From the moment that they seized Romina from her family home in a pre-dawn raid, the Iranian security forces designed every aspect of her two-week detention to terrify her.

Romina’s captors were determined to convince the young woman that she should give up on women-led street protests demanding improved rights.

Weeks of angry clashes and deaths – in what has been billed as Iran’s first feminist uprising – have presented an unprecedented challenge to the Islamic Republic. It is struggling to find an effective response.

At 3 a.m. one morning in late September, some 30 regime enforcers descended on the home in the northwestern city of Kermanshah to arrest Romina, as if she were wanted for murder – and not simply for peacefully attending protests.

Romina, who asked to be identified only by that name, was taken from her family, blindfolded, and driven into the night.

“They didn’t stop insulting me, repeatedly calling me a whore. I was just crying,” recalls Romina, who has a master’s degree in philosophy and owns an online business. “The touching and groping was a nightmare.”

So were the taunts to teach her a lesson about wanting to “overthrow the government.”

Upon arrival at what she later learned was an interrogation facility belonging to the intelligence unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Romina was pushed – still blindfolded – down a staircase, but managed to catch herself on a rail to break her fall.

During six blindfolded interrogations over the next three days, Romina, who today wears short black hair and a jovial smile, says her interrogator slapped her repeatedly in the face, pushed her off her chair, and made clear that “execution was definitely the verdict.”

GETTY IMAGES

Two young women take pictures in Azadi Square with their hair flowing proudly free, Nov. 1, in Tehran.

“He once even tangled my hair in his hand and twisted it. It was terrifying,” recalls Romina. “I have always been a fearless girl, but that place was the end of the world to me. Especially when he said, ‘So, a women’s revolution, huh? You’ll be hanged from this lock of hair. Then you will see the outcome of your revolution, you [female dog], you mercenary.’”

Like legions of Iranians – often young Gen Zers – Romina had been prompted to take to the streets by the mid-September death in detention of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old picked up by Iran’s so-called morality police for letting too much hair show from under her headscarf.

In a burgeoning wave of protests, Iranian women have defiantly removed the mandatory headscarves and torched them – while adding to the flames portraits of Iran’s aging supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Pro-regime militia and riot police – despite the use of live ammunition and brutal beatings – have failed to contain the unrest. The demonstrators’ focus quickly widened beyond the intrusive enforcement of strict “morality” rules to include long-standing grievances, from economic misery to corruption. More than 15,000 Iranians have been arrested in more than 130 cities.

Yet as the protests spread with visceral intensity to every corner of the country, hard-line stalwarts doubled down, declaring that covering women’s hair was not only a pillar of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, but also divine law.

The political and cultural chasms that divide Iranian society – between its Western-leaning secular youth and its aging ideologues, for example, and between its elite “haves” and a profusion of disenfranchised “have-nots” – have rarely been so wide and so obvious.

From fear to resolve

The trajectory of Romina’s experience helps explain why these protests – with their determined fist-pumping under the slogan “Women, life, freedom” – have outlasted crackdowns that have left more than 300 protesters dead, and shaken Iran’s self-declared “Government of God” to the core.

During her detention, Romina was accused of working with Iran’s archfoe Israel, or with militant Kurdish separatists, decadeslong enemies along with the United States and Britain, whom Iranian authorities blame for fomenting the unrest. She was told daily she could be executed.

IRNA/AP

Competitive climber Elnaz Rekabi addresses the press in October upon return from South Korea, where she competed without wearing a headscarf as required by the Islamic Republic.

But then something unexpected happened.

“As time went by, I felt I was getting stronger,” recalls Romina, as she realized she could not “confess to those stupid lies.”

“They knew it. They knew that those charges were just ridiculous,” she says. After five days she was sent to Dizel Abad Prison in Kermanshah, where, among the petty thieves held there, she found four fellow protesters, all younger – and very unbroken.

“They were so brave; I couldn’t believe it,” recalls Romina. “All four told me they would definitely go back on the [protest] line when they were released, but with new caution and tactics, so they don’t get so easily arrested.

“And yes, so have I.”

Jail did not create fear in Romina, but dispelled it.

Imprisonment “only strengthens my resolve and these people’s,” says Romina, with a renewed air of defiance. “The crackdown has completely failed. This revolution is well on its way. And I am happy I am part of it.”

Women’s turn

Since the 1979 revolution swept away the shah and ushered in an era of strict Islamic rule, Iran has been no stranger to protests – or to their violent suppression.

In 2009, for instance, the pro-democracy Green Movement – which at one point drew 3 million Iranians into the streets of Tehran to protest the result of a stolen election – was crushed after eight months. And in 2019, nationwide demonstrations sparked by rising fuel prices lasted only a few days. Security forces firing live ammunition into crowds reportedly killed 1,500 people.

But never before have protests centered on women’s issues or been led by women, even spearheaded at times by high school girls without head coverings chanting their hopes for the regime’s overthrow.

And some protesters say this time they have abandoned nonviolent methods and are determined to fight back. Ridicule and further disobedience greeted Revolutionary Guard Commander Hossein Salami’s late October declaration: “Today is the end of the riots. Do not come onto the streets.”

Surprised to be facing a largely female vanguard, Iran’s clerical leadership – whose hard-line president, Ebrahim Raisi, has overseen a wide-ranging crackdown on women’s rights and civil society – has been at a loss.

Officials say they plan to conduct mass trials in Tehran, handing down the “harshest” punishment to “teach a lesson” to more than 1,000 detained “rioters.” Some are accused of moharebeh, or “waging war against God,” a charge often leveled against suspected spies that can lead to the death penalty. Five death sentences had been issued in three days, by Nov. 16.

Yet such measures risk eliciting more outrage than obedience.

MIDDLE EAST IMAGES/AP

Many of the young protesters taking to the streets were born after the 1979 revolution and have only known life under the Islamist regime.

“The all-powerful Islamic Republic is fighting kids. They are not just killing them, but bashing their heads in. It’s shameful,” says Sussan Tahmasebi, co-founder of an equal rights campaign for women two decades ago in Iran and today head of Femena, an organization that supports female human rights defenders.

Since last year, she says, Iran has waged an “all-out assault on all forms of civil society,” which it stepped up with the arrest of hundreds of rights defenders, lawyers, activists, and journalists immediately after Ms. Amini’s death.

“Three generations of women have had to deal with this level of humiliation,” says Ms. Tahmasebi, speaking from Washington.

“Young women, the Generation Z that we keep hearing about, really reject control of their bodies. They reject being told what to wear, and they’re asking for freedom; they are asking for serious political change,” she says.

Iran’s rulers, she says, will have to decide whether enforcement of dress code rules is “where they want to exert their energy, when they have such an incredible level of broad dissatisfaction among everybody – not just young women.”

“They cannot expect to force people – especially this younger generation – to do things so beyond what they are willing to do ... forever,” she says. “It’s going to be very difficult to put this genie back in the bottle.”

That much was clear as thousands clogged roads in their march to Ms. Amini’s grave Oct. 26 to mark the 40th day of mourning after her death. The protesters descended on the remote northeastern Kurdish town of Saqqez despite official warnings to stay away and the mass deployment of riot police.

At Ms. Amini’s grave, women took off their head coverings and chanted, “A death for a headscarf – how long will we endure?”

And as security forces battled protesters and fires burned across the country, another chant was heard: “This will be the year of blood – we will topple Khamenei!” It has been heard often since, at other “40-day” mourning gatherings, as each killed protester is remembered.

The roots of inflexibility

Just as strident have been statements from regime ideologues, who have warned about the high price of “sedition” and declared that enforcement of “hijab and chastity” should be ramped up even further.

“Any negligence on the issue of hijab is tantamount to treason,” declared Mohsen Mahmoudi, the hard-line cleric appointed by Ayatollah Khamenei to head the government’s powerful Coordination Council for Islamic Propagation. Violations, he said, would happen only “over our dead bodies.”

Likewise, if the morality police weaken or abandon their enforcement of the hijab, “the Islamic Republic will quickly collapse; indeed it will decay and rot,” warned Hassan Rahimpour Azghadi, a member of Iran’s Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution, another powerful state institution.

OFFICE OF THE IRANIAN SUPREME LEADER/WANA/REUTERS

Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei attends a Nov. 2 meeting with students in Tehran.

Instead of signaling any chance for compromise on enforcement – or recognizing that their own policies and corruption may have contributed to citizens’ hopelessness and rage – Iranian officials accuse outside forces, ranging from the CIA and Israel to Western-based Persian-language television channels, of inciting Iranians against their leaders.

“It’s so hard for them to accept a little bit of responsibility and blame,” says a veteran analyst in Tehran, who asked not to be identified further out of security concerns.

Yet he thinks it is possible the regime could take a step back.

He notes that the protesters’ slogan “Women, life, freedom” has a positive and inclusive ring, and “has the potential to unite millions – it is already doing that.”

Already, some supporters of the regime “are distancing themselves from the way this is going,” he says. “They don’t want to see dead people. They don’t want to see kids in their high schools being raided by the police and beaten up. ... This is something that – if the pressure grows – might lead the regime to show some flexibility.”

For now, though, any hints at willingness to engage with protesters have been overshadowed by threats of force. That uncompromising mindset predates the 1979 revolution: Many Iranians date the beginning of the end of the shah’s authoritarian rule to his admission that he had made mistakes.

The Tehran analyst also cautions that the Islamic Republic’s most fervent supporters care less than they once did about popular support for the regime.

Indeed, one foundational narrative of the Islamic Republic lionizes the truehearted underdog, in the form of Imam Hossein, who chose to die in the seventh century with his handful of followers rather than surrender to tens of thousands of enemy troops.

The analyst recounts a story from Iran’s post-election protests in 2009, when he spoke to a leader of the Basij, a militia under the command of the Revolutionary Guard, whose unit had broken up a group of students.

“I asked him, ‘What if the people don’t want you?’” recalls the analyst. “His answer was, ‘Yes, it could be possible. But actually, the right side of history has always been the minority – look at Imam Hossein.’”

“This thinking, I know, goes on in the minds of many” hard-liners, the analyst says. “When a majority are rioting, it doesn’t mean that they are right.”

MIDDLE EAST IMAGES/AP

Many protesters, like this woman flashing a peace sign, are driven by both frustration with the current regime and hope for a better future.

The culture war

Disdain for “the other” permeates both sides of Iran’s social divide, as the Islamic Republic’s strictest rule-makers ossify in their 80s and 90s, and Gen Z “Zoomers” increasingly reject their diktat.

“Even if there is a change of regime, this culture war is not going to go away,” says Kian Tajbakhsh, a political scientist now at Columbia University, whose work in Iran led to two long periods of incarceration.

“On the motivational side, these kids are really fired up and angry – it’s a complete anachronism, this [hijab] situation, and they’ve had it,” Dr. Tajbakhsh says. And though the authorities might ease the pressure by limiting the enforcement of hijab rules, or reducing punishments, Dr. Tajbakhsh sees a clash of colliding worldviews preventing that.

“The Islamists don’t feel they coexist with other citizens who are equally citizens like they are, but simply have very different points of view,” he says. “They see them as kafir, as infidels, [and] foreign in that they don’t belong to this revolutionary belief.”

The protesters are despised as “unfortunate leftovers” of the idolatrous, deposed monarchy, he says, or “products of a global culture that is so powerful that even a righteous Islamist revolution can’t prevent it ... influencing this young generation with the wrong ideas.”

“They’ve always thought, ‘We will never ... get rid of these kinds of disturbances, or alien elements, so we’ll just have to manage them,’” adds Dr. Tajbakhsh. “They are not citizens to be assuaged, to be entered into dialogue with.”

What that denigrating mindset means on the streets of Iran was evident at a recent battle at the vast Ekbatan housing complex in Tehran, where live rounds and tear gas were fired into apartments during raids to stop people chanting from balconies against the regime.

“We swear to God that we will decapitate even our own families if we need to,” one battalion commander reportedly declared over a loudspeaker.

A broad front

Some regime tactics have succeeded in dampening protesters’ enthusiasm. One 17-year-old student from Sanandaj, in the western Kurdish region of Iran, describes being severely beaten and repeatedly threatened with rape for days at a Basij center in September, before he was transferred to a prison. After 10 days he was briefly brought before a judge, who set bail at $10,000.

The student’s father had to ask a friend to put up the title to his house as collateral, which means the young man has to be extremely careful to avoid any further brush with authorities. “Friends are looking at me like a hero,” he says. “But if I get arrested during those rallies again, I’ll be doomed.”

The protesters, however, seem largely unbowed.

A math teacher from Sanandaj explains why, noting that her girls’ school “keeps receiving threatening messages” from the education department that teachers will be held accountable if students chant.

“Are the students frightened by such pressure?” asks the teacher, who gives the name Yosra. “From what I can see, no. They are a different species; they won’t accept humiliation.”

Also unbowed is a team of three men in west Tehran who have joined the Mahsa Amini “revolution” in their own way. The middle-aged men, all engineers, fear the consequences for their families of participating in street protests, so have instead bought spray paint.

Wearing masks, the three go out on nighttime missions. One man drives, another films, and the third sprays anti-regime slogans and the names of those killed on the walls of militia, government, and religious centers.

“It’s a war, and no one can stop it,” says one, who asked not to be named.

“We are all like drops, but we will become rivers and then oceans once we are united, and that is exactly when the regime – no matter how dreadful and brutal it might appear – will crumble and drown.

“Believe me,” he adds, “we are already smashing ... the myth of their invincibility.”

An Iranian researcher contributed to this report.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Newly elected members of the House of Representatives arrive at the Capitol for an orientation program, in Washington, Nov. 14, 2022. Midterm election results have reassured America’s closest overseas allies, while strengthening President Joe Biden’s hand in dealing with other countries.

The unexpected results of last week’s midterm elections are resonating far beyond America – because international friends and foes were watching too.

Through bifocals.

Their eyes are now trained mainly on the close at hand, the short-term implications of a reinvigorated Biden administration. But they are also looking into the distance, weighing a long-term question that is less predictable, yet no less important to their relations with Washington: the political future of former President, and newly declared 2024 presidential candidate, Donald Trump.

The short-term view assesses issues of policy, above all Washington’s response to Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Yet the longer-range view, with memories still fresh from Mr. Trump’s four years in the White House, raises deeper questions about the United States’ democratic fabric, and its place in the world.

On both these counts, at least for now, the election results have reassured America’s closest overseas allies, while strengthening President Joe Biden’s hand in dealing with other countries.

The widely predicted “red wave” – and the prospect that large numbers of Trump-backed candidates would win – sparked concerns in Ukraine that Washington’s support might weaken. Also unsettled were European partners in the pro-Ukraine alliance that Mr. Biden had worked hard to put in place before Russian troops attacked nine months ago.

Alex Brandon/AP

U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping shake hands before their meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 summit meeting in Bali, Indonesia, Nov. 14, 2022.

While the outcome of the war remains far from resolved, Russian President Vladimir Putin can no longer count on a post-election American retreat from Ukraine, even though Republicans have won a slim majority in the House of Representatives.

The results also made Mr. Biden’s first meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping this week easier than it would have been if he had arrived at the G-20 summit in Bali on the heels of a midterm rout. Mr. Xi himself had just secured an unprecedented third term in power, and the two men began charting the course that Mr. Biden had been hoping for, toward an overt rivalry that still leaves space for cooperation in areas of mutual interest.

The midterm results could have an impact on relations with another world leader in attendance at the G-20, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis have long relied on the U.S. as their key military ally. But the kingdom’s de facto ruler remains incensed by Mr. Biden’s condemnation of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, especially the 2018 murder of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.

Not only has he rebuffed Mr. Biden’s request to increase oil supplies to help deal with a Ukraine-related energy crisis, but he also backed an OPEC decision to cut production. The timing of the announcement last month was widely viewed as a bid to damage the Democratic Party’s chances in the midterms – especially given the crown prince’s close personal relationship with Mr. Trump.

Now, he’ll have to reckon with a quite different outcome.

Still, for Washington’s principal allies, the view through the other lens of the bifocals – focused on Mr. Trump’s future prospects – looks unsettling.

They will take some reassurance from indications that a number of leading Republican Party figures oppose Mr. Trump’s White House bid, and from growing doubts among political pundits that he would succeed.

But concerns remain, nonetheless.

It is not rooted in partisan preference. Allied leaders long ago learned to live and work with presidents from both political parties – a lesson made easier by the broad continuity of American foreign policy through the post-World War II years. There is no reason to anticipate that they would be alarmed should a Republican candidate other than Mr. Trump win the presidency in 2024.

The reason U.S. allies are keeping their eyes firmly fixed on Mr. Trump is the degree to which he rewrote – indeed tore up – America’s political rule book both at home and abroad.

The former president dismissed, denigrated, and even clashed with America’s closest postwar partners in Europe and in Asia, while cultivating friendlier ties with leaders such as Mr. Putin and Crown Prince Mohammed.

Andrew Harnik/AP

Former President Donald Trump gestures after announcing he is running for president for the third time as he speaks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, Nov. 15, 2022.

NATO’s European members have bitter memories of Mr. Trump’s accusations that they were mere freeloaders, and of his desire to pull America out of NATO altogether. Those memories are sharpened now that the newly strengthened transatlantic alliance is providing key support to Ukraine in its war against Russia.

It is a different memory, however, that may best explain allies’ abiding preoccupation with Mr. Trump, despite the setbacks that many of his chosen candidates experienced in the midterms.

It is an image that has less to do with America’s foreign policy than with its role as an example to others, and it generated an electric shock worldwide: the scene at the U.S. Capitol nearly two years ago, when supporters of Mr. Trump sought violently to overturn the presidential election that he had lost.

Amid the chorus of condemnation from allied leaders worldwide, even two prime ministers who had supported and worked closely with Mr. Trump in office – Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Britain’s Boris Johnson – denounced the attack on the Capitol as “disgraceful.”

And Mr. Johnson’s remarks convey why the memory still lingers so powerfully.

“The United States,” he said, “stands for democracy around the world.”

Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters

People in costumes of polar bears and activists with the Nuclear for Climate movement protest at the COP27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, Nov. 11, 2022.

The obstacles activists have had to overcome in order to protest at this year’s climate change conference in Egypt, COP27, have been immense: interrogations over planned chants, the vetting of handwritten signs, questions over whether one’s traditional attire implied a political message, to name just some.

“There is almost no space for protests or activism. We are concerned on how this will affect the outcome at this COP,” says Joseph Sikulu, from Tongatapu, quickly rolling up his sign after a two-minute protest in the conference’s “blue zone.”

“It is the job of civil society to be here to hold these conference negotiators to account,” says Mr. Sikulu, a member of the Pacific Climate Warriors, “and so many voices that should be here are not present.”

And yet this tightly controlled climate conference seems a bastion of freedom compared with what Egyptian citizens confront beyond the walls of this Red Sea resort town.

From Cairo to Alexandria, amid bubbling economic discontent, Egypt’s crackdown on liberties – once mainly targeting journalists, activists, and opposition politicians – is affecting each part of Egyptians’ daily lives at a time they feel financially pushed to the limits.

Apolitical Egyptians are finding that an absence of human rights and freedoms they once viewed as political or abstract is now degrading their dignity, even robbing them of the simplest joys. 

In Cairo, the laughter that once permeated the city’s streets is now rarely heard.

Even asking someone about the weather fills their eyes with fear as they consider whether their response could land them in jail or if they should answer at all.  

“Will this put me in trouble? Does the government know you are talking to me? Do you have permits?” residents continuously ask a permit-holding reporter.

“As an Egyptian, one doesn’t even need to be an activist to know prison is only one wrong word away,” says Abdelrahman ElGendy, an Egyptian activist and former political prisoner who spent years in prison, via messaging app.

Building a new Egypt

While crushing dissent, however, the government and its military-owned companies build and build. They say they are creating a better and more secure Egypt for their people. A series of megaprojects that have improved services and daily life include new highways, improved airport terminals, a widened Suez Canal, and a new, glossy, and perfectly manicured capital in the desert.

Taylor Luck

Activists protest against the fossil fuel industry's presence at COP27 and alleged attempts to water down wording from COP26, at the global climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, Nov. 15, 2022. It was one of a handful of brief, small protests amid the tightly controlled conference in repressive Egypt.

It was part of the bargain many Egyptians, seeking stability and prosperity, struck in 2013 by backing Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and a return to military rule after tumultuous years of revolution.

But that deal is seeming one-sided:

• Behind newly beautified buildings’ facades are crumbling, decades-old interiors.
• Apartment blocks that are painted on one side facing highways remain stained and sooty on the others.
• New or widened highways that cut through residential areas lack proper drainage and are prone to flooding.
• The hundreds of Egyptians displaced by the megaprojects and, amid great media fanfare, given new housing, now face higher rent and bills for maintenance they cannot afford.
• Much of the new development that is displacing local communities is geared toward wealthy people.
• New Cairo, in the desert, remains largely empty, devoid of residents.
• And anyone who dares to puncture the government’s depiction of a perfect Egypt is challenging the state – and risking jail. Expressions of unhappiness here are viewed as a political threat.

There is little for Egyptians to be happy about these days.

President Sisi’s megaprojects were largely carried out with borrowed funds, and Egypt’s national debt, now $158 billion, or 88% of gross domestic product, and increased borrowing have led it to devalue the pound.

Most recently, to secure a $3 billion International Monetary Fund aid package, the currency slid 15% Oct. 27 to an all-time low of 23 Egyptian pounds to the dollar.

The resulting inflation, made worse by pandemic- and Ukraine-war-related supply chain issues, has led to a jump in food and energy prices and pushed many middle- and upper-middle-class Egyptians into poverty, and those in poverty into even more dire situations.

But few would dare say it out loud.

“Egypt has become a republic of fear in recent years,” says Hossam Bahgat, founder and director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, one of the last three licensed independent human rights organizations in the country. “There really is no room for work on the ground by civil society groups without the risk of arrest or political prosecution. This has taken away people’s ability to say how policies are affecting them.”

Amr Nabil/AP

Laborers work on a support column for a monorail line being built by Orascom Construction in Cairo, Jan. 31, 2022. The monorail is to link East Cairo with the new capital in the desert, one of Egypt's recent megaprojects.

Amr Magdi, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who himself was forced to leave Egypt because of his human rights work, concurs.

“The cost for peaceful protest or dissent in Egypt has literally been either murder or jail,” he says, “and we have seen tens of thousands of protesters arrested and prosecuted.”

But Egyptians are finding “dissent” is a kitchen-table issue.

“The regime is making policies that enrich the rich and hurt working-class people, and we cannot say a word,” says an Egyptian villager south of Cairo who requested anonymity. “We never thought human rights meant bread and affordable cooking gas.”

Clampdown in Cairo

Last week, as world leaders assembled in Sharm el-Sheikh, Cairo resembled a city under occupation. Gun-toting police officers prowled the streets; in some neighborhoods they stood on every street corner as armored vehicles rumbled back and forth.

Egyptian opposition figures located abroad had called on people at home to mount protests Nov. 11 to challenge Mr. Sisi at a time his security services presumably would be spread thin. 

The call filled Egyptians with dread: Whom would the police stop, who would disappear, who would pay the price?

According to independent media outlet Mada Masr and rights groups, even before COP27 launched Egyptian authorities had arrested 600 people, mainly young men profiled as potential protesters and taken from their homes or picked up off the streets.

“We don’t want another revolution or violence, but we are also suffering beyond the brink we can bear,” one weary Cairene said the evening before the planned protests. “We just want to live our daily lives in peace without looking over our shoulders.”

Said another: “We don’t want protests, we don’t want to go to jail, and we don’t want trouble. We just want to be able to feed our children and send them to school with a full stomach. Or, better yet, we want to leave.”

That Thursday, plainclothes police could be seen corralling Cairo residents into taking part in a pro-Sisi counterdemonstration.

In the end, no protests materialized in Egypt Nov. 11, just another cycle of repression and worry characteristic of Egypt’s capital in recent years.

COP27

Yet the bleakness of daily life in Egypt is why the global climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh has been a “ray of light” and a once-in-a-decade “chance for change” that Egyptian rights activists say they couldn’t afford to miss.

“In our view it has been a rare and useful opportunity for us to have the global spotlight on Egypt for a few weeks. The world has forgotten Egypt under Sisi because it appears to be a stable country in a very unstable region,” says Mr. Bahgat, among the loudest voices for Egyptian rights at COP.

“We think COP should go to wherever civil society needs to be seen and heard, and we definitely need to be seen and heard.”

Mohammed Sakah/AP

Laila Soueif, mother of jailed pro-democracy activist Alaa Abdel Fattah, who has refused food and water to demand his release, holds a letter from him during an interview with The Associated Press at her home in Cairo, Nov. 15, 2022. Members of his family reportedly were allowed to see him in prison Nov. 17.

Despite restrictions, and thanks to the work of Egyptian activists attending the conference through the sponsorship of Western organizations, Egypt’s human rights track record has dominated COP.

A central focus has been on Alaa Abdel Fattah, the hunger-striking Egyptian-British democracy activist. A figure in the country’s 2011 pro-democracy revolution, he has been languishing in Egyptian prisons for most of the last eight years.

The fate of Mr. Abdel Fattah, who stopped drinking water as world leaders gathered last week, was raised by the United States and Britain, mentioned in thousands of media articles, and brought up during President Joe Biden’s visit to COP27.

A letter from Mr. Abdel Fattah to his family on Monday stated he had stopped his hunger strike, and on Thursday family members said they were finally able to see him from behind a glass shield at the prison outside Cairo, Agence France-Presse reported. His sister, Mona Seif, tweeted that his health has “deteriorated severely in the past two weeks,” AFP said.

Rather than just highlight the plight of one activist, however, rights activists say they are out to make gains, clawing back some of the civil space from the Egyptian state.

Yet Western human rights observers at Sharm el-Sheikh warned that as soon as the government delegations and media outlets pack up their bags and fly out of the Red Sea resort this weekend, the Egyptian state will strike back and punish the Egyptians who dared speak out.

Lama Fakih, Middle East North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, issued a statement expressing such concerns.

“From surveillance to intimidation to outright arrests,” she said, “the behavior of the Egyptian authorities while the spotlight is on the country raises alarm bells about what may happen after COP27 is over.”

For Tim Tran and his wife, the house they purchased at the corner of Fourth Street and Bay Avenue had everything.

Just 45 minutes from downtown Houston, it could have been in any small, seaside town. Palm trees line the streets and salt fills the air.

Then the “Boardwalk Bullet” moved in.

The nine-story wooden roller coaster has towered over the block since 2007. The ride, part of a boardwalk entertainment district, sits about 200 feet from Mr. Tran’s home. A house on the other side of Fourth Street is only 50 feet away. Every few minutes, from noon until 9 p.m. (or 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekends), the ride pierces the salty air with roars and rattles and squeals.

“It’s so loud,” says Mr. Tran. 

The Boardwalk Bullet is loud, and perfectly legal. The ride meets local setback requirements, and because the town of Kemah doesn’t have zoning, those were the only requirements. There was no public hearing before the ride’s owner got a building permit, the Houston Chronicle reported in 2007.

Mr. Tran and his wife moved out 10 years ago – though they still own the house and run it as a short-term rental. “Ninety-nine percent” of renters don’t care about the noise, he says.

“Only the people that live there complain, and there’s only a small number of people,” he adds. “There’s not much we can do about it.”

Unlike most of the United States, several cities in this corner of Texas don’t have zoning. Houston is the most prominent example, the nation’s only major city in this category. In Space City, like Kemah, just about anything goes, and economic prosperity and affordability live side by side, with few regulatory burdens.

Is this kind of freedom a recipe for abundant and affordable housing? The reality is a bit more complicated, experts say. Houston is the most affordable of America’s five biggest cities, but it doesn’t rise near the top of the pack in broader national affordability rankings. And while it doesn’t have formal zoning, the city does have land use policies. This more relaxed regime has allowed for a greater diversity of housing stock, and perhaps inhibited gentrification (for now), but it’s bred environmental and health concerns in certain neighborhoods. 

“Houston isn’t exactly the free-for-all it gets portrayed as,” says Matthew Festa, a land use professor at South Texas College of Law Houston. “Houston is guilty as charged as being one of the most sprawling metropolises in the country,” he adds, “but it also makes it easier and less expensive to build affordable housing.”

Three votes against zoning

Why is Houston such an anomaly? One might think it’s because Houston is in Texas, and Texas can’t abide regulators telling you what you can and can’t do on your property. 

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

Memorial Crematory and Mortuary operates next to apartments and town homes. There is no zoning in Houston, which has helped keep the city relatively affordable, but it means some people live next to a crematorium or a concrete batch plant.

But every other major city in Texas has zoning. The reason Houston doesn’t is really because Houston residents have been able to vote on the question – three times so far, to be exact. The 1948 and 1962 votes both rejected zoning by a comfortable margin, and the most recent vote – in a low-turnout 1993 referendum – saw the anti-zoners prevail by about 4 percentage points.

Houston does have “de facto” zoning, Professor Festa says. Land use regulations include height restrictions, minimum lot size requirements, and historic districts. Still, the broad effect is that, while you can’t build anything anywhere in Houston, there are fewer restrictions.

Thus, you can have a house next to a roller coaster; or a house covered fence-to-roof in beer cans; or apartments, town homes, and an elementary school on the same street as a crematorium.

Home prices are cheaper here. The median home price in Houston ranked 77 among 187 American metro areas in the second quarter this year – around cities like Gainesville and Daytona Beach in Florida – according to the National Association of Realtors. 

Similarly, Houston is No. 20 in affordability, tied with Chicago and Atlanta, in a ranking based on incomes and housing costs among 56 U.S. cities this year. Half the U.S. cities were ranked as “seriously unaffordable,” according to the report by the Houston-based Urban Reform Institute and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Relaxed rules around minimum lot sizes seem to have enabled denser, more diverse housing – such as duplexes and town homes – in high-demand neighborhoods, according to a report last year by the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. It found there’s been more housing development inside Houston’s inner loop alone than in the entire cities of Atlanta, San Diego, and San Francisco/Oakland.

“That’s not to say that gentrification isn’t happening, just that it could be more severe,” says Luis Guajardo, a senior policy specialist at the Kinder Institute.

A tale of two neighborhoods

Beneath Houston’s broad pattern, experiences can diverge sharply by community.

In the Manchester/Harrisburg neighborhood at the mouth of the Houston Ship Channel, on a cold fall afternoon, the air carries hints of gas. The 16-square-mile community – more than 90% Hispanic, according to census data – is bordered by refineries to the north and east and a large rail yard to the south, and bisected by the Interstate 610 bridge.

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

A residential street in the enclave of West University Place. As a separate municipality inside Houston, West University Place has zoning, and thus a higher concentration of single-family homes.

About 15 miles west, homes in West University Place have one similarity – the occasional Astros flag. But this community, with tree-lined streets named after colleges and poets, is its own municipality inside Houston – and does have zoning, almost entirely for single-family housing.

“It’s like we’ve privatized zoning,” says Mr. Guajardo. “The city has devolved [that] responsibility to homeowner associations, which might be inequitable in what neighborhoods have access to it.”

Take deed restrictions. These are written agreements that restrict activities, facilities, and operations in a subdivision. They’re enforced by the city and typically need to be renewed every 20 or 30 years. Affluent neighborhoods have often kept theirs in place while other parts of town have seen them lapse. 

The city’s concrete batch plants are mostly in communities of color, the Houston Chronicle reported earlier this year, which lacked the rules or resources to fight them off. 

Houston also has a land use tool that allows certain areas to keep and spend a portion of their property tax revenue.

“Even without zoning, the communities with more resources and knowledge and capacity and access can kind of work around the legislative rules,” says Professor Festa.

Yet Houston’s de facto zoning regime isn’t as simple as the more advantaged benefiting at the expense of the less advantaged. The relatively low home prices make it easier for buyers to get onto the property ladder. And businesses are attracted by the relative ease of construction and development, which brings jobs.

In Third Ward, a historically Black community near downtown, residents are fighting a proposal to make one neighborhood an official historical district because the accompanying regulations would be unaffordable for most homeowners. The resistance echoes the city’s 1962 zoning referendum, when African American and Mexican neighborhoods decisively opposed zoning, associating it with segregationist housing policies of the New Deal era. 

On balance, “my perspective is that traditional zoning ... is an obstacle to equity, and it’s an obstacle to affordable housing,” says Professor Festa.

That view has been gaining traction beyond Texas. Oregon, California, and the city of Minneapolis are places that since 2019 have all been rolling back exclusive single-family zoning.

But Houston isn’t affordable on every metric. For the lowest-income residents, Houston doesn’t outperform other major American cities, zoning or no zoning. 

In fact, only Las Vegas had a larger shortage of affordable rental homes last year than Houston, where there were 19 for every 100 renters, according to a report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. That has translated into Houston having one of the highest eviction rates in the country. 

“Our lowest-income folks just don’t have options,” says Mr. Guajardo. “We might be closer [to being a model] if we solved that foundational problem that’s afflicting every large city in the U.S.”

Reuters

Vehicles drive past the Duvha coal-based power station in Mpumalanga province, South Africa.

The task of curbing climate change has taken significant shifts over the decades, from denial of the science to acceptance of the human causes; to pledges by countries to reduce carbon emissions; to an embrace of innovative, efficient solutions. The latest United Nations climate summit, held in Egypt, may mark another turning point – one from blame and victimization to cooperation and a shared responsibility. 

The global gathering opened last week under a pall of injustice. Poorer countries again sought money from wealthier countries to compensate for the disproportionate loss and damages from global warming. The issue remained unresolved. Yet a new model, known as “just energy transition plans,” has now taken hold. 

Last week, South Africa signed an $8.5 billion agreement with the European Union and individual Western governments to start weaning the country off the use of coal. That was followed yesterday by a similar agreement between coal-dependent Indonesia and the G-20 club of wealthy nations. India, Vietnam, and Senegal have all expressed interest in the approach.

Instead of basing climate justice on reparations and compensation, just energy transitions define the shift to renewable sources by an insistence on honest government, community prosperity, and recognition of individual worth. As German Chancellor Olaf Scholz noted, “Climate change and economic prospects must go hand in hand.” 

The South African deal, proposed in 2021 at the last U.N. climate conference, creates the template. 

The country depends on coal for almost 80% of its electricity needs. To break that dependency, the government says, it will need $98 billion during the first five years of a 20-year transition plan. That makes the funds pledged so far little more than a kick-starter. 

But it is what’s behind the money that counts more. The deal signed last week was a year in the making. Britain funded advance work in two coal-dependent regions to develop community-based economic transition plans so miners and other coal-industry workers and their families have future prospects. Germany provided technical expertise to measure how renewable energy can be patched into the existing grid. France funded development of a climate finance mapping and tracking tool to monitor corruption – a persistent problem in South Africa.

The pledged funding will be in the form of investments, grants, and loans issued at below-market rates. The Indonesia deal, worth an initial $20 billion, signals the start of similar on-the-ground collaboration. It, too, will focus not just on transforming a power grid, but building post-coal communities. 

That sense of caring can build vital public support for the huge transformations required to address climate change. A just approach, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said, ensures “that those most directly affected by a transition from coal – workers and communities, including women and girls – are not left behind.” Amid the vast sum of money needed to mitigate climate change or adapt to its effects, humanity is learning to tap its most abundant resource – the values that bind communities and nations.