Call for Analytical Contributions On the Changing Conditions for Civic Space in the Middle East and North Africa

HuMENA for Human Rights and Civic Engagement invites researchers, human rights defenders and practitioners to propose short analytical contributions on the shifts reshaping civic space and human rights work across the Middle East and North Africa, and in exile.

We are looking for documented analysis that explains how repression is changing, where protection systems fall short, and which legal, digital, economic and institutional factors determine whether defenders, movements and organisations can keep working. Proposals that connect questions usually treated separately are particularly welcome.

What we are looking for

Short analytical pieces. This call does not cover op-eds or long research reports. A contribution should:

• Start from a clear analytical question, and set out how the argument will be built.
• Make a specific claim or offer a specific explanation.
• Explain a mechanism, a pattern, an institutional practice or an emerging shift.
• Show what the phenomenon means for defenders, movements, organisations or civic participation.
• Add to what is already known or argued, rather than restating published material.
• Connect the case at hand to a wider question about civic space or the protection of defenders.

Writing should be clear and direct, grounded in verifiable facts and sources, with links or references for the central claims.

A contribution may focus on a single country, compare contexts, or address a regional or cross-border pattern. Where it focuses on one country, the case should serve to explain a broader phenomenon rather than survey the human rights situation there.

We are not asking for extensive field research or a full report. Professional experience, legal cases, interviews, available data, documented incidents and lived experience are all valid bases.

What we will not consider

• Op-eds and personal position pieces not grounded in analysis and evidence.
• General country overviews, and chronologies of violations with no analytical question behind them.
• Statements, appeals and advocacy material, and organisational or project profiles.
• Literature reviews with no clear contribution, and restatements of international standards not applied to a specific question.
• Long research or investigative reports.
• Texts that repeat published work without new evidence, a new reading or a new angle.
• Material that would expose victims, defenders or sources to undue risk.

Who reads these contributions

Contributions are written for actors working on policy, protection and funding: EU institutions and EU delegations in the region; UN mechanisms, including the Special Procedures and the Universal Periodic Review; donors and emergency and protection funds; defender protection programmes; and regional and international organisations and coalitions, parliamentarians, and policy teams at technology companies.

We translate contributions and use them in our editorial and advocacy work with these actors. Naming the audience does not mean contributors are expected to adopt its language or its analytical frames.

Thematic areas

These are broad directions. The breadth of the list is not an invitation to broad proposals: we are looking for one specific question, not a survey of an entire area. A proposal does not need to sit within a single heading.

1. Civic space and the changing tools of repression

• Restrictions on freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association.
• The use of registration, taxation, banking systems, and counter-terrorism and anti-money-laundering legislation to constrain civil society.
• Administrative obstruction that paralyses organisations without formally banning them.
• Pre-trial detention, case rotation — recycling detainees into new cases on release — travel bans and asset freezes.
• Restrictions that continue after release, pardon or the completion of a sentence.
• The role of banks, universities, professional associations, employers and service providers in restricting civic work.
• Temporary emergency measures becoming permanent instruments of control over public space.

2. Protection of defenders and the sustainability of human rights work

• Gaps in existing protection mechanisms for defenders.
• The cumulative psychological and professional toll of repression, burnout, secondary trauma, and the sustainability of human rights work.
• Responsibility for care within organisations, networks and donor institutions.
• The effects of repression on defenders’ families and dependants.
• What happens after emergency support or temporary relocation ends.
• The loss of work, income, expertise and institutional memory.
• Integrated protection combining physical and digital security, mental health and advocacy capacity.
• Gaps facing women defenders, LGBTQI+ defenders, refugees, stateless people and defenders with disabilities.

3. Exile, mobility and transnational repression

• Continued targeting of defenders through their families, property, documents or professional relationships.
• Denial of passports or nationality, and pressure exerted through consular services.
• Extradition requests, Interpol notices and security cooperation between states.
• Deportation threats, and the overlap between migration policy and the protection of defenders.
• How precarious residency and asylum status affect freedom of expression and public participation.
• Surveillance, intimidation and smear campaigns within diaspora communities.
• Banking, funding and legal restrictions on organisations working from exile.
• Relations between defenders inside the country and the organisations and individuals working from outside.
• Unequal access to international resources and platforms within movements in exile.
• Return, or attempted return, in the absence of real guarantees.
• Transnational repression between states within the region itself.

4. Technology and the digital restriction of civic space

• Targeted surveillance and commercial spyware, procurement and export routes, and accountability gaps in European dual-use export controls.
• Internet shutdowns, throttling and network disruption around protests, elections and crises.
• Digital ID systems, SIM registration, and the linking of services to national identity as tracking tools.
• The criminalisation of protection tools themselves: encryption, VPNs and secure messaging applications.
• The use of communications data and digital evidence in prosecuting activists.
• Automated content moderation and its effect on Arabic-language content, the mass removal of documentation, and the loss of evidence that follows.
• Generative AI in smear campaigns and fabricated content, and its disproportionate use against women defenders.
• Government contracts for automated social media monitoring, and the move toward predictive policing.
• The relationship between platforms and governments: takedown requests, trusted flagger mechanisms, and regional ownership of and investment in technology and media companies.
• Data localisation laws and local hosting requirements, and their effect on the security of organisations’ data.
• The exclusion of civil society from digital payment infrastructure and crowdfunding platforms.
• Organisations’ dependence on foreign technical infrastructure, its cost and its effect on independence.
• The risks organisations create by collecting sensitive data themselves, and the limits of their own use of AI tools.

5. Legal and economic dimensions of civic action

• The use of terrorism, cybercrime, false news and public morals legislation against civic actors.
• How short funding cycles and compliance requirements affect the independence and sustainability of organisations.
• The exclusion of informal or unregistered groups from funding.
• The relationship between funding and research and advocacy priorities.
• The economic cost of continuing human rights work, who can absorb it, and who is pushed out by it.
• The political economy of the surveillance and control industry in the region, and the role of private companies in supplying repression technology and services.

Cross-cutting issues

We expect these to be addressed within the areas above, rather than treated as a separate subject:

• Gender: the distinct forms of targeting women defenders face, including digital violence, smear campaigns aimed at reputation and sexuality, and family pressure.
• Sexual orientation and gender identity, and their effect on public visibility and access to protection.
• Age: the situation of young defenders and students, and breaks in the transfer of experience between generations.
• Disability: access to protection mechanisms, funding and participation.
• Legal status: refugees, asylum seekers, stateless and undocumented people.
• Ethnic, religious or linguistic belonging, and its effect on exposure to repression and on access to protection.
• Location within a country: the difference between the capital, the periphery and marginalised regions.
• Language as a factor in access to international mechanisms and to funding.
• The intersection of these factors, rather than each treated on its own.

Who can apply

The call is open to anyone with direct knowledge of the context or subject they propose to write about, inside the region or in exile and the diaspora, regardless of institutional affiliation. This includes people working in registered organisations and in unregistered initiatives and movements.

Joint proposals from two or more authors are welcome. The fee is set per contribution, regardless of the number of authors.

What to include in a proposal

Full texts are not required at this stage. A proposal should contain:

1. A working title.
2. A summary of the idea, 300–500 words.
3. The main analytical question.
4. The central argument the contribution will develop.
5. Method: how the argument will be built, which sources or evidence it will draw on, and how the central facts will be verified.
6. The geographic scope or the cases it will cover.
7. A brief note on what the contribution adds to existing work or debate.
8. A short professional biography.
9. The proposed writing language.
10. Any security, confidentiality or pseudonymity considerations.

How we select

• Relevance to civic space, the protection of defenders, or human rights work in the region.
• Clarity of the analytical question, the method and the argument.
• Originality of the angle, and whether the proposal explains a pattern or mechanism beyond the individual case.
• Quality of the evidence and sources, and attention to how the phenomenon affects different groups differently.
• Whether the piece is realistic within the length and timeframe, and consistent with do-no-harm principles.

We also take geographic and thematic range, and range of experience, into account across the selected contributors. We may come back with a limited clarification question before deciding. The number of commissions is limited, and a proposal that is not selected is not necessarily a weak one.

Everyone who submits receives a reply. Selected contributors receive a written commission confirming the assignment, with initial editorial notes, the delivery date, and the administrative and financial steps.

Fee and payment

EUR 150 for each contribution commissioned and approved in its final version. For co-authored pieces, the fee remains EUR 150 per contribution.

Payment falls due on approval of a final version meeting the standards agreed at the point of commissioning. Contributors receive at least one revision round to address editorial comments before we decide whether to approve the piece.

Editing

We work with selected contributors to develop the text before publication. This may involve reviewing structure and argument, verifying facts and references, requesting specific clarifications or changes, reviewing protection and do-no-harm considerations, copy-editing, and translation into Arabic or English where agreed.

A commission is an assignment to write the contribution; it is not a commitment to publish a first draft as submitted. We will not make substantive changes to the argument or content of a text without consulting the author.

Originality, accuracy and the use of AI tools

Contributors are responsible for the originality of their material; the accuracy of information, quotations and references; disclosing any prior publication connected to the piece; obtaining the necessary consents where they draw on testimony or information that is not publicly available; and disclosing any conflict of interest bearing on the independence of the analysis. Material already published in full will not be accepted.

On AI tools, we apply the following rules:

• They may be used for supporting tasks such as translation, proofreading or organising notes.
• They may not be used to generate the analysis, the argument or the main text, nor to produce references, quotations or facts.
• Every reference and quotation must be verifiable directly against its original source.
• Any use of these tools must be disclosed on delivery.
• Sensitive or unpublished information concerning people at risk must not be entered into any AI tool.

We may withdraw a commission or halt publication where we find plagiarism, fabrication, unverifiable references, material misrepresentation, or a breach of protection and security standards.

Copyright and republication

The author’s name stays on the piece. HuMENA retains the right to publish it on our platforms, translate it, promote it and quote from it in our editorial and advocacy work. Translations are reviewed with the author wherever possible.

Authors may republish the piece elsewhere two months after we publish it, with a clear statement that it first appeared with HuMENA for Human Rights and Civic Engagement, and a link to the original.

Protection and confidentiality

Some subjects and contexts carry security risks, and contributors may ask to publish under a pseudonym or without being identified publicly. The pseudonym applies to publication only: contracting and payment require the contributor’s real identity and a bank account in that name. We treat this information confidentially, and do not publish or share it.

Do not include names or details that could identify people at risk without their consent. Protection and do-no-harm considerations form part of the editorial review. Information submitted with proposals is used only for assessment, correspondence and the financial administration of this call.

How to submit

Send proposals to: [email protected]

Subject line: [Country or region] – [Working title]

If naming the country in a subject line carries risk, use the region instead (Maghreb, Mashreq, Gulf, cross-border).

Deadline: Friday, 30 October 2026, 23:59 Brussels time

Unsolicited full texts will not be considered, nor will proposals that omit the information listed above.