewer answers than it has for the authoritarian kind. 

The Asymmetry of Accountability 

The concept of sportswashing entered the global lexicon through the Gulf: Saudi Arabia’s purchase of Newcastle United, the LIV Golf merge, and Formula 1 in Jeddah and Bahrain. The logic was straightforward:– authoritarian states exploiting sport’s apolitical aura to launder reputations-stained executions, torture and the occasional assassination. The critique is coherent: authoritarian states exploit the apolitical prestige of sport to launder their image before a global audience that would rather watch a race than read a human rights report. The legal problem is equally coherent: because sports federations like FIFA are private bodies registered in Switzerland, they sit outside the reach of binding international human rights law and can do as they please. The 2026 World Cup in the United States asks a harder question: what happens when the “sportswasher” is a democracy? 

The discomfort is structural. The international human rights accountability framework-such as the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), the Universal Declaration, the ICCPR, the Convention Against Torture was architected to constrain states and, increasingly, corporations from abusing the vulnerable. It was not designed to reckon with a scenario where a rights-violating host government is simultaneously a P5 Security Council member, the world’s largest economy, and the nominal guardian of the liberal international order. When Bahrain hosts an F1 race, human rights organizations can pressure the FIA, the FOM, and their European corporate sponsors under nascent mandatory human rights due diligence (HRDD) frameworks. When the United States hosts the World Cup, the pressure has nowhere to go because the United States writes, funds, and, when convenient, defunds those very frameworks. 

The World Cup Brought to You by the Travel Ban 

The facts are not in dispute. The US State Department has imposed full or partial travel bans on 39 countries, suspending visa issuance entirely for 19 of them. Four of those countries namely Iran, Haiti, Ivory Coast, and Senegal qualified for the 2026 World Cup on merit. Fans from Iran and Haiti are categorically barred from entering the United States, even with valid match tickets. For five African nations whose teams qualified, Algeria, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Tunisia, the administration imposed a $15,000 visa bond requirement, reversed only in May 2026, weeks before the June 11 kickoff, and only for those who could produce a match ticket. Jordanian fans, though not under a blanket ban, found their visa appointments cancelled after the US Embassy in Amman shuttered. 

FIFA’s response has been consistently breathtaking in its inadequacy: “Such things are outside its remit.” This formulation is worth examining. FIFA, which generated over $11 billion in revenue from the 2026 World Cup cycle, which required host countries to submit human rights strategies as part of the bidding process for the very first time and embedded UNGP compliance obligations into its host city contracts, now claims that the exclusion of qualifying fans based on their nationality falls beyond its institutional mandate. One hundred and twenty civil society organizations, led by the ACLU, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the NAACP, and Reporters Without Borders have called this precisely what it is: FIFA “paying lip service to human rights while cozying up with the Trump administration.” 

When the Guardian Becomes the Problem 

There is a particular irony in FIFA’s predicament that its leaders appear constitutionally unable to acknowledge. The 2026 World Cup is the first FIFA tournament in which human rights criteria were woven into the bidding architecture, a reform championed, in part, as a response to the catastrophe of Qatar 2022 and the deaths of migrant workers in stadium construction. FIFA’s FWC26 Human Rights Framework explicitly protects migrant workers and vulnerable populations regardless of immigration status. The framework commits FIFA to “constructively engaging with relevant authorities” when human rights commitments are at risk. Instead, Infantino attended Trump’s inauguration, shared Instagram posts proclaiming that Trump “def deserves” the Nobel Peace Prize and told an American business forum that the world “should support” what the Trump administration was doing. 

This is not mere personal eccentricity. It is institutionally significant. FairSquare, a human rights organization, filed a formal complaint with FIFA’s ethics committee identifying four distinct violations of FIFA’s own political neutrality obligations. The complaint found no traction. Meanwhile, FIFA cancelled anti-discrimination messaging campaigns ahead of the tournament, an act that combined with the Peace Prize affair led Amnesty International to characterize the organization as “normalizing an increasingly authoritarian US government.” An internal FIFA source told The Guardian in January 2026 that senior officials felt “deep embarrassment” but no one would act because Infantino controlled the institutional machinery. 

The structural parallel here is instructive: just as Saudi Arabia’s sportswashing operates through the FIA’s financial dependence on Gulf hosting fees, American democratic sportswashing operates through FIFA’s financial dependence on US hosting revenue and its president’s political alignment with the sitting administration. The mechanism is the same; a private international sports federation captured by its most powerful host, but the democratic packaging makes accountability harder to demand and easier to dismiss. 

Iran Plays in Los Angeles; Its Fans Watch in Tehran 

There is an image that captures this World Cup’s central contradiction more sharply than any policy document. On March 20, 2026, Iran’s national team secured a place in the tournament, becoming the second team to qualify for the 2026 World Cup. As the players celebrated on the pitch, the fans who had watched them from Tehran knew they would not be able to follow. Iran’s first match, against New Zealand, was scheduled for June 15 in Los Angeles, home to the largest Iranian diaspora outside Iran. As of May 21, 2026, the Iranian squad was photographed outside the US Embassy in Ankara, applying for visas in Turkey because the US Embassy in Tehran no longer operates. Players and coaches are technically exempt from the travel ban, but even this exemption rested on the fragile goodwill of an administration that had authorized military strikes on Iran in February 2026. 

The fans, of course, needed no appointment. They simply needed to not be Iranian. Fans from Iran and Haiti are categorically barred from attending any match on US soil, regardless of their possession of valid tickets. FIFA PASS, the priority visa appointment system FIFA designed in coordination with the White House, is functionally useless for citizens of countries that have been refused visa issuance entirely. The $15,000 bond waiver, hailed by FIFA as evidence of “continued cooperation with the White House,” was announced three weeks before the tournament and applied only to fans who had already bought tickets, they could not previously guarantee entry to use. As the ACLU’s Jamil Dakwar put it: “FIFA has unique leverage right now to pressure the U.S. government to respect the fundamental human rights of every person visiting and attending the games. FIFA has yet to offer meaningful assurances.” 

The Accountability Gap and Its Democratic Cover 

The legal vacuum here is identical to the one that shields F1 in Bahrain, and its existence in a democratic context is both more damning and harder to remedy. The UNGPs impose a corporate responsibility to respect human rights on FIFA as a non-state actor. As a non-binding instrument, the UNGPs generate no enforceable obligation before any court. The ICCPR’s non-discrimination provisions in Articles 2 and 26 bind state parties, not sports federations. FIFA, registered in Switzerland, is subject to Swiss private law and the jurisdiction of the Court of Arbitration for Sport, neither of which has developed meaningful doctrine on the exclusion of fans by nationality.federations. FIFA, registered in Switzerland, is subject to Swiss private law and the jurisdiction of the Court of Arbitration for Sport, neither of which has developed meaningful doctrine on the exclusion of fans by nationality. 

What distinguishes the democratic sportswashing case is this: in authoritarian contexts, the state and the rights-violating actor are the same entity. The demand that the FIA or FIFA refuse to hold events in Saudi Arabia or Bahrain is at least conceptually coherent as it asks a private body to exercise leverage against a foreign government. In the 2026 World Cup context, the demand that FIFA exercise leverage against the United States requires a private Swiss association to confront the most powerful government on earth, with which it has just co-produced a peace prize ceremony on live television. There is no body of international law, no enforcement mechanism, and no institutional appetite for it. 

For communities already living with the consequences, this is not a theoretical gap. Latino communities in all eleven US host cities Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Atlanta, Seattle, Dallas, San Francisco, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Houston, and Boston have reported that fear of ICE operations is suppressing their participation in the event. In a country where 11 million undocumented people reside, many of them forming the backbone of the hospitality, construction, and service sectors that the World Cup infrastructure depends on, the human rights question is not only about foreign fans. It is about the people who will build the venues, clean the stadiums, and serve the food and who have no recourse under the FWC26 Human Rights Framework if detained. 

Conclusion: The Flag, the Trophy, and the Question 

In July 2026, the final will be played in New Jersey. Billions will watch. The production values will be extraordinary. The football, as one expects, will be thrilling. Anad the lesson the 2026 World Cup will have taught international human rights law is an uncomfortable one: that the architecture of accountability which took the post-war world eighty years to build has a very large blind spot, and the blind spot is shaped exactly like a democratic superpower. Authoritarian sportswashing is a cynical exploitation of law’s gaps. Democratic sportswashing is something slightly worse, it is those gaps being enforced by the actor that wrote them. 

FIFA’s first-ever human rights bidding requirements, the FWC26 Framework, the UNGP commitments in the host city contracts were not meant to be empty promises. They were genuine reforms, won through years of pressure by people who believed institutions could be made better. They were also, faced with a travel ban, a $15,000 bond, and a peace prize ceremony, entirely unequal to the task. The game has always promised that on the pitch, the only thing that matters is what you can do with a ball. Off it, in 2026, what matters is the colour of your passport. FIFA got a trophy for that. The fans of Iran and Haiti got a livestream.  It is, in the end, a very American kind of welcome: boundless in its rhetoric, precise in its exceptions. 

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: “England-Ghana World Cup 2026 Boston 04,” Image Sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made

Rethinking the matter of autonomous vessels in International Maritime Law

In the spring of 2022, a vessel slipped quietly out of a Norwegian port carrying a cargo of mineral fertilizer. No captain stood at the helm. No crew walked the decks. The Yara Birkeland, the world’s first fully electric, zero emissions, autonomous container ship, had entered into operation. Developed by Yara International and Kongsberg Maritime, the vessel was designed to eventually operate entirely without crew, replacing 40,000 annual diesel truck journeys.

This ship is not a singular instance of such inquisitiveness. Alongside it, many research projects have emerged, such as the MUNIN (Maritime Unmanned Navigation Through Intelligence in Networks), DNV GL’s Revolt, and Nippon Yusen Kaisha’s autonomous vessels trials, which test the technical feasibility of autonomous ships. They signal a shift towards how goods and people are going to move across the world and across oceans. The question is no longer whether autonomous ships can sail internationally, it is whether international law is prepared for them when they do.

The current legal landscape

International Maritime Law is one of the oldest and most developed bodies of Public International Law. It has several instruments which make up the current architecture of governance, these include: United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) Convention, the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs), the Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (STCW) Convention, and the Maritime Labour Convention (MLC).

Despite the development in this field, there is a stark challenge that maritime law faces with autonomous vessels. Every one of these instruments was built on a single assumption: that a human being would always be on board and would bear ultimate responsibility for the vessel.

The Mass Code: A roadmap not a rulebook yet

Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (“MASS”) are vessels that operate independent of human action to varying degrees. The International Maritime Organization (IMO), has a taxonomy of degrees of autonomy for MASS vessels. This framework is essential to establish the ambit of the existing regulatory framework and includes 4 degrees of automation, with degree 1 having the most human involvement and degree 4 being fully autonomous.

An IMO scoping exercise, concluded in May 2021, aimed at mapping the adequacy of existing conventions, the need for amendments, and the conventions/provisions, which had gaps, in dealing with autonomous vessels. The diagnosis of this exercise was sobering. Most major conventions need significant amendments to accommodate these developments.

Subsequently, a joint working group developed a goal-aligned MASS code. At the 109th session of the Maritime Safety Committee (MSC 109), the IMO agreed to a revised roadmap which involved a non-mandatory MASS code to be finalized and adopted by May 2026. This would be followed by an experience building phase till 2028, leading to a finalized mandatory code to be adopted by 1^st July 2030 that will enter into force on January 1st, 2032.

This roadmap is significant, but pertinent in understanding what the MASS code will and will not do. The code will be goal-based instead of prescriptive. It will provide a framework “against which a vessel using autonomous technologies can be assessed and certified for commercial operations within IMO’s structure,” but will not mandate specific technical methods. The responsibility for developing a compliance stratagem falls largely on industry, flag states, and classification societies.

It is pertinent to note that autonomous shipping is currently not fully regulated by the International Association of Classification Societies (IACS) or the IMO. This means that individual flag states must decide how to regulate MASS within their own jurisdictions, creating a fragmented, uneven global picture.

Where the law falls overboard

The scoping exercise identified gaps across virtually every major international maritime instrument; they cluster into five critical areas, each having legal challenges. Liability and accountability are the largest challenges. Thus the question remains: Who is responsible when an autonomous vessel causes a collision; the owner, the software developer, the remote operator, or the algorithm itself? Collision regulations (COLREGS compliance) require human judgement. Thus, we extend our question further, asking if artificial intelligence will be able to exercise the ‘ordinary practice of seamen?’

The status of seafarers is a further question as well. SOLAS, STCW and MLC all presuppose crew on board. Remote operators have no clear legal status under existing conventions. UNCLOS requires a genuine link between a vessel and its flag state, developing this concept around the presence of human nationals.

Fully networked autonomous vessels face new threat vectors. A possible hijacked navigation system could become a weapon scaled at the volume of a ship with no crew to intervene. Furthermore, search and rescue and salvaging are heavily impacted by the duty to render assistance at sea, as enshrined in UNCLOS Article 98 and SOLAS Reg. V/33. How does an unmanned ship fulfil this duty of helping other people in peril at sea?

The liability labyrinth

There is a particularly troubling dimension: the “black box” nature of AI decision-making. If a neural-network navigates a vessel into a collision, recovering the sequence of decisions that led to the incident and attributing fault becomes technically impossible. Evidence-gathering in maritime litigation already depends on voyage data recorders (VDRs); the opacity of the machine learning and decision making process significantly compounds the difficulty in tackling this challenge enormously.

Traditional maritime law assigns ultimate responsibility to the master, who is the human being commanding the vessel. When something goes wrong at sea, the legal chain involves the master, the shipowner, and the insurer. Autonomous vessels introduce multiple new parties into play: manufacturers, AI software developers, remote operators, and algorithmic decision-making systems that may act in ways their creators did not anticipate them to.

In the United States, this problem has been recognized to have taken a legal form by the identification of the “Pennsylvania Rule.” The Pennsylvania rule is a federal maritime doctrine under which a party in a collision, who has violated a regulation intended to prevent that type of collision, is presumed liable. The rule presents unique challenges for cases involving autonomous ships because causation for these collisions or other incidents may be difficult to attribute. Principles like the Pennsylvania Rule, are now increasingly pushed to be incorporated in maritime liability allocation as seen in recent allisions and collisions cases. 

The COLREGs problem

The 1972 Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs) is the “road code” of the ocean. Every collision case before an admiralty court is ultimately measured against it. Rule 2(a) holds that no vessel, owner, master, or crew can be absolved from the consequences of neglecting the rules. Rule 5 mandates a “proper look-out by sight and hearing.” Rule 8 requires that any action taken to avoid collision be “large enough to be readily apparent to another vessel observing visually.”

These rules presuppose human perception, judgment, and moral responsibility. The COLREGs contain subjective requirements and deviations from the written rules may be required by “the ordinary practice of seamen, or by the special circumstances of the case.” This rule sets a standard for professional wisdom and contextual reasoning. We can conclude that the 1972 COLREGs require amending, for the rules that are presently laid forth are not compatible with the operation of fully autonomous vessels. 

Remote operators in the legal web

Whether the ship is operated from the shores or operates independently without any crew, as is the case for Degree 3 and Degree 4 MASS ships, the question of the legal position of the “master” is spectral. SOLAS defines a master as a person in command of a ship. STCW requires specific training, certification, and watchkeeping standards for officers on board. The MLC defines a seafarer as “any person who is employed or engaged or works in any capacity on board a ship.” None of these instruments contemplate someone sitting in an office in Oslo, overseeing the movement of a container ship passing through the Malacca Strait.

There are suggestions that remote operators should be treated as masters, “by perpetuating the notion of the master, retaining their status as the final entity of responsibility for the ship,” but these are merely suggestions and are not the law just yet. IMO’s own working groups have begun differentiating between “MASS crew/seafarers” and “remote operators,” but no clear legal regime for remote operator qualifications, duties, or liabilities currently exists under international law.

Cybersecurity: another crew member

“Ships are now interconnected with many devices and the shore. The communication and devices used have cyber vulnerabilities.” For a conventionally crewed vessel that experiences  a cyberattack, a crew can respond, improvise, and override the attack. For a degree 4 autonomous vessel with no crew on board, the same attack could result in total loss of control with no human recourse available.

The IMO’s MSC resolution 428 on Maritime Cyber Risk Management in Safety Management Systems provides a starting point to addressing cybersecurity concerns, but it is noted that the IACS has identified “the human element and careless habit of employees” as the weakest link in cyber security, This forms a factor that shifts dramatically in character when there is no human on board at all. 

Frameworks for a hybrid future

The question of how to close these legal gaps is not merely technical. It sits at the intersection of commercial interests, labour rights, environmental imperatives, and geopolitical competition. Any framework that hopes to succeed must “ensure that the uniform and consistent enforcement of UNCLOS provisions” is maintained while making space for technology that did not exist when these provisions were written.

The move by the IMO to adopt a goal-based approach for the development of the MASS Code, is in part an experience learnt from aviation regulations. The Chicago Convention on international civil aviation, and the standards issued by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), have successfully regulated unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) using a similar framework. Maritime lawyers and academics have pointed to the aviation precedent as an instructive, yet  imperfect, model.

A few goal-based suggestions

There are a few mechanisms that can be adopted and would aim at bridging the gap that exists at the moment between current regulations and prospective regulations that would comprehensively accommodate autonomous vessels.

First, COLREGs regulations need amending to replace anthropocentric language (“ordinary practice of seamen”) with outcome-based substitutes, such as collision avoidance that is “effective, and verifiable.” This preserves the safety objective while allowing AI navigation systems to meet the standard by any technically adequate means.

Second, ensuring increased algorithmic transparency. Existing VDR requirements should be extended to mandate logging of AI decision-making processes in a standardised, interpretable format. Without this safeguard, post-incident liability allocation is arbitrary and practically  guesswork.

Third, mandating the IMO’s existing MSC resolution on cyber risk management. The currently non-binding nature of these resolutions is evidently inadequate for fully networked autonomous vessels. A new SOLAS provision should establish minimum cybersecurity standards for MASS, including requirements for intrusion detection and fallback systems.

Charting a Course Forward 

The human cost of autonomy is not a secondary concern, the question of the maritime workforce cannot be set aside as a downstream consequence of automation; it must be addressed as a central feature of any regulatory framework. Aspects of the seafaring profession, like situational awareness, improvised engineering, and diplomatic negotiation cannot be replicated by AI yet. 

The challenge before regulatory and educational bodies is not to mourn the demise of shipping careers but to plan for a shift in focus such that the vast reservoir of knowledge within the shipping sector is utilized to fulfil new roles.

Autonomous maritime vehicles are no longer a theoretical problem: they are a commercial reality. Vessels are already in service, more are under development, and the legal framework has not yet fully adapted. The IMO deserves credit for recognizing the regulatory lacunae and taking serious steps to remedy it. But the roadmap to a mandatory code by 2032 is a decade away, and commercial pressure to deploy autonomous shipping will not wait for legal surety.

What the MASS Code must deliver is a framework that is technologically neutral in its standards, human-centred in its values, and international in its reach. It should determine whether the voyage is safe, the environment is protected, the workers are treated fairly, and someone can be held accountable when things go wrong.

The boat still needs a captain. The question is where that captain sits.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: “35th anniversary of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) International Maritime Law Institute (IMLI) at IMO Headquarters in London, England on 22 April 2024,” Image Sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made

New Name, Familiar Tale

On March 7, 2026, leaders from across Latin America and the Caribbean gathered in Doral, Florida, at the invitation of U.S. President Donald Trump to inaugurate what was presented as a renewed framework for hemispheric security cooperation. Framed in the language of peace, stability, and shared prosperity, the initiative signaled the emergence of a “new” regional security architecture. Yet for Latin America, such moments rarely represent rupture as much as repetition.

Hemispheric security cooperation has historically oscillated between multilateral coordination and asymmetrical dependence, from the 1947 Rio Treaty to more recent counternarcotics partnerships such as the Mérida Initiative and Plan Colombia. The proposed “Shield of the Americas” appears less as a departure from this trajectory than its latest evolution.

Gradually, these attempts at hemispheric cooperation have eroded to give way to coercive action between relevant players in the Americas. We may think of the recent U.S. military incursion in Venezuela in January 2026 or the repeated question mark over American intervention in Mexico posited by President Trump. The game, however, is just as important as the players within it. Much like a prudent player of classic titles such as The Elder Scrolls or any other RPG, it seems the U.S. and its regional allies are investing heavily in defense, both as a principle of their foreign policy toolboxes and as justification for the creation of new multilateral regimes. After all, it is often said that “a good defense is the best offense,” and seemingly this has proven true for allowing Washington to broaden its military operations as far south as Ecuador.

Latin America now finds itself increasingly preoccupied with the offensive capabilities of its northern neighbor, compelled to reconsider how far it is willing to go to defend its people and national vision. Much the same as any prudent, yet astute, RPG player, it increasingly appears that the United States has hidden the sword behind the shield, deploying the language of defense in ways that expand the political legitimacy of intervention across the hemisphere.

The “Return” of Security: A Snake Eating Its Own Tail

The construction of security policy, as discussed by authors linked to security studies, such as Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, or Thierry Balzacq, has rested upon a government’s ability to define what threats we should be worried about and, as such, the justification to go after them. In truth, Trump’s bid to frame Latin American criminal networks, cartels, gangs, and illegal mass migration as a mortal threat to the peace of mind of U.S. citizens and the nation has come accompanied by mechanisms designed to legitimize action, including multilateral initiatives such as the Shield of the Americas.

Would similar U.S. operations be received the same way if these threats were not collectively recognized as legitimate security concerns? Security theory suggests otherwise. Shared threat narratives allow states to gradually expand the boundary between cooperation and intervention, normalizing actions that might otherwise provoke resistance.

As such, Latin American discussions on security become even more entangled. Like a snake eating its own tail, critics argue the willingness to participate in this new security strategy will come at the cost of a new era of American interventionism, in essence, that most feared by the staunch defenders of Latin American autonomy and anti-American politics in the region. 

Is a Shield Truly Ever Without a Sword?

A shield, nevertheless, must be analyzed as a harbinger of retaliation. The United States has made the nature of “defense” quite clear, positioning itself and her hemispheric allies as clear defenders against an onslaught of illegality and criminality. This, in the eyes of the Trump administration, has remained the savage and untamed beast of the Western Hemisphere; a beast that only responds to a language of violence and heavy-handedness. Under such a framing, the region easily finds itself equating military power with social security.

“The heart of our agreement is a commitment to using lethal military force to destroy the sinister cartels and terrorist networks [in the Western Hemisphere]…”

More captivating, however, is the way in which Latin American security policy has echoed this statement and continues to do so. Ecuador’s President Noboa no doubt used this same sentiment when allowing for his country’s security gap to be filled partially by direct military cooperation with the U.S. earlier in March 2026. Likewise, El Salvador’s hard-hitting security reforms ushered in by Bukele followed this same line of action through policies of exception restricting the right to self-defense and high incarceration rates. Even my own country, Mexico, has seen its security policy fall back and forth between open war against drug trafficking networks and political reframing of security under former President López Obrador. 

Aside from the purely political nature of security policy, one thing remains constant within these cases; the general population of Latin America is increasingly frustrated by the nature of security and desperate for answers. Across the region, efforts to confront insecurity have often fallen into crisis, making reliance on the United States’ protective “shield” appear increasingly attractive, even as the protection it offers risks expanding Washington’s capacity to intervene once again, whether through its military or political recognition. All the same, the message remains explicit: cooperation is a relationship regulated by Washington for the region, rather than alongside it.

“I want to thank members of the coalition, most of whom are friends of mine… many of whom I endorsed…”

One thing has become clear: a shield, no matter how defensive, is nevertheless a weapon when used in new and creative ways. Across Latin America, worried observers find themselves increasingly on edge as the Shield of the Americas reinforces a growing inertia in regional cooperation. The region now appears to be drifting toward competing visions of hemispheric security, further widening existing fractures between states, as seen in the visible diplomatic tensions between Mexico and Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, and Argentina and Brazil.

Security’s Game: Shields, Swords, and Subordinates

If players are shaped by the games they play, then the hemispheric player operating from Washington appears to do so from a position few can truly challenge. Much like an experienced RPG player, the United States does not need to master every role when its Latin American partners are expected to fill them.

The question, then, is what role these partners are meant to play. The meeting in Doral suggests that they may remain secondary actors within a system largely defined by U.S. security protagonism, shaped by decades of sluggish cooperation and unresolved tensions. In this sense, Latin America risks becoming both the shield invoked to safeguard U.S. interests and the region most affected by its weight. 

Supporters of the Shield of the Americas may argue that it offers a concrete response to problems long addressed through softer cooperation. Yet as security once again becomes the region’s dominant political language, it remains unclear whether this new arrangement will lead to genuine partnership through the development of a unified security agenda or to the familiar return of American influence and boots on the ground.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: “LAAD Defence & Security – 2025 (54425241592),” Image Sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made

When Ugandan authorities arrested two young women for sharing a Valentine’s Day kiss and charged them with offences related to homosexuality and indecency, they upheld a law written and imposed by the colonisers. When colonisers departed, they left behind legal systems that criminalised same-sex conduct, a burden the colonised were made to carry long after independence. Given the size of the empire and the height of its power, British law did not merely travel; it calcified, embedding itself into the legal DNA of nations that would later become their own tradition. A recent wave of conservatism has swept across Africa, with activists decrying an assault on LGBTQ+ rights, especially in East Africa. Half of all countries worldwide where homosexuality is outlawed can be found in Africa, according to a global review by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association (ILGA), a statistic that reflects the uniformity of colonial legislation. In some countries, offenders are punished by death or lengthy prison terms, enshrined in statutes drafted in colonial capitals. 

This column traces how laws enforced by the colonisers have been weaponised into a modern instrument of oppression, and what it means for the millions living under its shadow. It does so in five parts: first, the historical origins of anti-sodomy legislation and how it travelled; second, what pre-colonial African societies actually recognised about sexuality; third, how this inheritance is being actively reinforced and expanded today; fourth, how a second and more contemporary wave of imported intolerance is compounding it; and fifth, the human cost of both.

The historical development of anti-sodomy laws

In 1534, under the reign of Henry VIII, British law took its first legislative aim at homosexual acts. The legislation punished ‘… the detestable and abominable Vice of Buggery committed with mankind or beast.’ The word ‘abominable’ was taken from Leviticus. The term buggery traces back to ‘bougre’ or ‘heretic’ in Old French, and to the Latin ‘Bulgarus’ for ‘Bulgarian’, a reference to Orthodox Christian heretics. ‘Heresy’ was a common euphemism in the Middle Ages for a group of sexual sins, so the 1534 wording was not innovative. Derived from ecclesiastical law, the religious character of this criminalisation was hardly new. A criminal law prohibition based on Leviticus travelled through early Christianity, Roman law, and ecclesiastical law to become a standard non-religious criminal offence in Europe, including Russia. The Protestant Reformation ended the church Courts in much of Europe, requiring them to be handled by secular law. This uniform pattern was broken by the Napoleonic Penal Code of 1810, which drew no distinctions between homosexual and heterosexual acts, a legal innovation adopted by the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, resulting in only British colonies having inherited the prohibition. In Asia and Africa, the legacy of 1534 is now hidden behind the language of the 19^th-century Indian Penal Code (IPC), imposed on colonial India in 1861, before it travelled to parts of Africa.

The most telling illustration of colonialism’s uneven legal afterlife lies in the diverging fates of s. 377 of the IPC. Drafted by Thomas Babington Macaulay, the section stated that “whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal” would be punished with imprisonment or fines. It travelled with the empire, exported to colonies across Asia and Africa as a standardised instrument of moral policing. 

The empire that exported this moral code was slow to reckon with it on its own soil. In 1966, the year before partial discrimination through the Sexual Offences Act, 1967, some 420 men were convicted of gross indecency in Britain; by 1974, that number had surged to 1,711, a rise of over 300%. Full reform did not arrive until the Sexual Offences Act of 2003, meaning that for 470 years, England and Wales maintained a criminal code that penalised gay sexuality, the same code it had spent centuries exporting. Scotland’s anti-LGBTQ+ laws were not repealed until 2013. India, inheritor of the same provision, did not strike down s.377 until 2018, over 150 years after it was imposed. The slowness of the coloniser’s own reform is not incidental; it is precisely what made the inheritance so durable and so devastating for those on whom it was imposed. Their survival after independence reflects not only legal continuity but also the willingness of postcolonial governments to deploy them in the service of nation-building, moral politics, and claims of cultural authenticity.

Sexuality in Pre-Colonial Africa 

Colonialism shaped the archives through which Africa came to be understood: same-sex intimacies were frequently ignored, misrepresented, or relegated to the margins of colonial records, creating silences that continue to distort contemporary understandings of Africa’s sexual past.

The claim that homosexuality is ‘un-African’ collapses under the weight of the historical record. Long before colonial law arrived to declare it criminal, same-sex relationships and gender-nonconformity were documented across more than 40 pre-colonial African societies. Among the Langi of northern Uganda, effeminate males known as ‘mudoko dako’ were treated as women and could marry men. In Angola, the Chibados male diviners were believed to carry female spirits and occupied recognised spiritual roles within their communities. Woman-to-woman marriages were equally documented, a practice so perplexing to European travellers that it provoked, in the words of one Portuguese soldier writing in 1681, accusations of ‘sodomy’ and ‘filth’. What unsettled the colonisers was not deviance, but the difference they had no framework to understand. As legal scholar Sylvia Tamale of Makerere University puts it, “it is not homosexuality that is alien to Africa, but homophobia.”

The deployment of African culture as a shield against LGBTQ+ rights is not a natural outgrowth of the continent’s traditions; it is a political construction with a familiar precedent. When Mobutu Sese Seko built his decades-long dictatorship on the ideology of authenticité, he justified it by reference to African culture, ‘Democracy is not for Africa,’ he said, ‘there was only one African chief.’ Yet paradoxically, Mobutu was not recovering African tradition but deploying European colonial stereotypes about it, borrowing from colonial predecessors the very ideas he claimed to reject. The same logic is now deployed against sexual minorities, with homophobia dressed as heritage. Yet the historical record tells a different story. In ancient Egypt, same-sex intimacy was, at certain periods, legally recognised. Among the Azande of pre-colonial Sudan, male same-sex marriage was legally acknowledged, with dowry paid to boy-wives and damages awarded for infidelity. African culture was never homogeneously heterosexual; it was diverse, varied, and far more accommodating than the colonial legal code imposed upon it. What is rarely acknowledged is that the homophobic rhetoric currently rising across Africa is not organically domestic; it is funded and sustained by Western, specifically American, conservative campaigns, making it contemporarily manufactured. As historians Murray and Roscoe conclude, the colonialists did not introduce homosexuality to Africa but rather the intolerance of it, and systems of surveillance and regulation for suppressing it.

Contemporary Africa: The Inheritance Enforced 

The scale of inheritance is telling. Across Africa, 32 of 54 countries, according to ILGA, criminalise same-sex relations, a uniformity that reflects colonial standardisation. What is more alarming than the number is the direction of travel; these laws are not relics being passively retained, they are actively being reinforced, expanded, and, in several cases, made more severe. 

Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023 stands as the most egregious example, imposing life imprisonment for homosexuality and the death penalty for ‘aggravated homosexuality,’ while organisations found guilty of ‘promoting homosexuality’ face fines up to USD 266,000 and permanent suspension of their licenses. Senegal amended its Penal Code as recently as March 2026, increasing prison terms for ‘acts against nature’ from one to five years to five to ten years, and separately criminalising the funding of any activity deemed to promote homosexuality. 

The Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, has called on African leaders to reject the promotion of homosexuality, believing it to be a real danger to humanity and a big threat to the procreation of the human race. Across Africa, so-called ‘family values’ conferences have proliferated, bringing together international organisers, local lawmakers, and faith leaders under the banner of defending traditional family life, a banner that, on closer inspection, doubles as a coordinated campaign against LGBTQ+ existence and abortion rights. In Uganda, the Catholic church has become the institutional reference point for political leaders wishing to speak against homosexuality, with government ministers publicly arguing that it is alien to Ugandan culture and a threat to the country’s traditions. What is presented as cultural sovereignty is, upon examination, a colonial inheritance, one that the coloniser quietly set down while the colonised were left to enforce it.

A Second Wave 

Ironically, what goes largely unacknowledged is that Africa is also the target of a more contemporary importation of intolerance. In 2009, American evangelical pastor Scott Lively travelled to Kampala at the invitation of the Ugandan Parliament, briefing lawmakers on how to address homosexuality, a visit widely regarded as a catalyst for the Anti-Homosexuality Act that followed. He was not an isolated actor. Family Watch International, led by Sharon Slater and “described as a hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, has sponsored trips for politicians from Kenya, Uganda, and beyond, training them on what activists “describe as an extremist anti-LGBTQ+ agenda.” In April 2023, the organisation hosted an inter-parliamentary conference in Uganda, attended by leaders from 22 African countries, after which a Kenyan MP vowed to table an anti-gay bill in parliament. “There is nothing organic about the wave of anti-homosexuality bills we are seeing,” said Muthoni Ngugi of the East Africa Legal Service Network. As Dr Kapya Kaoma concludes, these organisations are losing the culture wars at home and seeking quick gains elsewhere. 

The Human Cost 

“It is crucial to acknowledge that these challenges faced by LGBTI people in Africa extend beyond the realm of legality, encompassing a profound struggle for the hearts and minds of societies. However, the abuse of law has undoubtedly heightened their vulnerability and underlines the urgent necessity for coordinated regional and international intervention,” observed Samira Daoud, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for West and Central Africa. 

The evidence bears her out with devastating precision. In January 2011, David Kato, Uganda’s most prominent gay rights activist, was beaten to death at his home in Kampala, weeks after a local tabloid published his name and photograph under the headline ‘Hang Them.’ He had just won a court case against the publication. Kato’s murder was not an isolated act of violence but a consequence of a climate that legislation actively creates. In Burkina Faso, following the junta’s criminalisation of homosexuality in September 2025, LGBTQ+ people report living in fear of a ‘witch hunt,’ with photographs shared on social media as evidence and lists of meeting places passed to authorities. “With this law, people will feel they have a mission: to hunt down homosexuals,” testifies Quentin, a gay Burkinabe man living in Ouagadougou. 

The consequences extend beyond persecution into public health. Criminalisation drives LGBTQ+ people away from healthcare, creating conditions in which HIV thrives invisibly. Rates are estimated at 27 times higher than for other men in eastern and southern Africa and 199 times higher than for other men in western and central Africa. Anti-LGBTQ+ policies, which strengthen stigmatisation and control of people living with HIV/AIDS, undermine progress towards mitigating the epidemic. The COVID-19 pandemic compounded these vulnerabilities further, as restrictions on public gatherings, diverted resources and heightened surveillance. These laws thereby put Africa’s fight against HIV in ‘great jeopardy.’ In Uganda alone, police raided shelters for homeless LGBTQ+ youth, arresting dozens and subjecting some to forced anal examinations, a practice Human Rights Watch has “described as cruel, degrading, and constituting torture.” In August 2021, 54 civil society groups were indefinitely suspended. Sexual Minorities Uganda, which had provided education and healthcare advocacy for LGBTQ+ people since 2004, was ultimately banned entirely. Behind every statute and every amendment, a person is paying the price for someone else’s imported conviction.

Conclusion 

The two women arrested for sharing a Valentine’s Day kiss in Uganda did not violate an ancient cultural prohibition. They were caught in the machinery of a legal code drafted in a foreign capital, exported across an empire, abandoned by its authors, and then handed down as tradition. That is not heritage. That is inheritance, and inheritance, unlike tradition, can be refused.

Across the continent, some are refusing it. Namibia decriminalised same-sex relations in 2024. Botswana formally removed the colonial prohibition from its penal code in 2026. These are not concessions to Western pressure; they are corrections of a Western imposition. The demystification of homophobic pseudo-history and the detachment of homophobia from African-ness are, therefore, a necessary first step in the promotion of LGBTQ+ rights, not as a foreign agenda, but as a reclamation of what the continent’s own history has always shown to be true. In Botswana and Namibia, the government has recognised that enforcing the private moral views of a majority does not justify criminalising another’s freedom. That criminalisation itself is a public health failure, one that bars LGBTQ+ populations from accessing the treatment and care they are owed.

But for the millions still living under laws they never chose, written by hands that have long since washed themselves of them, and now reinforced by a second wave of foreign moral entrepreneurship, the weight of the inheritance remains. It is measured in raids, in bans, in bodies, and in the quiet daily cost of living under a law written for you by someone who never asked. The first wave of intolerance arrived with the coloniser’s penal code. The second arrived with the missionary’s chequebook. Both called it tradition. Neither was.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: “HarareMarch,” Image Sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made

2026 has begun with a dramatic and rapidly unfolding geopolitical crisis centered in Venezuela. In late 2025, the United States initiated a significant military buildup in the southern Caribbean and off the coast of Venezuela, deploying multiple naval assets—including guided‑missile destroyers—and thousands of personnel as part of what the U.S. government described as an expanded counternarcotics and security operation. 

This deployment marked the most substantial concentration of U.S. military power in the region in decades, with carrier strike groups, amphibious forces, and supporting aircraft operating within striking distance of Venezuelan territorial waters. The buildup contributed to heightened regional uncertainty and strained diplomatic relations, particularly as sources from Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, characterized it as a hostile encroachment on its sovereignty.

Tensions escalated further on September 2, 2025, when the United States conducted its first acknowledged strike against a vessel in the Caribbean suspected of transporting illicit drugs originating from Venezuela. U.S. officials framed the action as part of an expanded campaign against transnational crime, but the operation also set the stage for a series of 32 known kinetic strikes on small boats later publicly linked to alleged drug trafficking activities—actions that drew scrutiny from international bodies and regional governments alike. 

The escalation reached its climax on January 3. The US carried out a “Large-Scale Strike” on Caracas which culminated with the arrest of Nicolas Maduro. This event has led to a wide range of discussions regarding the role of the US in world affairs and the return of interventionism into Latin America, a region haunted by US intervention in their national affairs, foreign affairs, and an overall lack of respect for international law.

This brief analysis, rather than simply arguing that international law should be respected (a point largely uncontested), will rather focus on a more difficult question raised by the U.S. operations in Venezuela. The paradox at the heart of the international legal order is created: an intervention may appear morally compelling yet remains legally prohibited under existing international law. Furthermore, this text would like to push back on the popular idea of the uselessness or death of international law. International law, as I argue later on, both as a concept and a structure is not dead. Our usual conception of it has reached its boiling point, and new conceptions must be grappled with. 

International law as a practice and not just norms. 

One of the key issues that differentiates international law from national law is that international law lacks any real way of being enforced. There is no world tribunal that can sentence and punish states for breaking international norms, just in the same way that a national court can prosecute and sentence an individual to prison. The only international institution that manages to fill this niche within international society is the International Court of Justice, yet it also suffers from limitations. 

Articles 36 and 59 of the ICJ Statute the Court’s binding power is limited and conditional. The ICJ may issue legally binding decisions only where states have consented to its jurisdiction and once jurisdiction exists, judgments are binding exclusively between the parties and only with respect to the specific case. The Court may also indicate provisional measures under Article 41, which are legally binding, but these do not constitute punitive or coercive enforcement. If a state fails to comply with an ICJ judgment, the Court itself has no enforcement mechanism. Even the institution that most closely resembles a world court cannot enforce all sentences. The idea that international law can and should function like national law shows its limitation.  

The Venezuelan intervention invites a reassessment of how we view international law and how we think it functions in practice. International law isn’t solely the norms written in treaties, but also the way these norms operate and are practiced in the real world. 

This practice-oriented understanding of law is further developed by the New Haven School of international law, which defines law not as a static system of rules but as a “continuous flow of authoritative and controlling decisions.” In this framework, authority is not derived solely from formal legal sources, but from community expectations regarding who is entitled to decide, by what procedures, under which conditions, and in light of which values. Power refers broadly to the resources used to shape behavior, while authority constitutes the specifically legal dimension of decision-making. A decision is authoritative when it aligns with these shared expectations, even in the absence of centralized enforcement.

In a system without centralized enforcement, the law’s practical force is shaped by power asymmetries which can provide some states the capacity to act unilaterally and resist being held accountable for violating legal rules. The Venezuela case makes this tension visible, revealing the gap between international law’s formal prohibitions and its uneven application in practice. Legal realism offers a framework for understanding this disjunction. Realism argues that law is best understood through the actual practices of legal decision-makers, emphasizing how social, political, economic, and institutional forces shape legal outcomes. Norms, in this view, do not disappear— they derive their operative meaning from how they are interpreted, invoked, ignored, or selectively enforced in concrete cases.

The Venezuelan intervention underscores the need to rethink international law as a set of practices, not merely prescriptive norms. Law is not only what states ought to follow, but how norms are interpreted, deployed, and contested in concrete political contexts. International law emerges through state action, institutional responses, and patterns of justification rather than abstract textual authority alone. If international law is to remain relevant, its dominant conception must evolve alongside the geopolitical realities that continuously reshape it.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: “Protest against US military intervention in Venezuela,” Image Sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made

The word “Bauhaus” literally translates from German to “house of building.” Originally, the Bauhaus was a school of design, architecture, and applied arts in Germany that emerged in response to the rapid social and technological changes following World War I. Its founder, architect Walter Gropius, sought to end the schism between art and technical craftsmanship by fusing functionality with aesthetics. In 2020, the European Union launched the New European Bauhaus (NEB) as part of the European Green Deal to bridge climate action with culture and creativity. Though the initiative draws on a legacy now a century old, it arrives at a moment of urgent relevance. The 1920s Bauhaus movement embodied a wider intellectual undertaking aimed at societal transformation. Today, the NEB continues this legacy, with a special focus on environmental protection, social justice, and urban regeneration. Yet while the NEB successfully revives the Bauhaus spirit of uniting design with social purpose, its revolutionary potential is undermined by structural barriers in implementation, persistent inequalities in access, and a funding model that privileges execution over imagination.

The NEB is an EU policy and funding program designed to make the green transition in the built environment “attractive and convenient for all.”  Its functioning includes grassroots-level engagement, tools and guidance for tailor-made solutions, the incorporation of stakeholders’ views, and a focus on people and social inclusion whilst maintaining strategic economic policies. The NEB follows a bottom-up approach, inviting citizens, stakeholders, and professionals to share perspectives to co-create solutions for their respective neighborhoods. Prizes were first awarded in 2021 in what has since become a well-established annual competition. In total, more than 5,700 applications have been received, and over €2 million has been awarded across the two competition strands: one for existing and completed projects and one for new concepts. 

Many NEB projects have been qualified successes. The NEB has been widely referred to as the “soul” of the European Green Deal, adding cultural and social aspects to ecological targets to ensure community values are part of the collective climate response. It has also inspired a range of innovative local and grassroots projects. In the Champions’ strand—recognizing existing, completed work—Spain’s Green Axes and Squares reclaims streets for the public and greenery, Austria’s cooperative die HausWirtschaft combines affordable housing with shared work and childcare, and Ukraine’s Promprylad transforms a former factory into a cooperative center of innovation and social investment. In the Rising Stars’ strand for new concepts, Barcelona’s Superblock project is recognized as an exceptional pilot that addresses green space shortages, climate change, air and noise pollution, road safety, and the rehabilitation of degraded urban areas through a single systemic framework. Outside individual projects, the NEB’s co-design process drew more than 2,000 contributors from over 85 countries, indicating the breadth of its ambition.

However, the NEB encounters serious impediments to long-term transformation. The project, CoolCo’s—Cooling Corners and Corridors, in Budapest, Hungary, serves as an example of a case where execution falls short. CoolCo’s was a small-scale urban heat adaptation installed in the summer of 2023 in the dense, socioeconomically vulnerable neighborhood of Józefváros. Following the engagement of community residents in the design and prototyping process, modular shaded seating structures, plants, water features, and information panels were installed in public spaces. However, the project failed to account for the friction between their need for rapid decision-making and the slow, procedurally rigid municipal systems, resulting in significant delays. Further, the co-design process at the beginning of the project was a one-off engagement that failed to establish an ongoing relationship, thus leaving gaps in long-term communal ownership. This was compounded by the generalized distrust of public institutions in the neighborhood, complicating participation efforts. Ultimately, the NEB principles supplied useful guiding ideals but offered little practical guidance for handling the realities of small, bottom-up, and community-driven projects. 

The NEB’s funding model, however, presents the most fundamental tension. While the initiative claims to privilege creativity and interdisciplinary experimentation, the distribution of prize money and financial support tends to favor already established, implementation-ready projects over early-stage or speculative ideas. The Champions strand winner receives €30,000—double the €15,000 award of the Rising Stars’ strand winner. The logic is understandable: completed projects have demonstrated results and offer higher potential for replication. But this creates a structural imbalance. Projects with existing institutional backing, technical maturity, or proven feasibility are far better positioned to secure meaningful funding, while more radical or untested concepts receive comparatively less support. 

This pattern matters because revolutionary design ideas often emerge from high-risk conceptual exploration as opposed to incremental refinements to present models. By allocating significantly less funding to new ideas, the NEB risks narrowing the scope of innovation to what is already scalable and administratively viable within existing EU frameworks. In effect, the NEB initiative privileges execution over imagination, contradicting what they claim to foster. This can also discourage participation from smaller actors, such as independent designers and undersourced municipalities, who may lack the capacity to develop fully realized proposals without substantial upfront investment. The result is a feedback loop where established actors continue to dominate, and even the NEB’s stated pledge to inclusion and co-creation is quietly undermined. If the initiative genuinely intends to inspire a completely new design paradigm, it must invest more heavily in the uncertain, conceptual stages of innovation. Otherwise, it risks becoming a showcase for polished projects rather than a generator of fundamentally new ones. 

The history of the original Bauhaus yields a cautionary precedent. Throughout its short life, the school endured rising political pressure from conservative forces in Weimar Germany, forcing it to relocate twice before the Nazis shut it down in 1933. Despite Walter Gropius’s repeated attempts to depoliticize the institution, its avant-garde, anti-bourgeois ideals made it structurally vulnerable not only to external hostility but also to internal tensions. The Bauhaus did not fail for a lack of vision. It failed because visionary institutions, without structural protection and political durability, cannot survive on ideas alone. 

The NEB, too, has a powerful vision and a constrained execution. To fulfill its potential, it needs dedicated funding streams, equity-focused criteria, and a willingness to invest in ideas that have not yet proven themselves. The deeper question the NEB raises is whether the design-led policy can drive genuine societal transformation, or whether institutional logic will always tame the radical impulse that makes such movements worth launching in the first place. The original Bauhaus changed how the world thinks about design. Whether the New European Bauhaus can do the same or will be undone by the same tensions that closed its predecessor remains to be seen. 

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: “Dessau-Bauhaus,” Image Sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made

Over 10,200 miles from Paris in the South Pacific Ocean lies the French overseas territory of New Caledonia. The archipelago currently sits at the center of one of the world’s most complex decolonization and self-determination debates. Shaped by a long history of colonization, indigenous marginalization, and decades of negotiation over sovereignty, the territory has recently entered a new era of political uncertainty following French parliamentary votes that may have just opened the door to independence. In this article, I will examine the historical and political development of New Caledonia under French rule, the long-term marginalization of the indigenous Kanak population, and the recent political crisis surrounding independence movements and constitutional reform. New Caledonia is closer to independence than at any other point in its modern history, as recent constitutional crises, contested reforms, and shifting political alliances have exposed the fragility of French authority over the territory. 

Melanesian peoples first settled the islands around 3000 BC, whose descendants are now known as the Kanak population. Their societies developed complex social and political systems rooted in land, kinship, and clan identity. European contact began in the late 18th century when British explorer James Cook visited the region. Despite early British contact and the islands’ later naming after Scotland, France formally annexed the territory in 1853. However, colonial rule quickly created tension as land was confiscated, taxes were imposed, and Kanak sovereignty was dismantled. Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Kanak resistance movements repeatedly challenged French authority.

Following the suppression of these uprisings, colonial policy deliberately attempted to reshape the islands’ demographic structure. French policies encouraged European settlement and the development of plantation agriculture, primarily around coffee. Indentured laborers from Asia and nearby Pacific islands were also introduced, further transforming the population. Over time, these demographic changes reduced the Kanak population to a minority within their own territory. Even though the Kanaks were granted French citizenship in 1946, along with the right to vote, structural inequality and land dispossession continued to limit their political influence. Gradually, frustration surrounding marginalization strengthened a unified Kanak identity.

Another major economic, political, and social transformation occurred during the nickel boom between 1967 and 1972. Today, nickel accounts for roughly 90% of the territory’s exports and 10% of its GDP. Driven by rising global demand for stainless steel and industrial metals, New Caledonia’s vast nickel reserves became central to French economic interests in the Pacific. Rapid industrial expansion followed, as new mining operations increased production and attracted significant investment from the French government and multinational firms. As a result, immigration surged as labor demand grew, which further reshaped the demographic balance of the island. These developments intensified feelings of marginalization among the Kanak population, particularly as open-pit mining operations destroyed their historic homeland. Nickel soon became the backbone of the territory’s economy, but its dominance also deepened political tensions between pro-independence groups and loyalist factions.

Tensions reached a breaking point after the 1984 establishment of Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste (FLNKS), a major pro-independence political party. Violence emerged as independence activists clashed with French and right wing loyalist settlers. While the Matignon Agreements of 1988 ended the immediate conflict, it wasn’t until the Nouméa Accord of 1998 that a long-term framework was established. The Nouméa Accord outlined a twenty year gradual transition plan aimed to end colonization, enhance infrastructure and education, and organize future independence referendums. A key provision also restricted electoral eligibility to long-term residents and their descendants, which intended to protect Kanak political influence. Despite these measures, tensions over sovereignty remained unresolved.

In 2024, tensions escalated again when the French government proposed a controversial electoral reform to expand voting rights to more recent residents of New Caledonia. While supporters described the bill as democratic modernization, many Kanak leaders viewed it as a deliberate attempt to dilute their electoral influence. The proposal triggered widespread protests that quickly developed into violent unrest. As a result, mistrust between pro-independence groups and the French state deepened significantly. With key industries, including nickel mining, disrupted and widespread property damage occurring, the French government responded with emergency measures, which included security crackdowns and restrictions on social media platforms such as TikTok. Many critics argued that these actions violated freedom of expression, but supporters of these measures claimed they were necessary to restore order and prevent further violence. By the end of the unrest, fourteen people had been killed and economic losses exceeded $2.4 billion.

Following the protests, France and New Caledonian political factions entered renewed negotiations. However, these discussions exposed deep internal divisions within New Caledonia itself. The territory has long been divided on the issue of independence. For example, in the 2020 independence referendum, 53.26% of voters wished to remain a part of France while 46.74% sought independence. With a voter turnout of 85.6%, the 2020 referendum truly captures the narrow split between New Caledonian residents. Many who support remaining within France are descendants of European settlers, known as Caldoches. Meanwhile, the independence movement is largely supported by the Kanak population, who make up approximately 41% of the territory. Although Kanak communities represent a significant ethnic group, they continue to experience significantly higher levels of poverty and unemployment, along with reduced access to education and housing. Caldoche wealth is primarily rooted in New Caledonia’s colonialist history, which is reflected by their dominant ownership of businesses, industry, and wealth. These economic and political divisions have produced competing visions for the territory’s future, and weakened the independence movement’s ability to act as a truly unified force. 

Negotiations between French and New Caledonian representatives culminated in the 2025 Bougival Accord, which proposed to redefine New Caledonia’s political status. Instead of remaining an overseas territory, New Caledonia would be elevated to the level of statehood. The agreement granted expanded autonomy, formal recognition of Kanak identity, and the possibility of a distinct New Caledonian nationality alongside French citizenship. It also included commitments to further institutional reform and a future referendum on the proposed arrangement. Pro-independence groups agreed to expand voter eligibility and adjust the number of seats in Congress for two majority Kanak areas. Meanwhile, loyalist factions agreed to provisions for dual nationality and future consultation on political status. In accordance with the Bougival Accord, the Elysée-Oudinot Accord was signed in January of 2026 to formalize economic, cultural, and institutional arrangements. However, implementation quickly stalled. 

Three months after the signing of the Elysée-Oudinot Accord, New Caledonian pro-independence MP Emmanuel Tijbaou introduced a motion to reject the proposed constitutional bill required to enshrine the both accords into the French Constitution. His motion successfully passed 190 votes to 107. Tijbaou’s motion blocked the ratification of the accords from being ratified into French law. Despite FLNKS previously signing the agreements, many within the movement supported the rejection. FLNKS members believed the reforms constrained meaningful self-determination and over-expanded voting rights. Subsequent talks between French PM Sébastien Lecornu, FLNKS leaders, and anti-independence factions have produced little progress, as disagreements centered on voting rights and the scope of future sovereignty. At the same time, the recent rejection also exposed divisions within French politics regarding the extent of decentralization and decolonization, resulting in a political stalemate.

Despite persistent internal divisions, recent political developments suggest that New Caledonia is closer to independence than ever before. Repeated failures to implement constitutional reforms have weakened confidence in France’s ability to manage a stable long-term relationship with New Caledonia. As debates over electoral rules and Kanak representation remain unresolved, each new cycle of negotiation has intensified skepticism among pro-independence groups. Many, such as the FLNKS, view French proposals as incremental extensions of control rather than genuine steps toward sovereignty. Although the independence movement is not united and French political resistance remains strong, the accumulation of political crises has shifted the debate away from whether change will occur toward how and when it might happen. Additionally, an independence referendum has not occurred in over five years, so current public opinion is uncertain. It is possible, however, that the 2024 protests along with the ongoing disagreements between France and New Caledonian political factions may have shifted attitudes toward independence. 

New Caledonia now stands at a crossroads of competing visions of identity, governance, and sovereignty. At the heart of the issue lies a fundamental question regarding who has the authority to define membership in the territory’s future state. Equally important and unresolved is the meaning of self-determination, and whether it can exist within a French framework. While no outcome is guaranteed, the recent patterns of unrest, stalled reforms, fractured negotiations, and French hesitance have transformed independence from a distant aspiration into a tangible and increasingly plausible outcome.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: “Flag Map of New Caledonia using their second official flag and pro-independence flag,” Image Sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made

On May 11, 2025, members of Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wa al-Musileen (JNIM) entered the northern town of Djibo in Burkina Faso. Over the next eleven hours, JNIM insurgents killed more than one hundred people and destroyed homes, businesses, and roads. Shortly after, JNIM seized the city of Diapaga, setting buildings, vehicles, and governmental infrastructure ablaze. Oddly, JNIM remained in the town for two additional days, departing from their typical pattern of rapid assault, loot, and withdrawal. The prolonged occupation has marked a new phase in insurgent strategy, indicating an ambition to control.  

Over time, attacks by Islamist insurgent groups, like JNIM, have intensified in both frequency and devastation. Across Burkina Faso’s northern border, Mali has also been crippled by the devastating attacks of the JNIM. On November 6th, JNIM surrounded the capital city of Bamako, inciting panic, causing gas shortages, and power was severed. The JNIM and other Islamist insurgent groups appear to be focused on tightening their rule over captured areas rather than merely destabilizing them. Meanwhile, the Burkinabé government has struggled to effectively respond to these groups. In this article, I will examine the recent political history of Burkina Faso, the effects of Islamist insurgents on the state, and how President Ibrahim Traoré has used the threat of extremism to justify his authoritarian regime. I argue that the rise of Islamist insurgents in Burkina Faso is inseparable from the country’s political instability, which has been intensified by decades of Western intervention, and that Traoré has exploited this crisis to consolidate his own power. 

Since gaining independence from France in 1960, Burkina Faso has faced many crises of governance. Coups, single-party rule, and authoritarianism have eroded the government’s stability and public trust. Moreover, foreign intervention from France and the United States has exacerbated these problems. French counterterrorism operations, particularly Operation Barkhane and Serval, placed a militarized foreign presence in Burkina Faso. Burkinabé saw France’s military presence as a neo-colonial effort that violated Burkina Faso’s national sovereignty. These foreign interventions do not establish stability, but empower military elites and foster resentment among civilians who view outside involvement as a continuation of neo-colonial governance. 

In 2022, Burkina Faso experienced two military coups within just nine months. The latter, orchestrated by Ibrahim Traoré, installed the current regime. Many onlookers optimistically envisioned Traoré as a successor to the revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara,who governed from 1983 to 1987. He sought to break the country from dependency on the West, promoting anti-imperialist reform, women’s rights, environmental activism, education, healthcare, and social welfare programs. His 1987 assassination, supported by foreign intelligence networks and executed by his close ally Blaise Compaoré, symbolized the fragility of Burkinabé politics and anti-imperialist movements. Compaoré’s subsequent 27 year rule ingrained corruption into the government and intensified the repression of political and civil rights. Following Compaoré’s ousting in 2014, Burkina Faso experienced eight leaders in eight years. By the time Traoré seized power in 2022, the state had been severely undermined by instability, internal conflict, foreign interference, and authoritarian rule. 

Ibrahim Traoré has since established his own authoritarian regime, promising to restore national sovereignty. Instead, Traoré has escalated the anti-democratic policies put into motion by Colonel Damiba, who disbanded the nation’s elected parliament and dissolved the Constitution in January of 2022. Shortly after seizing power, he suspended all political parties, indefinitely postponed all elections, and replaced democratically elected officials with military loyalists. He abolished the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI), dismissing it as financially wasteful, ineffective, and vulnerable to foreign interference. As a substitute, Traoré transferred all electoral responsibilities to the Ministry of Territorial Administration, which operates under his direct control. By entrusting his junta government with control over election management and certification, Traoré has deprived all future elections of independence and credibility. Despite pledging to restore democracy within three years of his coup, Traoré has extended his rule through a transitional charter. Even though there are regional demands for democracy, Traoré has systematically dismantled democratic institutions while maintaining the face of legality. Additionally, in addressing anti-imperalist issues, Traoré has consolidated the executive power under his own authoritarian power. 

Beyond political centralization, Traoré has overseen widespread repression of dissent. Human rights organizations, many with Western funding, have been expelled, with their workers detained and their reports censored. Traoré has framed these actions as necessary to end western neo-colonialism. Opposition politicians and journalists who criticize his government have been labeled “unpatriotic” and expelled from the powerless national assembly. Egregiously, Traoré has used forced military conscription as punishment. Former foreign minister Ablasse Ouedraogo, who is seventy years old, was arrested and forced to fight on the front lines against Islamist insurgents. Judges who have investigated corruption allegations were similarly detained or drafted. In September 2024, the junta extended its repression by criminalizing homsexuality, further restricting personal freedoms. All of these actions have capitalized on legitimate public fear and resentment toward Western influence. Together, historic Western interference and Traoré’s repressive rule have reinforced the internal instability that contributes to the very political vacuum that Islamists insurgent groups like JNIM seek to exploit.   

When Traoré seized power, insurgents groups controlled roughly 40% of the country. Since then, they have expanded their control. Despite promising quick victory over these Islamist groups, Traoré’s government has continued to lose authority. The rise of insurgents linked to al-Qaeda and ISIS has destabilized the country and strengthened Traoré’s justification for autocratic rule. Following a major attack in 2023, Traoré suspended various media outlets for reporting on the deteriorating security crisis. He warned that journalists who “communicate for the enemy” will “pay for it.” His government has criminalized online criticism under the cover of combating those who incite terrorism. Yet, dissenting reporters and regular citizens have faced censorship, intimidation, and imprisonment. Ultimately, Traoré has weaponized the country’s increasing insurgent activity to legitimize his authority and suppress any opposition. 

Meanwhile, the government’s inability to secure territory has forced it to redirect resources away from vital social programs. As a result, schools, hospitals, and courts have closed. Additionally, public trust has collapsed, and rural communities have been forced to rely on insurgent groups for food, medicine, and protection. Traroré has used these failures to rationalize deeper centralization of power. He’s continuously insisted that strong executive control is the only path to defeating terrorism. Overall, these insurgents have become a threat and a political asset, allowing Traoré to suppress dissent, eliminate democratic institutions, and justify prolonged military rule in the name of national security.

Islamist insurgents, like JNIM, in Burkina Faso cannot be separated from the country’s political and imperial history. Decades of coups, corruption, and foreign intervention have eroded the national government’s legitimacy, leaving millions vulnerable to the threat of terrorism. Traoré’s authoritarian governance has not restored order, but has instead maintained the very instability that insurgents exploit. By silencing civil dissent, dismantling democratic institutions, and prioritizing regime survival over public welfare, his government has ceded the proper legitimacy and capacity to rule. Lasting stability in Burkina Faso will depend not on defeating jihadist forces, but on the construction of a stable, inclusive, and trustful government that is free from the cycles of foreign intervention.

Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: “Captain Ibrahim Traoré, President of Burkina Faso, Head of State,” Image Sourced from Wikimedia Commons | CC License, no changes made