In October 2026, two of our legacy grantees RESURJ and the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), collaborated on a report titled “Beyond Anti-Gender & Anti-Rights: Rebranding States and Engineering Citizens in the SWANA Region.” This report alleges government oppression across the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region through state rebranding initiatives, which aim to make governments appear progressive and modern abroad, and citizen engineering, which is used to enforce control at home.
This report’s main argument focuses on five countries using these state rebranding initiatives: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Tunisia. These states aim to project an outward image of progress to attract foreign investment and trade, while using disinformation at home to control public discourse and manage their reputations. One strategy the report alleges these states implement is using highly publicized, top-down women’s empowerment reforms to create a facade of progress while repressing feminist dissent. These countries also invest in culture, sports, and technology to conceal the oppression and exploitation that result from their control.
For example, the report argues states use concepts like pinkwashing, in which they brand themselves as LGBTQ+ friendly despite often being far from it. They also use greenwashing, presenting themselves as using advanced technologies to promote sustainability, particularly through energy sources. This strategy is used by Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and the UAE to remain central actors in debates over energy politics.
The report also focuses on citizen engineering, defined as states constructing an image of the ideal citizen to promote hierarchies of gender, sexuality, class, and race. This is particularly evident in Tunisia, Egypt, and Sudan, where state legitimacy remains fragile due to economic crises and prolonged war. These states use social norms and legislation to control who can and cannot reproduce while limiting the reproductive rights of the most marginalized.
States allegedly promote broad concepts like “morality” and “family values” to criminalize behavior that does not align with their vision of an ideal citizen. These policies come at the expense of LGBTQI+ people, Black people, migrants, and refugees.
These policies of state rebranding to gain power abroad and citizen engineering to enforce social control at home reinforce one another. These strategies allegedly represent new forms of contemporary authoritarian governance rooted in colonial structures and sustained through capitalism, which rewards repression and fuels these regimes.
Resurj and AWID argue that these findings are particularly important today because violence, surveillance, criminalization, and the persecution of activists and marginalized communities are being normalized by states that claim to be tolerant and progressive.
Overall, this report takes a deeper look at the labels of “pro-rights” and “anti-rights” and analyzes the complexities and contradictions of authoritarianism today.
