Your decision to travel anywhere in the world is political. The infrastructures that make our travel easy are often the same ones that make other people's lives impossible. And when we choose not to interrogate where our money goes, which governments we legitimize, which forms of violence we look past, we participate in the quiet sorting of human beings into categories of worthy and disposable.
This summer, there are a number of festivals being promoted across occupied Western Sahara and Palestine: glossy events, influencer invitations, film premieres, pride celebrations. Spectacle layered over stolen territory.
Dakhla is a city in occupied Western Sahara, a territory the United Nations still recognizes as a Non-Self-Governing Territory, whose indigenous Sahrawi people have a right to self-determination that has never been honored. Morocco has occupied Western Sahara since 1975, in violation of international law and repeated UN resolutions.
The Dakhla Film Festival presents itself as a celebration of African cinema, of culture, of creative exchange. What it does not present is the political reality that makes it possible: a Moroccan state apparatus that has systematically displaced, imprisoned, and surveilled the Sahrawi population in order to consolidate control over a territory rich in phosphates and Atlantic fishing grounds. Culture is welcomed as long as it entertains without challenging power. The moment it asserts dignity, history, or political presence, it becomes uncomfortable and thus rejected. A film festival in Dakhla does not challenge power. It decorates it, and offers the international community a red carpet to walk while the Sahrawi people are denied the right to return to their homeland.
Sahara Fest takes a different approach to the same logic. Aimed squarely at influencers, digital nomads, and extreme sports enthusiasts, it offers kite surfing, DJ sets, white sand dunes. A "Sahrawi Village," curated for content creation, packaged as local color, in a territory from which Sahrawi people have been expelled. A territory where those who remain live under military occupation and constant surveillance, and where activists who travel to document human rights abuses are deported. A festival that brands itself with Sahrawi identity while the Moroccan state suppresses that identity is not cultural exchange. It is extraction. And those of us who attend, photograph, and share it become its distribution network.
This extractive and exploitative logic extends beyond festivals. The Odyssey, a major international film production, was filmed in Dakhla without the consent of the Sahrawi people. A film should not use occupied land as its backdrop while the people whose land it is have no say, no credit, no share of the proceeds, and no political recognition in the final product.
This pattern of using culture to launder occupation is not unique to Western Sahara. In Israel, a four-day LGBT pride festival called Pride Land is scheduled for June 2026 at the Dead Sea, billed as the largest Pride event in Middle East history. Pinkwashing is the name given to the use of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgrendervisibility and celebration to distract from a state's record of violence and dispossession toward another group. It requires only that the state uses the event to promote a fake openness while simultaneously denying freedom, land, and life to Palestinians. Queer liberation cannot be built on the suppression of another people's liberation. These are not separate causes. Solidarity is not divisible.
Decolonizing travel is not a refusal to ever move, to ever see, to ever be somewhere unfamiliar and moved by it. It is a refusal to outsource responsibility. It means asking: Who benefits from my presence here? Whose invisibility is the condition of my experience? What government am I legitimizing with my tourist money? What story am I helping to tell, or suppress, with my Instagram post? Tourism is not innocent. By transforming a place into a commodity, it decides who stays, who leaves, and who profits.
Nonviolence is not passive and demands coherence. It is action that begins when we refuse to forget how systems are connected, when we insist that tourism cannot be separated from displacement, that culture cannot be separated from politics, that mobility cannot be separated from power. Being a global citizen is not an identity but a practice. It means ethical consumption, collective pressure, boycotts, divestment, and organizing. It means cultural participation, but also defending communities and movements when visibility comes with risk.
In concrete terms, right now, that means:
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Not attending, promoting, or sharing content from festivals used to normalize occupation.
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Pressuring film festivals and cultural institutions to reject productions filmed on occupied land without community consent.
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Connecting the dots, for ourselves and in our communities, between tourism, occupation, and the normalization of dispossession.
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And attending events and cultural celebrations that are built with and for indigenous communities, rather than over them. Nonviolence International is currently participating in the organizing of two of these, the Sacred Awakening Pilgrimage in Palestine and the Sahrawi Solidarity Summit, held in the refugee camps near Tindouf, Algeria, in January 2027.
