The Stolen Futures: Systems, Power, and the Shrinking of Political Imagination in the Arab World
Photo: Canva
I come from the feminist movement. It is there where I learned that imagining different futures is not a luxury, it is the work itself. The debate was never whether change would come. It was only when, and how, and with what stubborn clarity we would hold that conviction against everything designed to dissolve it. I marched in the Tunisian revolution. For years before that day, I had carried it in my imagination, whispering it to myself under dictatorship like a forbidden prayer. So I know what it means to imagine against fear. And I know what it looks like when political imagination refuses to be extinguished and wins.
My work in foresight and futures thinking is a continuation of that same journey, not a departure from it. I move between protest and strategy, between the urgency of the now and the discipline of long-term thinking. Each nourishes the other. We engage with the future so we do not end up living inside someone else’s imagination. And because imagining where we want to go is how we understand what must change now. The future is not an escape from the present. It is its clearest mirror. Which is why what I have observed over years of work across the region troubles me and why I can no longer avoid naming it directly. Political imagination among activists and civil society actors is shrinking. Not because activists lack ideas or courage. But because it is being structurally produced from outside, through the very institutions that claim to plan for the future.
Some of what I observe is personal: the burnout of people who have given everything to movements that were betrayed. Some of it is ecosystem: a sector that rewards delivery over vision, outputs over imagination. These are real, and they deserve their own reckoning.
But beneath both sits something more foundational and more deliberately constructed. Public institutions. national and international, have become central actors in the contraction of political imagination. Not as passive bystanders. But as authors.
Institutions that claim to plan for the future are making it harder to imagine the future. In every conversation about just and democratic futures in the Arab world, they sit like an elephant in the room, simultaneously present and unacknowledged, leaving activists and citizens with a question that corrodes from the inside: we can imagine, but to what end?
Because institutions do not simply govern the present. They structure the boundaries of what the future is allowed to look like. They shape what Arjun Appadurai calls our “capacity to aspire,” defining what feels possible, what feels dangerous, and what becomes, over time, literally unthinkable. When an institution consistently punishes certain visions, absorbs others into meaningless consultation, and rewards only the imagination that confirms existing arrangements, it is not neutral. It is doing political work. It is deciding, on behalf of everyone, which futures are permitted.
Exposing this does not change institutions overnight. But it makes power visible. And visible power is power that has already lost something essential: its ability to operate through our unconscious consent.
Once we see how the system keeps us passive, how it manufactures our exhaustion, colonizes our time, performs our participation, and normalizes the limits it has placed on our thinking , we begin to move beyond what Paulo Freire called "magical consciousness": the condition in which we experience our own oppression as natural, as inevitable, as a reflection of our incapacity rather than of their power. That movement does not guarantee change. But it is where agency begins. It is where political imagination stops being a private whisper and starts becoming a collective practice again.
This piece is not about solutions. It insists that before we reach for solutions, we owe ourselves the discipline of naming the problem with precision. The most disabling confusion in our field is the one that mistakes constraint for incapacity, that looks at shrinking political imagination and concludes that activists have lost their vision, when what has actually happened is that the conditions for imagining have been deliberately narrowed.
The question I want to hold through this piece is not whether we can imagine differently. We can. We always have. The question is: who structures the limits of political imagination, how do they do it, and what becomes possible the moment we refuse to pretend we do not see them doing it?
The national Layer- six parallel mechanisms
1. They colonize time
This is the most invisible mechanism. Institutions control what is urgent. In contexts of permanent crisis, economic collapse, security emergencies, and political instability, public institutions set the tempo of public life. And that tempo is always immediate. There is always a budget crisis, a security threat, a humanitarian emergency that demands response now. Activists spend their time running around putting out fires and not building power, to borrow the words of Marshall Ganz[1]. The effect on political imagination is surgical. When every week is an emergency, long-term thinking becomes not just difficult but morally suspect. The activist who says “let us think about what Tunisia looks like in twenty years” is implicitly accused of not caring about what happens tomorrow. Urgency becomes a political weapon, whether wielded deliberately or structurally reproduced; the effect is the same. Because a population locked in the present is a population that cannot organize around an alternative future.
This is the political economy of time. People are not failing to imagine because they lack vision. The institution has stolen time itself and made that theft feel like a personal shortcoming.
2. They monopolize the future
In authoritarian and semi-authoritarian contexts, the state does not just govern the present. It claims ownership of the future. There is one permissible vision of what the country will become, and it belongs to the leader, the party, or the ruling coalition. All other visions are treated not as political alternatives but as threats to national unity, stability, or sovereignty.
This monopolization works through laws. In Tunisia, activists have been prosecuted for articulating alternatives. But it also works through culture: state control of media, ownership of key industries, and the shaping of educational curricula. And through the slow, accumulated signal that the future is not a space of collective negotiation but a destination already determined by those in power.
The consequence is profound. When the future is monopolized, imagination does not simply go quiet. It retreats underground, becoming the property of the very few willing to carry the risk. And underground imagination cannot compound. It cannot be shared, tested, or built upon collectively. Collective imagination, the kind that actually shifts political possibility, requires precisely the conditions that monopolization destroys.
3. They perform participation while preventing it
This mechanism is particularly insidious because it wears the mask of democracy and therefore operates even in contexts that consider themselves open. National dialogues, consultative committees, civil society forums, public consultations: these are the institutional theater of imagination. They invite activists to the table. They give the appearance of futures thinking. They produce reports, recommendations, and roadmaps. And then nothing changes.
What this does over time is more damaging than simple repression. At least repression is honest about its intentions. The consultation trap teaches activists that imagining out loud is futile. The system will absorb their vision, process it, produce a document about it, and continue exactly as before.
After enough cycles of this, political imagination does not need to be repressed. It has been trained out of existence through the repeated experience of irrelevance.
4. They withhold the knowledge
You cannot credibly imagine a different future for a country whose present you cannot fully see. This is why information control is imagination control.
Lebanon has not conducted a census since 1932[2]. This is not administrative negligence but a political choice: an accurate census might destabilize the sectarian power-sharing arrangement that holds the entire institutional edifice together. By keeping the demographic reality opaque, the institution makes it structurally impossible to imagine a post-sectarian political arrangement. You cannot build a vision of equal citizenship when you cannot even see who the citizens are.
In other contexts across the Arab world, budget documents, urban planning maps, and security expenditures — information that citizens in democratic countries routinely access — remain difficult or impossible to obtain. We think of it as inefficiency. It is deliberate maintenance. Knowledge hoarding is future hoarding. And institutions do it not through negligence but through the rational logic of self-preservation: a population that can fully see its present is a population capable of imagining and demanding a different future.
5. They criminalize the imaginative act itself
The most direct institutional suppression of imagination is simply legal. Laws against spreading false information, destabilizing the state, threatening national unity, or insulting the head of state are used across the Arab world to prosecute people who have done nothing more than articulate a different vision of how their society could be organized.
But the legal mechanism is almost less important than its cultural effect. You do not need to arrest many people to silence many more. The trial of one intellectual, the detention of one activist, the prosecution of one journalist sends a signal that recalibrates the entire community’s sense of what is safe to imagine. The ceiling of permissible imagination descends because the cost of transgressing becomes visible and real. This is how you shrink political imagination without destroying most of the people who carry it. You make an example, and you let the example do the rest of the work.
6. They exhaust the imaginers
The final mechanism is the most human and the hardest to quantify. But it is not accidental. Exhaustion, in the contexts this piece is examining, is not a byproduct of crisis. It is a product of the system. Political imagination requires conditions: energy, a horizon long enough to think toward, and a sufficient sense of safety to take the risk of wanting something different. These are not luxuries. They are the basic infrastructure of visionary thinking. And they are exactly what the mechanisms above systematically destroy.
Consider the Tunisian activist who has spent fifteen years responding to crises, navigating consultations that lead nowhere, self-censoring her most ambitious thinking, watching her peers leave for exile or give up entirely. That activist is not less imaginative than she was. She is exhausted. And exhaustion is not a psychological weakness. It is a rational response to a system designed to deplete. Precarity, scarcity of time, safety, and basic resources narrows cognitive bandwidth and crowds out the long-term thinking that political imagination requires.[3]
Lebanon makes the ask visible in its most extreme form. People have had to grieve war, explosion, economic collapse, and the mass emigration of an entire generation, while simultaneously being asked to remain politically imaginative. Grief and imagination are not separate processes. They compete for the same cognitive and emotional resources. Institutions that continue to demand vision from people in the middle of collective trauma are not supporting political imagination. They are extracting its last reserves.
The international layer — Five parallel mechanisms
The six mechanisms above are real. But they do not float free of context. National institutions operate inside a global order that shapes, finances, and in some cases designs the boundaries within which they work. This does not mean national governments are simply victims of external forces. On the contrary, many are willing participants, protecting their own arrangements under the cover of international constraint. But whether a national institution is complicit or genuinely constrained, the global order exists independently of its intentions. And that order has its own mechanisms for shrinking political imagination. They work through what feels viable. Through what seems realistic. Through the persistent message that certain futures are simply not available to certain parts of the world.
1. They export prefabricated futures
Development frameworks rarely arrive empty. They come pre-loaded with visions of what good governance, sound economics, and democratic transition should look like, modeled overwhelmingly on Western institutional experiences and presented not as one possible path but as the universal destination. Through policy conditionalities, benchmarking systems, and the authority of "best practice," a narrow range of futures is defined as realistic. Everything outside that range is rendered impractical or utopian.
This is Gramsci’s common sense in action: the naturalization of a particular imagination so complete that it no longer appears as imagination at all. It appears as expertise. And expertise, unlike politics, is not supposed to be argued with.
The effect is imaginative foreclosure that is harder to resist than repression precisely because it does not feel like power. It feels like competence.
2. They mortgage the future
Epistemic control is only half the story. The other half is money. And money, in the international development architecture, is never neutral.
The most powerful enforcement tool is not the framework itself. It is the architecture of consequence behind it. When the IMF withholds a loan because a government refuses its prescribed reforms, the World Bank typically follows. Regional development banks align. Bilateral donors grow cautious. And when rating agencies downgrade a country’s creditworthiness, the cascade accelerates: borrowing costs rise, investors withdraw, and the government finds itself financially isolated not because its alternative path was tried and failed, but because it was never permitted to be tried at all. The future was foreclosed before it could be imagined, let alone built.
Debt is not only financial. It is temporal. When governments are locked into cycles of repayment and fiscal austerity, the future is no longer open. It is already claimed. Budgets are structured around obligation rather than possibility. Reform agendas are set by creditors rather than citizens. And the horizon of what feels politically achievable contracts to fit what international lenders will permit.
Austerity does not simply manage resources. It manages imagination. It scales down ambition, normalizes constraint, and makes alternative futures appear not just difficult but irresponsible. The activist who imagines a different economic arrangement is told she is not engaging with politics. She is being unrealistic. The language of fiscal discipline becomes the language of what is allowed to be imagined.
This is how debt disciplines not only governments but also citizens. It captures the future in advance. And in doing so, it determines what can be conceived in the present.
3. They set the terms of reality
It is not only that international institutions impose frameworks. It is that their dominance in producing knowledge about the Arab world systematically crowds out the knowledge that could form the basis of alternative visions.
When the IMF publishes a country report, it does not simply describe an economy. It sets the terms of the conversation. It determines which indicators matter, which problems are named, and which solutions are thinkable. Arab researchers, local think tanks, and civil society organizations that produce alternative analyses of the same reality do not get censored. They get marginalized by scale, by authority, and by the simple fact that a government negotiating with international creditors will orient itself toward the knowledge those creditors recognize as legitimate.
The result is a quiet but devastating asymmetry. Locally generated knowledge, grounded in lived experience, shaped by the priorities of the people actually inside these societies, is systematically delegitimized not through suppression but through irrelevance. It does not make it into the negotiating room. It does not shape the conditionalities. It does not define what counts as a viable reform. And knowledge that cannot enter the room where decisions are made cannot expand the imagination of the people those decisions affect.
This is how knowledge becomes power: not only through what it reveals, but through what it makes unnecessary to know.
4. They institutionalize tokenism
The international consultation industry, its high-level dialogues, multi-stakeholder forums, and civil society convenings, operates by a similar logic to the national participation theater described above, but with an additional layer of sophistication. Here, the performance of inclusion is globalized. Activists travel, sometimes across continents, to participate in processes whose conclusions were drafted before they arrived. Donor governments receive the evidence of engagement they need. Civil society organizations consume months of capacity producing inputs that leave no trace.
But what makes this mechanism more than simple waste is the star system it produces and depends upon. These spaces do not include randomly. They select. The activist who is measured, who speaks the language of the room, who frames her critique in terms the institution can absorb without discomfort, gets invited back. The activist who is loud, who names power directly, who refuses the terms of the conversation, gets labeled. Not repressed. Labeled. She becomes the radical, the emotional one, the activist who has not yet learned to be constructive. As if radical were an insult. As if naming the architecture of a system were a failure of professionalism rather than an act of intellectual honesty.
The result is a self-reinforcing circuit. The same faces travel from Geneva to New York to Beirut to Nairobi, their legitimacy sustained by continued access, their continued access sustained by never saying anything that would threaten it. These are not bad people. They are rational actors inside a system that has made palatability the price of presence. And in doing so, the system has ensured that the voices most likely to imagine genuinely differently are the ones least likely to be in the room.
The damage is not only wasted time. It is the slow training of a generation of activists to perform imagination rather than practice it, to speak the language of futures thinking inside rooms that have already decided what the future will be.
5. They make hope feel naive
Edward Said argued, through his framework of Orientalism, that power operates through representation: that the stories told about a people shape what that people believe is possible for themselves. When the Arab world is represented, consistently and across decades, through the language of war, failure, and dysfunction, those representations do not stay outside. They are internalized. They become part of how citizens and activists understand their own capacity, their own horizon, their own right to imagine something categorically different. This is the predictable consequence of being seen, generation after generation, through a lens controlled by power.
And then there is Gaza.
A real-time proof of everything this mechanism argues. The world has watched, documented by the people experiencing it on their own phones, the selective enforcement of international humanitarian law, the paralysis of institutions designed to prevent exactly this, and the calculus of strategic alliance overriding every principle those institutions claim to uphold. The International Court of Justice has spoken. The UN has spoken. The dying has continued.
For activists across the Arab world, Gaza has not only been a humanitarian catastrophe. It has been an epistemological one. It has confirmed what many had long suspected: that the international order does not malfunction in the Arab world. It functions exactly as designed. The grief is immense, and the rage is legitimate. But beneath both sits something more devastating: the collapse of the belief that the institutions built to protect human dignity were ever built to protect ours.
I have sat with a Lebanese colleague whose house was destroyed by Israeli forces and tried to find the words to say: we need to imagine different futures, we need to build scenarios, we need to think long term. I felt the obscenity of that ask. When your nervous system is in permanent alert, when crisis is not an interruption but the soundtrack of your life, when you have watched the people you love lose everything, political imagination does not feel like resistance. It feels like an insult to the reality in front of you. And yet. It is precisely here, in this impossibility, that the question of imagination becomes most urgent and most necessary.
The region has not known peace as a governing condition. Palestine, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya: wars produced by geopolitical interest, fueled by a military industrial complex backed by the most powerful economies in the world. When moments of genuine popular possibility emerged, they were systematically crushed. Revolution glimpsed, then crashed. Hope extended, then withdrawn. Repeatedly, across a generation. Each crash did not return people to where they started. It left them somewhere worse: more guarded, more certain that the horizon is fixed, more convinced that wanting something different is a preparation for loss.
It produced al qahr / القهر. There is no precise English translation for this word because English has no single condition for what it contains: deep anger, deep resentment, a profound sense of injustice, and deep despair held together as one state, inseparable, mutually reinforcing. Not anger alone, which can fuel action. Not despair alone, which can be survived. But all of it fused, sitting in the body and in the collective memory, making the future feel not just difficult but forbidden.
This is how a global order that applies international humanitarian law to some and suspends it for others, that grieves certain lives and renders others invisible, decides which peoples get futures and which get managed. Its most lasting damage is not through force alone. It comes from convincing an entire civilization, through the accumulated weight of crashed revolutions and unanswered atrocities, that hoping for something different is not courage. It is naivety.
And yet, across this entire history, someone has always refused to accept that verdict. That refusal is where political imagination survives. It is also where this piece began.
Conclusion
Naming the architecture of constraint is not a consolation prize for the absence of solutions. It is the beginning of a strategy. Before you decide whether to smash a system, reform it, or build something alongside it that renders it obsolete, you have to see it. Clearly. Without the mystification that power depends on for its reproduction.
This is what political imagination actually is, and I want to be precise, because the word has been softened into something decorative and then dismissed as a luxury. That dismissal is intellectually lazy and politically convenient. Political imagination is not optimism. It is a capacity: to see how power was constructed historically, so you know it can be deconstructed. The hope is not the starting point. It is the logical consequence of understanding. When you see that the walls around your thinking were built deliberately, structurally, by institutions that benefit from your passivity, you understand they are not natural. And what is not natural can be contested.
I know this not as theory but as lived experience. The Tunisian revolution happened not because people were certain it would come, but because they refused to accept the existing order as permanent. That refusal was not innocent. It was disciplined. It was the product of seeing, clearly, that what power had constructed, people could undo. Political imagination was not what people felt after the revolution; it was what made it conceivable before.
The feminist movement taught me to be surgical: to trace the architecture of power, not to produce despair but to locate the entry points. To understand that even a small act, when you can see the larger structure it belongs to, is never futile. You know what you are part of. You know why it matters. You fall back ten steps, and you do not collapse because you have the map.
So when you finish reading this, if you find yourself seeing an institution differently, recognizing the consultation theater, feeling the theft of time, noticing the prefabricated future being handed to you as common sense, that is not a small thing. That is the beginning. We do not need everyone to see everything at once. We need enough people, seeing clearly enough, to refuse to pretend they don’t.
Knowledge of the system will not liberate us directly. But it will liberate our minds. And a liberated mind is the only place a different future has ever begun. Revolutions do not happen often. But revolutionary ideas are always available to those who allow themselves to think.
Ikram Ben Said
Co-Founder & President of New Visions
[1]Veteran organizer Marshall Ganz sees a path to power under Trump | Waging Nonviolence
[2]Con (census): Turns out national censuses are controversial, especially in the countries where information is most tightly controlled
[3] Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much
