I study governance. Or I did, before governance became something I could see being demolished in real time.
When I took this position three months ago, I was supposed to settle into the familiar work, reading about institutions, systems, the slow erosion or maintenance of democratic processes. The kind of work where you can maintain distance. Where the subjects exist mostly historical or theoretical, rendered safely in past tense or conditional mood. My colleagues send me papers on institutional resilience, on how democracies fail gradually or suddenly, on the mechanisms of state control. We discuss these things over coffee or in seminar rooms. We cite precedent. We apply frameworks. We make sense of chaos by rendering it legible, by finding the pattern, by asserting that we understand how these things work.
Instead, I spend my evenings checking news, watching the thing I’ve spent years analyzing get dismantled piece by piece. I read casualty counts. I scroll through videos of neighborhoods I walked through as a child. I wait for word from family members who may or may not still be able to send messages. This is not how I was supposed to use my training.
In December 2023, my mother was killed in Gaza. I’m mentioning this not because it’s the point, but because it’s the lens, the thing that changed what I’m able to pretend about my field. A message didn’t finish reading. Then my brother called at 3:47 a.m. Taiwan time, his voice already gone before he said anything. She was conscious when they found her after the strike. Internal bleeding. Lungs crushed. The medical system couldn’t help because the medical system had ceased to function under the weight of the injured and the dying. This is not theoretical. This is not a case study. This is my mother, and the systems I study allowed this to happen, managed this, made it possible.
After that, I couldn’t do the work I was trained to do anymore, not in the way it’s supposed to be done. You’re supposed to maintain analytical distance. You’re supposed to separate the observer from the observed. These are foundational professional rules. Good ones, probably; they’re supposed to protect objectivity, prevent bias, keep research clean. They’re also impossible when you’re watching people you know disappear systematically while studying the systems designed to make disappearance legal. They become impossible the moment you stop being an observer and become instead someone who is being observed, someone whose erasure is being managed by the very systems you’re trying to understand.
The particular form of governance being implemented in Gaza has a shape to it. It’s recognizable if you know what to look for. It’s the same shape that appeared in other places, at other times: the architecture of separation, the legal infrastructure of control, the administrative mechanisms that make violence systematic rather than chaotic. Stripped of certain euphemisms, sure, but the structure remains consistent: classify a population as “security threat,” restrict movement, destroy infrastructure, make normal life impossible, then when people die or flee, call it an “unfortunate consequence of necessary security measures.”
What interests me, what keeps me up, is how openly it operates now. There’s no pretense anymore. No fig leaf of legality or claim of proportionality. The state simply decided that certain populations could be treated as problems to be solved through removal or death, and it did that thing, and most of the world watched or looked away or accepted the explanation that this was necessary or defensive or complicated. And my field, the study of governance, of institutions, of how states work, produced thousands of pages of analysis explaining why this happened, how it worked, what the strategic logic was. We made it intelligible. We made it writable. We made it professional.
My wife’s father was erased from the Palestinian civil register in 1967. I didn’t grow up thinking about this as something remarkable. It was just family history, the way certain uncles or cousins had incomplete documentation, the way some paperwork was difficult to obtain. But as I got older and started reading about governance systems, administrative law, the machinery of state control, I began to understand what had actually happened to him. It wasn’t a glitch. It wasn’t an error. It was a decision. The state made a technical change to how people were categorized, and he disappeared from the official record. He continued to exist, he had a life, he had children, he still lives in Algeria, but legally, officially, he ceased to be countable. This is a particular kind of violence. It doesn’t kill you, but it unmakes your claim to existence within the systems that matter. It makes you illegible to the state, which in practice makes you vulnerable to anything the state might decide to do.
For a long time I thought about this as an abstract problem, an interesting case study in how administrative systems function as tools of control. I wrote about it academically. I discussed it in seminars. I used it as an example of how states manage populations through bureaucratic means rather than crude force. Everyone agreed it was a good example. Elegant, even. The kind of thing that makes sense when you’re trying to understand how power works.
But my wife’s father’s erasure, which took decades and a bureaucratic change to accomplish, is now happening in real time in Gaza, at scale, in ways that are visible if you know where to look. The hospitals that would have kept records of births, deaths, illnesses, were destroyed. The civil registry where people were registered, destroyed. The infrastructure that proves you existed has been systematically removed. Thousands of people now have no official record. They’re missing in ways that the systems designed to account for them can no longer manage. No longer is this administrative violence an abstract concept. This is administrative violence as lived experience, as something you can document, something you can point to and say: this is how it works when theory becomes policy.
When I tell colleagues about what I’m working on now, I don’t talk about my mother. I talk about governance structures and administrative systems and the technology of statecraft as a tool for elimination. I use the vocabulary of my field. I maintain the distance I was taught to maintain. And the further I go into the work, the more I understand that this vocabulary, this distance, this frame, it’s not neutral. It’s actually doing something. It’s a way of preventing certain conclusions from being reached. It’s a way of keeping certain things professional and therefore manageable, containable within the boundaries of academic conversation.
Here’s what I mean: if I say “the state is implementing a policy of demographic change through targeted violence and administrative erasure,” that’s one kind of statement. It’s clear. It’s direct. It has moral weight. But if I say the same thing using the language of my field, “the state is utilizing governance mechanisms including spatial control, documentation systems, and population management to achieve territorial reconfiguration,” something happens. The language becomes more precise in some ways, more vague in others. It becomes writable. It becomes publishable. It becomes professional.
Both statements describe the same reality. But only one lets you sit comfortably in a university office and write about it without the weight of what you’re actually describing crushing you completely.
I’m not saying academic language is useless. I’m saying it serves a function beyond just clarity. It serves a function of containment. It allows horrific things to be discussed in seminars and published in journals and debated in terms that keep them at a manageable intellectual distance. The distance that I was told I needed to maintain as a researcher.
The problem is that distance is a choice. And I’m not sure I believe I have the right to make it anymore.
My oldest daughter was born in Gaza in 2013. She’s twelve now. She remembers the place, not everything, but enough. She remembers the sea. She remembers visiting family. She remembers the heat and the density, the way the city felt. After we left in 2014, she grew up in Algeria, then Taiwan. She became trilingual, Arabic with her family, Mandarin at school, English as the language she uses to move between worlds. She’s spent most of her life away from Gaza, but she carries it with her. It’s part of how she understands who she is.
In 2022, we went back for two months. A family visit. My wife wanted the children to know their cousins, their aunts and uncles. We walked through Khan Younis, through neighborhoods where I grew up. We visited family we hadn’t seen in years. It was joyful and complicated and ordinary in the way family visits are. We took photographs. We ate food my mother had cooked her whole life. We made plans for the next visit, thinking it would happen the way previous visits had happened, thinking this was just one visit in a series of visits, not the last one.
We didn’t know it was the end of something.
A few months later, my brother’s voice on the phone at 3:47 a.m. My mother, conscious, bleeding internally, dying in a place where help couldn’t reach her. My wife’s face when she understood what was happening. Our oldest daughter, old enough to understand that something fundamental had shifted, that the place she came from was no longer safe, was no longer fully habitable, might not exist in the way she remembered it for much longer.
This past month, my youngest daughter asked me if we could go back to Gaza. She was born in Taiwan in 2017. She has some memory of our visit. But she’d heard enough from her siblings, enough from us, to understand that it was somewhere. A place. Somewhere that mattered. Somewhere with family.
I told her the truth: not right now. The place is too dangerous. Too broken. Too much is gone.
She accepted this, the way children do. She moved on to other things. But I couldn’t move on. I’ve been stuck on that conversation, on the question of what it means to tell a child that the place where her family comes from has been made uninhabitable. What it means to be a researcher on governance and democracy while your daughter asks about going home and you have to explain that home has been systematically made impossible. What it means to understand the systems that did this, to have studied them, to have written about them, to have maintained the proper analytical distance while watching them operate on the people you love.
Here’s the thing that keeps me awake: we have good scholarship on this. Decades of it. Books about state collapse, about ethnic cleansing, about administrative violence, about how democracies fail and how authoritarian systems entrench themselves. We have frameworks for understanding what’s happening. We have historical precedent. We have case studies from other places, other times. The scholarly apparatus is comprehensive. It’s sophisticated. It’s well-reasoned.
And somehow, despite all of this accumulated knowledge, the systems continue. The erasure continues. The infrastructure of elimination continues. Gaza continues. We write. It happens anyway.
I’m not saying scholarship is worthless. I’m saying there’s something about the very act of making something scholarly, of rendering it legible, of putting it into a framework, of making it writable and publishable and discussable in the proper register, that accomplishes something beyond just understanding. It accomplishes a kind of permission. It makes the thing survivable for people who don’t want to confront it directly. It gives you a language for talking about the worst things in a way that doesn’t require you to say: this is unacceptable, this must stop, I refuse to participate in systems that allow this.
My colleagues are good people. They care about justice. They care about understanding how systems fail, how power operates, how we might build better things. But we’re also embedded in institutions that benefit from maintaining certain analytical distances, certain scholarly languages, certain ways of framing that keep uncomfortable things manageable and discussable rather than urgent and demanding action.
After my mother died, people asked me if I was going to write about it. They meant: turn your grief into something usable, something that might convince people who are currently unmoved. This seems to be what’s expected of people from places where bad things happen, you have to make your suffering legible and persuasive, as if your dead need to justify their existence by serving as rhetorical tools for the living. Make your pain argue something. Make your loss mean something beyond just loss.
I didn’t want to do that. I still don’t. My mother’s death isn’t an argument. But my work, the field I spent years preparing for, that became something else entirely after she died. It became unavoidable. I couldn’t look away from what the systems I study actually do when they’re aimed at the place and the people I come from.
I moved to Taiwan in 2016 with my wife and our oldest daughter and son. We left Gaza because it was suffocating and dangerous and limited. We left because we wanted to give our children space to breathe, room to grow up without the constant weight of occupation, without being told constantly that their existence was disputed, contested, managed. We wanted them to have a future that wasn’t about survival.
For a while, it worked. My second child was born in Algeria in 2015. My third was born here in Taiwan in 2017. All three are now trilingual. They move between languages the way they move between spaces. Arabic at home with us, Mandarin at school, English as the language they use to navigate the world. My wife and I never learned Mandarin. We speak Arabic to each other, English to the wider world. Our children became the translators, the bridge-builders. They carry all of us in how they speak.
In August 2025, I started this position. I was told I would work on governance, on understanding how political systems function, and on the questions that fascinate me. I was told I could do public talks about my research. I was told I wouldn’t have to teach, but I could engage with the public, share what I know. I was excited. I thought I could do good work here. I thought I could maintain a certain kind of distance from what was happening and still be useful, still contribute something to the world.
I was wrong about the distance. Or rather, I was right that distance is possible, but I was wrong about what maintaining distance actually means. It means choosing not to say certain things. It means using certain language instead of other language. It means being complicit, through silence and framing and professional boundaries, in the thing you’re supposedly studying and trying to understand.
My relatives are still there. Not all of them. Some have managed to leave. But many are still there, in what’s left of Gaza, trying to survive in a place that’s being systematically made impossible to survive in. We get messages when the internet works. We know who’s alive because they send messages. When messages stop coming, we wait. Sometimes they come back. Sometimes they don’t.
This is not something I can maintain analytical distance from. This is not something I can render into academic language and make professional and manageable. Those are my friends. Those are my relatives. This is the place where I grew up and the people I love and the thing I study all colliding in a way that makes every bit of training, every framework, every scholarly apparatus utterly inadequate.
What I’m supposed to do is produce analysis. What I actually do, most days, is think about my mother. How she was conscious when they found her. How her lungs were crushed and she was bleeding internally. How the medical system couldn’t help because the medical system had been destroyed by the very systems I study. How my brother had to call me at 3:47 a.m. Taiwan time and tell me our mother was dead. How I had to tell my wife. How we had to tell our children. How our oldest daughter understood, in a way that a child shouldn’t have to understand, that the place she came from had become a place where people die without help, where systems fail, where governance means something very different than what we’re taught it should mean.
I think about what my mother probably understood in those last hours. I think about my brother’s voice. I think about my wife seeing the news before it was confirmed, before it was real, before we had to figure out how to exist with this new fact in the world. I think about my youngest daughter asking if we could go home and me having to explain that home is gone, or going, or being unmade, or all of those things at once.
This is not supposed to be what I do with my research position. I’m supposed to be working on governance and democracy and institutions. I’m supposed to be producing something useful, something that might be published, something that maintains the proper register and boundaries. Something that doesn’t require me to look at what’s actually happening and say: this is what the systems I study do. This is what they’re doing right now. This is what they did to my mother.
Instead, I’m here, trying to figure out what it means to study the mechanisms of your own erasure. Trying to figure out if there’s a way to do this work that doesn’t require pretending you’re not personally invested in the answer. Trying to figure out if scholarship is a form of resistance or a form of accommodation, and whether there’s actually a difference.
I don’t know if there is.
Maybe that’s what I’m actually studying now: not the systems themselves, but the function of scholarship about systems. Not how governance works, but how the analysis of governance functions as a kind of permission. How we’ve built an entire apparatus of understanding that allows the worst things to proceed because we’ve made them intelligible, manageable, writable about in the proper register. How distance is a choice, and how making that choice means accepting a certain complicity.
I don’t have an answer to this. I just know that I can’t pretend anymore—not that my research is separate from what’s happening, not that studying governance is neutral, not when those systems are destroying the people I love and the place I come from.
This is my crisis and my work now: figuring out what scholarship looks like when you refuse to look away, when you refuse to pretend distance is possible, when you understand that the observer and the observed are not actually separate things at all.
