Introducing the Discomfort Zone

It's actually about foreign policy, foreign aid, human rights, democracy and the former Soviet Union. And money. And feminism. Get uncomfortable.

I don’t publish often. Maybe a dozen times in 20 years (with my name in the byline anyway). Same with interviews on the record. I would only ever want to write about what I see in my work. That work, for much of those 20 years, was on Russia’s North Caucasus, where it’s dangerous for locals to associate with someone like me. Anything I’d write could harm my friends and colleagues, even if it wasn’t about them, or about their region. So I would bite my tongue.

My work with activists across Russia must come to an end now. This was bound to happen sooner or later, given the way relations between the West and Russia were going. I am a citizen of the European Union, whose High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy is crowing that Russia’s war against Ukraine must be “won on the battlefield”. Under the circumstances, I don’t see how I can presume to “support civil society” in Russia and do anything but harm.

But that’s not all of it. Over 20 years, I became increasingly alienated from the entire set-up, the political economy, the assumptions and sanctimony of how Western power and money “promotes democracy” in the former Soviet Union (and much of the rest of the world). Especially how anything from human rights to cultural autonomy to ending violence against women was conflated with geopolitical agendas and captured by technocratic aid industries. I sat through many a meeting squirming and raging on the inside, at the bland arrogance, the elitism, the distortions it was causing in communities. That, incidentally, is (part of) the “discomfort” of my blog’s title. But I put on my poker face and said nothing or only very measured things, so that I’d be invited to the next meeting again and get resources and opportunities for the grassroots activists I was working with. I never wrote about that, either, or only in the most roundabout way.

I’m cutting myself loose from all that, or at least I have to try. So now I’m free to write.