Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alexandra Consterdine, Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Sport, Exercise and Health, Liverpool John Moores University
Olympic swimmer Ben Proud has become the first British athlete to join the Enhanced Games – a controversial new event that allows athletes from all over the world to compete using performance-enhancing drugs. The prize money on offer can hit US$1 million (£730,000). But the swimmer, who won a silver medal at last year’s Paris Olympics, has sparked sharp criticism from sporting bodies after announcing he would be taking part.
In essence, Proud’s decision challenges the core values of fair play and athlete safety. While he frames it as a pursuit of human potential, motivated by financial reward, critics argue it undermines clean sport, poses health risks and is very likely to damage his legacy.
It also leaves him unable to compete in future Olympic Games and raises questions about his suitability to receive public funding.
The Enhanced Games will debut in Las Vegas in May 2026. The event offers prizes of US$250,000 per event and US$1 million for breaking the world record. It was created as an alternative to sport controlled by the International Olympic Committee, with athletes being permitted to use substances approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These could include steroids, testosterone and growth hormones.
Athletes will compete in swimming (50m and 100m freestyle, 50m and 100m butterfly), athletic events (100m sprint, 100m/110m hurdles) and weightlifting (snatch, clean and jerk). So far, five elite-level swimmers have signed up, including four-time world champion Megan Romano. She is the first American and the first woman to commit. Australian Olympic swimmer James Magnussen has indicated that he will come out of retirement to compete in the 50m freestyle.
The event has had to look to alternative sources for funding. International venture capitalists and private investors have provided a multimillion-dollar investment into the project – reportedly Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal) and German entrepreneur Christian Angermayer are among those backing the project.
But outside the world of venture capitalism, the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) has labelled the Enhanced Games “dangerous and irresponsible”. The governing bodies Aquatics GB and UK Sport have condemned Proud’s decision.
As well as his Olympic success, Proud is also a former world and European champion in the 50m freestyle. So you might think he has little left to prove. But in an interview, the swimmer said his goal is to test the limits of human potential, and become the fastest man on the planet.
But, of course, the question of money is looming large. Proud has also admitted that this played a major part in his decision. Elite-level swimming, compared to sports like men’s football, rugby and tennis, does not offer big financial wins for athletes.
Proud claimed that prize money of US$250,000 would take “13 years of winning world championship titles” to earn. A gold medal at the world championships in 2025 would have earned a swimmer US$20,000 at most.
Inequality in sport
Within sport, there are deep divisions in terms of how it is financed and supported, with variations in sponsorship, commercial investment and viewing figures. At the high-performance level, this inequality is most keenly felt in minority sports such as swimming, where even highly successful athletes struggle for financial rewards.
In fact, the British Elite Athletes Association (the independent representative body) has warned that the majority of athletes funded by the World Class Programme from UK Sport will not be able to afford to stay in their sport until the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics without a funding increase.
According to a survey done by the association last year, two thirds of the 87 respondents who travelled to Paris in 2024 said they would be forced to quit before 2028. This could put British sport in a precarious situation with potentially serious ramifications.
It would mean that the number of athletes representing the UK would fall, with consequences for the longevity of sports programmes, community initiatives and grassroots schemes to get people more active. At a time of rising obesity levels, sedentary lives and declining health, the UK cannot ignore the positive effects of getting more exercise, bolstered by sporting role models.
So while it could earn him serious prize money, Proud’s decision is a direct challenge to clean sport values. And it risks normalising drug use in sport, undermining decades of anti-doping efforts. Experts have defined clean sport as being free of “drugs and other forms of artificial enhancements”.
What’s more, it pits athlete autonomy against their responsibility to the public. There is a tension between Proud’s decision to test his limits and the responsibilities he has as a role model – and a recipient of public funding.
And the health risks of performance-enhancing drugs is a problem. Even if FDA-approved, the use of otherwise-banned substances in competitive sport introduces unknown long-term health consequences, especially when used in extreme training environments.
This highlights the inherent contradiction of sport as a desirable, healthy activity, while at the same time promoting potentially dangerous practices.
And the impact on an athlete’s legacy and reputation cannot be overstated. Proud’s Olympic achievements are now likely to be overshadowed by his association with a movement widely condemned by sporting bodies. Regardless of his success at the Enhanced Games, his presence there could shut him out of the many opportunities that sporting heroes can enjoy long after they’ve retired.
Alexandra Consterdine does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
At the end of our conversation, Nathan (a pseudonym) kept repeating, almost to himself: “Perhaps we should have done more. Perhaps we could have done more. Perhaps there was something we could have done about the camp itself. About the dogs. We kept on hearing the dogs. Every night.”
Nathan, a senior surgeon in one of Israel’s bigger hospitals, was talking about the Sde Teiman camp, an army camp in the Negev desert in southern Israel which, following the October 7 2023 attack on Israel, was turned into a holding facility for detainees from Gaza.
Initially, this camp served to imprison members of the Nukhba force, the Hamas unit which led the massacre in southern Israel. But since then, and throughout Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza, Sde Teiman has been a “black site” in which Palestinians captured by the Israeli army inside Gaza were held, including many who say they were not involved in the fighting.
Nathan never stepped foot in the camp. But he was one of a small number of Israeli doctors who volunteered to work in a medical facility which operated next to it, where some of the most badly injured detainees from Sde Teiman received medical treatment. This facility was set up after many Israeli hospitals refused to admit anyone suspected of taking part in the October 7 massacre, many of whom were severely injured.
Nathan’s decision to serve in this facility was not a simple one, he explained to us. While he had no reservations about treating detainees from the camp, and saw it as his duty as a doctor to treat patients no matter who they were (especially if no one else would treat them), his work at Sde Teiman’s medical facility – which he has kept secret from family and colleagues – continues to haunt him. “Ultimately,” he said, “it made me into a war criminal.”
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We interviewed Nathan for a book we have been writing on torture in Israel. In our research, conducted over the past five years with the Israeli human rights organisation, the Public Committee against Torture in Israel (Pcati), we investigated the extent to which healthcare systems and other civic institutions have become complicit in the processes of torture that have become more widespread and brutal since the October 7 attacks.
After harrowing accounts also began to emerge from the medical facility, we set out to investigate it. Stories from this facility told of patients held in humiliating and degrading conditions, of sub-standard medical care leading to medical complications (including unnecessary amputations due to constant handcuffing), and of patients dying due to neglect.
Nathan, and two other doctors we interviewed who worked there, provide new insights into the conditions inside the medical facility – and more generally, the conduct of the Israeli healthcare system in the wake of the October 7 attacks. Their stories allow us to see, as they all made clear in various ways, how even people with the best intentions can become complicit in war crimes.
‘They were all in unbearable pain’
Shortly after the October 7 2023 attacks, Nathan got a call from the Israeli Ministry of Health asking him if he would be willing to treat some of those who had committed the atrocities. The ministry approached a small number of doctors after many Israeli hospitals and some doctors had refused to treat people widely regarded in Israel as savage terrorists.
Doctors have an ethical obligation to care for all patients, regardless of who they are or what they have done. Indeed, the Israeli healthcare system had prided itself on its long record of treating all patients equally, including enemycombatants, suicide bombers and Hamas leaders. But after the October 7 attacks, for reasons we explore below, hospitals started turning such patients away.
The medical facility at Sde Teiman was set up so detainees held in the main camp could receive medical treatment without having to be admitted to public hospitals. Recalling the first time he visited the facility, Nathan told us: “I had no idea where I was going or what to expect.” He did not expect it to be anything but a temporary fix – and certainly did not imagine himself working there for many months.
BBC News report on treatment of prisoners in the Sde Teiman detention centre, August 2024.
In the first few weeks, without adequate equipment, suitable medications, a functioning logistical apparatus and even a proper institutional affiliation, the doctors had to improvise and rely on their resourcefulness. “By the end, this facility was well-equipped compared to a field hospital … But the point is,” Nathan insisted, “a field hospital should be temporary; you cannot really perform operations in a tent in the middle of the desert.”
When we met at the end of 2024, Nathan was not at ease and seemed very worried. Several times during our conversation, he told us that “no one can know who Nathan is”. Seeing how concerned he was at being exposed, we were surprised he had agreed to be interviewed at all. But unknown to us, a few days before we contacted him, he had attended a public talk we gave about our research on torture being conducted by Israel. This is probably why, when we reached out, he immediately agreed to meet us.
In addition to Nathan and the two other doctors who worked in the facility, we also interviewed others who were involved in its operation in some way: two members of the Israel Medical Association’s ethics board, a medical ethics expert who advised doctors working in the Sde Teiman facility, and human rights practitioners who investigated it. We also interviewed medical staff and healthcare professionals from seven of Israel’s largest hospitals, as well as several Israeli government officials working in the healthcare system and Ministry of Justice.
While most interviewees spoke under condition of anonymity, Nathan was particularly guarded. He was mostly scared that he or his family would be targeted by rightwing Israeli activists if they knew he had treated “terrorists”. But he was also concerned about his colleagues’ reactions – even his direct line manager had no idea what he had been doing, beyond that he had been called up for military reserve duty.
Furthermore, Nathan wanted to protect himself from criticism from members of the leftwing community who saw anyone involved with the Sde Teiman facility as a war criminal. Yet it was clear that he too saw the very existence of the medical facility as a crime – even though he always tried to provide the patients there with the best possible care.
Indeed, Nathan told us that while working there, he had tried repeatedly to get the medical facility shut down. “The patients there could not receive the treatment they needed. They all needed to be admitted to a normal hospital.”
After many months, once “it was no longer an emergency situation” – and when Nathan realised his efforts to shut the facility down were futile – he felt he could not “be there any longer”, and quit.
Cuffed, blindfolded and wearing diapers
We approached Ben (also a pseudonym) for an interview because of his involvement with another human rights organisation, to ask about the medical treatment of Palestinians in Israeli prisons after the October 7 attacks. It was only during our conversation, when he heard that we were writing about the medical facility at Sde Teiman, that he told us he, too, had been called late in 2023 to serve there.
Ben, a much more junior doctor than the other doctors we interviewed, works in one of Israel’s public hospitals. He recalled being asked by a colleague if he would help perform a procedure on a patient from Gaza he had previously treated. He immediately got in his car and drove to Sde Teiman, following the directions he’d been given over the phone – not knowing exactly where he was going.
Once he got to the medical facility, Ben said he was astonished by what he saw. Even though this was late December and the place had been operational for more than two months, “patients were still wearing nothing but diapers”. He told us they were still cuffed to their beds and blindfolded at all times, including while receiving medical treatment. They were not allowed to get out of bed, so had to defecate in bed when they needed to relieve themselves.
Ben carried out the procedure he was called to perform. But once he got home, the reality of what he’d witnessed dawned on him: “I decided not to step into that facility ever again.”
Because they were cuffed, the nursing staff had to do everything for the patients. They washed them, changed their diapers, and even had to feed some of them liquid food through straws. These accounts were confirmed by the other two doctors we interviewed who had worked in the facility.
Doctors describe conditions inside the Sde Teiman medical facility: BBC News, May 2024.
Nathan told us several times: “You must emphasise the care and dedication of the nurses” who bathed, fed and cared for people few others were willing to care for. Yet while this was undoubtedly noteworthy, especially under those circumstances, most of these patients would have been able to go to the toilet, shower and feed themselves had they not been restrained to their beds 24 hours a day. Using such restraints indiscriminately on patients violates Israeli law, and is considered a form of torture according to ethical codes both in Israel and internationally.
“At first, [the cuffing] may have been necessary because we treated very dangerous people” who had just carried out a brutal massacre, Nathan explained. He described a severe attack on one female staff member which he witnessed, confirming: “We had several instances in which patients assaulted staff.”
But, he continued: “They had no justification after the first few weeks. By then, other precautions could have been introduced, and assessments could have been conducted to determine who might pose a danger to staff and still needed to be cuffed.”
Nathan said that eventually, many of the patients seen by the doctors and nurses were not dangerous. “Arrangements should have been made so those patients could be cared for in a general hospital in Israel.”
After visiting the Sde Teiman medical facility in late February 2024, members of the Israeli Ministry of Health’s ethical committee reported that all patients were still chained to their beds by all four limbs – despite the fact that, by the Israeli army’s own admission in December 2023, many Sde Teiman detainees were by then not suspected of being related to Hamas or other militant factions. Many of those incarcerated in Sde Teiman, including some who had been held for many months and were chained to their beds, would eventually be released without charge.
‘We did everything we could’
Nathan’s account was supported by our third interviewee, Yoel Donchin – a senior anaesthesiologist who also served in the medical facility for many months. Donchin described some of the patients he treated to the New York Times in June 2024, explaining that one was paraplegic, another severely obese, and a third had needed to use a breathing tube since childhood. Donchin concluded it was “highly unlikely” that any of them were involved in the fighting. “They take everyone,” he said, referring to the Israeli army’s actions in Gaza.
Since he had already spokenpubliclyabout his experiences in the facility, Donchin was easy to locate. Unlike Nathan and Ben, he was happy for us to use his real name, and had no reservations about his involvement there.
After he publicly defended his decision to serve in the facility, Donchin and the rest of the medical team working there was criticised by human rights organisations including members of Pcati’s board. Treating patients there, they claimed, was “a moral disgrace and a violation of every ethical principle” to which doctors must commit.
But, a couple of hours into our long conversation in his quiet home in a suburb of Tel Aviv, we began to reconcile the facts we knew about Sde Teiman with Donchin’s account of his time working in the medical facility. He equated the situation in Israel immediately after October 7 to “a multi-casualty event”, explaining that in such conditions, “medical ethics is different”. In the chaos of the first few weeks after the attacks, he told us, “no one knew what they were doing. The hospitals were swamped with patients and the system was overwhelmed.”
Donchin said that even some Israeli soldiers wounded in the Hamas attack could not get the full care they needed. In the aftermath of October 7, he told us: “The entire [Israeli] healthcare system was in complete disarray. In the first month, there was no state to speak about whatsoever.”
Within this chaos, Donchin told us: “We did everything we could.” He explained that when the nutrition patients needed was not supplied, staff would buy it themselves. When a patient needed to be seen by a specialist, they would use their personal networks to bring in colleagues with the needed expertise – either having them come to the facility or, when that was impossible, having them provide advice over a video call.
Yet while these may have been effective emergency measures, “they should not have been the solution”. Ultimately, Donchin said, these “compromises and improvisations” meant the doctors were operating under “a black flag of illegality”.
According to the medical ethics expert who advised doctors working in Sde Teiman: “In this first month, treating those who’d just taken part in the massacre posed particular challenges”, because some were very dangerous and aggressive. “General hospitals are not set up to treat patients who pose such risks to staff.”
However, he also said that “Israel had detailed contingency plans in place for such a scenario, which included preparing a dedicated ward for enemy combatants in one of the main hospitals. But those were never implemented.”
‘He should be left to rot’
Many of the nearly 200 Hamas militants who took part in the October 7 attacks and were captured inside Israel were wounded in the fighting. At first they were taken to general hospitals, but word quickly got out – leading to widespread reports of mobs raiding hospital wards, attacking staff and patients they suspected of being Palestinian.
To protect the safety of both patients and staff, Israeli hospitals began refusing to admit these patients. But some medical staff also expressed their “difficulties” with treating those whom they suspected of having committed the October 7 atrocities.
On October 11 2023, Moshe Arbel, Israel’s health minister at the time, officially endorsed this reluctance by issuing an ordinance stating that general hospitals should not treat “terrorists from Gaza”. This guidance also enabled Israeli hospitals to refuse treatment to any Palestinian arriving from any incarceration facility.
Staff working in some of these hospitals told us in the aftermath that they had regularly heard colleagues making statements such as “Gaza should be erased” or “as far as I am concerned, all babies in Gaza are terrorists and can die” – sometimes in formal staff meetings and in front of Palestinian colleagues.
We also heard stories of medical staff demonstrating explicit disregard to the injuries and wellbeing of those they suspected were part of Hamas’s Nukhba force – and in some cases, Palestinian detainees from Gaza more generally.
For example, Nathan described calling a senior specialist when he needed urgent advice about treating one of the detainees in Sde Teiman, only to be told: “As far as I am concerned, he should be left to rot.” And according to Ben: “On October 8, I witnessed a doctor inserting a tube into the lungs of a patient from the Nukhba force without anaesthetising him. There were likely other such cases.”
“Paradoxically,” Ben told us, “the doctors in Sde Teiman’s medical facility had a much deeper commitment and understanding of their responsibility to provide care to these patients.” It was in the general hospitals, he said, that he had found more “verbal violence, less care” – and some cases of physical abuse.
As an underequipped and understaffed makeshift facility, according to those who worked at Sde Teiman, if a patient needed urgent treatment that could not be provided on site, they would sometimes be taken to one of Israel’s general hospitals. Nathan described spending long hours on the phone each time, calling different hospitals until he could find one willing to admit a patient. But it was the very existence of the Sde Teiman medical facility that allowed many hospitals to shirk their responsibilities, since these patients were apparently already receiving treatment.
And when a hospital procedure was performed, the patients were quickly sent back to the Sde Teiman medical facility, as described in this leaked letter to Israel’s Ministry of Health from a doctor working in the facility:
Patients after major operations, such as abdominal surgeries for intestinal resections, are brought back after about an hour of post-op observation to the Sde Teiman medical facility, which is staffed most of the day by a single doctor, accompanied by a nursing team, some with no more than medic training.
Eventually, staff at the Sde Teiman medical facility managed to get some patients released from being handcuffed to their beds by all four limbs, and to enable them to wear hospital robes rather than diapers. But regardless of their effort to provide better care, and regardless of their important struggles and partial successes, to treat people in the Sde Teiman medical facility was, in the view of many observers as well as some of the doctors themselves, to become complicit in violations of international and Israeli law.
The anonymous letter submitted to Israel’s Ministry of Health claimed conditions in the facility often resulted “in complications, and sometimes even in the patient’s death”:
This makes all of us – the medical teams and … those in charge of us in the health and defense ministries – complicit in the violation of Israeli law, and perhaps worse for me as a doctor, in the violation of my basic commitment to patients, wherever they are – as I swore when I graduated 20 years ago.
The doctors’ dilemma
Ben only visited the Sde Teiman medical facility once, yet the regret stayed with him. “I should have turned around the moment I saw the patients were treated while naked and cuffed to their beds,” he told us. “To treat patients there was not only a violation of our ethical codes as doctors – it was to take part in war crimes, if not crimes against humanity. This was not something I was willing to consider.”
He continued: “To serve there effectively mediated the crisis that would have been caused had no doctor agreed to do so. The medical staff allowed the facility in Sde Teiman to continue operating, and the existence of the facility allowed the hospitals to refuse treating those patients.”
While the Sde Teiman detention camp held many hundreds of detainees over long periods, its medical facility could treat no more than 15 patients at a time. Usually, only detainees identified with acute injuries were received – often only after their condition had already deteriorated. This meant lesions would frequently get infected, according to our interviewees, leading to amputations of limbs that could have easily been prevented.
In the main detention camp, untreated illnesses led to complications, debilitation and, in some cases, death. The most recent public data shows that between October 2023 and July 2024, at least 36 detainees died inside Sde Teiman. To a slightly lesser extent, the withdrawal of care has also become the standard in other prisons and detention facilities where Palestinians are held. According to the most recent (still unpublished) data we have received from Physicians for Human Rights (Israel), from October 2023 to July 2025, 52 Palestinians have died within military facilities and 41 inside Israeli prisons.
Denying medical care to an imprisoned person may itself amount to torture. While commonly imagined as breaking someone’s bones, pulling out their fingernails or applying electric shocks, torture can take many other forms. When someone is sick or injured, denying them the treatment they need and preventing them from getting any pain relief can be a way of causing unbearable pain and unnecessary suffering.
For Donchin, to refuse to treat patients would have meant becoming an accomplice in this crime. “For me, the alternative – to provide no care at all, to show no compassion – was impossible,” he said, adding that it is one thing to think about these questions in theory, a completely different thing when you see a person suffering right in front of you.
In contrast, for Ben, the only right thing to do was to refuse to work inside Sde Teiman’s temporary medical facility – especially when state-of-the-art hospitals were only a short car drive away. “Treating patients there doesn’t save them, since it leaves them outside the healthcare system that could have given them the lifesaving treatment they so needed,” he told us.
But as we were concluding our conversation, he added: “There are no right answers here. It is a huge tragedy, no matter which way you look at it.”
The Sde Teiman medical facility was finally shut down in October 2024 when, following a petition to Israel’s High Court of Justice by several human rights organisations including Pcati and Physicians for Human Rights, the population of the main detention camp was significantly reduced.
By the time Nathan sat down to talk to us, the medical facility had been shut for a good few months. But the man we met was still utterly defeated, visibly broken. He kept asking himself if he had done enough – or if he should or could have done more. This is when he concluded: “Perhaps there was something we could have done about the camp itself.”
While he never stepped foot inside the main camp, he told us he could hear very clearly the yelling and the barking of the dogs. “Maybe we could have done more about the camp itself.”
Whereas Ben and Donchin seemed to draw some comfort from their belief that they had done the right thing (despite reaching opposite conclusions), Nathan did not share that conviction. On the one hand, it was clear to him that he had become complicit in crimes. The conditions in the medical facility failed even to comply with what he called the “stripped-down law” that Israel had adapted to treat these people – let alone international human rights law and all medical codes of ethics.
Yet at the same time, Nathan felt he could not abandon these patients. When we met him, he was still torn about what he had done, still wondering whether he had made the right decisions.
Comparing our findings with testimonies that have emerged over the last two years, we can say with confidence that the use of torture by the Israeli security forces has increased both in scale and severity since then – though this has been denied by the Israeli government and military.
According to numerousverifiedreports, many of the detainees in Sde Teiman were subjected to sexual violence ranging from forced nudity and humiliation to rape; constant cuffing that led to injuries and in some cases the amputation of limbs; and beatings using batons, metal bars and the butts of guns and boots, sometimes until detainees lost consciousness.
Similar practices were reported in almost all Israeli prisons and detention facilities where Palestinians were held after the October 7 attacks.
The stories of the doctors working at Sde Teiman should not distract from the gravity of this wider story of abuse and torture. But the dilemmas the doctors faced, and the impact it has had on their lives, show the complexities, if not impossibilities, faced by Israelis who are trying to resist the atrocities Israel has been committing in Gaza (and the West Bank) in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks.
A Palestinian hospital worker inspects damage to a bombed pharmaceutical warehouse in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza, May 2025. Anas Mohammed/Shutterstock
In its July 2025 report, Physicians for Human Rights Israel claimed that the “broader targeting of Gaza’s healthcare system” amounts to a dismantling of the “existing conditions of life with effects into the future”, and should therefore be seen as a violation of the UN’s 1948 Convention On Genocide.
The doctors we met, alongside the other medical staff in the Sde Teiman facility, attempted to counteract the dehumanisation and abandonment of life that allows genocides to happen. In different ways, they tried to stop the atrocity that was evolving in front of them and to remedy the conditions that made it possible. Yet they still, in their view, found themselves complicit in the very crimes they tried to prevent.
As much as their story is a story of the impossible dilemmas these doctors faced, it is also a story of people who at least did what they could to counter this almost-inevitable complicity. Not only by insisting on the humanity of the people in front of them, and therefore also of their own, but also by refusing to remain silent.
Response to this article
The Israeli Medical Association (IMA) was contacted by The Conversation during the editing of this article. Its response, which is reflected in the final article, included the following comments:
According to Israeli Ministry of Health guidelines, all patients in the Sde Teiman medical facility were treated according to conventional Israeli medical standards, meaning the level of care there was higher than what they would have received in Gaza.
The IMA has continuously spoken out on humanitarian issues throughout this war and will continue to do so. On August 5 2025, we reaffirmed our long-standing policy on the assurance of medical care during armed conflict.
The destruction of Gaza’s healthcare is tragic, but there is no “mass killing, detention, torture and abuse of medical personnel” [as was stated in the Physicians for Human Rights Israel report, July 2025]. There have been some medical personnel that were suspected or proven terrorists. The IMA has made it very clear that all patients are to be treated equally.
The Israeli military was contacted by The Conversation about the findings in this article, but did not provide a response. When previously contacted by the BBC about allegations of abuse and torture in the Sde Teiman medical facility, it said it “completely rejects accusations of systematic abuse of detainees”.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Siobhan Keenan, Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, De Montfort University
How did Shakespeare become the world’s greatest playwright? It’s a question that has long fascinated scholars and fans alike. My latest research suggests that one answer lies in the Bard’s close collaboration with his leading man, Richard Burbage.
Their partnership lasted more than 25 years, and as my new book, Richard Burbage and the Shakespearean Stage, reveals, the creative chemistry between writer and actor transformed their art and elevated their respective profiles – a bit like an Elizabethan Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro.
Shakespeare and Burbage’s careers likely started in the 1580s. But the first time we hear of them being members of the same acting company is in 1595.
In March that year, the pair was paid £20 (about £8k today) alongside the famous Elizabethan clown, Will Kemp, for performing two plays at court before Queen Elizabeth I with a troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (named after the lord chamberlain, Henry Carey). At this stage, Shakespeare and Burbage were newcomers on the flourishing Elizabethan theatrical scene. But they soon made their mark.
By the turn of the century the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had moved to the legendary Globe theatre, and the pair had become famous. Shakespeare was being praised by contemporaries as “the most excellent” writer of comedies and tragedies in English, while Burbage had become the Elizabethan stage’s newest star, with a breakout performance as Shakespeare’s witty and wicked tragic hero, Richard III.
One fan apparently admired Burbage’s Richard III so much that she even arranged a secret off-stage rendezvous with him, only for Shakespeare to get there first, sending word to Burbage that William the Conqueror was before Richard III – or so claimed gossipy lawyer John Manningham in 1602.
There aren’t any contemporary reviews of Burbage’s Richard III, or his other early performances, but we know that he was especially admired for his versatility and the authenticity of his acting.
This included an ability to portray powerful emotions convincingly and to immerse himself in his roles completely, “putting off himself with his Clothes” as contemporary Richard Flecknoe put it in 1664 – like an early modern Daniel Day-Lewis. These qualities were to prove a source of powerful inspiration to Burbage’s fellow actor and company playwright, Shakespeare.
Writing for Burbage
When Shakespeare became a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s players, it marked a significant new phase in his career as an actor and writer. For perhaps the first time, he found himself writing regularly for the same group of players – a position he would enjoy for the rest of his career.
It’s not surprising that he started to tailor his plays for the men and boys he knew would act in them. Sometimes he even mistakenly wrote their names instead of their characters’ names in his scripts.
But in Burbage’s case the collaboration proved an especially rich and enduring one, the mutual talents of writer and actor inspiring the creation of a series of memorably complex and believable tragic heroes of a kind not seen not known before on the English stage.
These range from tragic kings, such as King Lear and Macbeth, to murderously jealous husbands, such as Othello and Leontes (A Winter’s Tale). They also include roles shaped by another of Burbage’s talents – the ability to feign madness convincingly. The most famous example of this is Hamlet.
The story was not new when Shakespeare created his updated Hamlet play around 1601, probably a star vehicle for Burbage. The role is famously demanding in length – 1,338 lines in the edition published in 1604. It also requires incredible versatility in its performer, who must play several roles in one: grieving son, bereft lover and revenger.
Perhaps most memorably of all, Hamlet must put on an “antic” or mad disposition, as he seeks to conceal his plans of revenge from Claudius, the uncle who murdered his father and married his mother.
Hamlet’s feigned madness can be found in Shakespeare’s source, but Shakespeare’s late Elizabethan reworking of the play gives more room to Hamlet’s performance of madness – including his sudden changes in speech and behaviour – and it creates more uncertainty about whether the madness remains a performance or becomes the real thing in the character.
Implicitly, Shakespeare made these changes influenced by his experience of working with Burbage and to give his star more room to show off his versatility and his aptitude for playing men who had gone mad. The result was a hit for both: Hamlet became one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays and its hero one of Burbage’s most memorable roles.
For many years, the conversation about Shakespeare’s authorship has focused on his work with other playwrights. But Burbage also helped shape Shakespeare’s plays, and his role in the Bard’s creative process deserves more recognition.
Siobhan Keenan received funding from the Society for Theatre Research.
The Middle East is experiencing a period of intense political and economic turbulence, with several countries in the region embroiled in conflict. These conflicts are taking place against the backdrop of an escalating climate crisis.
In 2023, global thinktank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concluded that Middle Eastern countries “are among the world’s most exposed states to the accelerating impacts of human-caused climate change – including soaring heatwaves, declining precipitation, extended droughts, more intense sandstorms and floods, and rising sea levels”.
The capacity of a society to receive, process and act upon climate-related information is at the heart of an effective climate change response. Media plays an important role: it is central to advancing public understanding of climate change and its connection to individual, communal and national security.
Yet over the past two decades or so, media coverage of climate change in the Middle East has been among the lowest in the world. According to the University of Colorado Boulder’s Media and Climate Change Observatory, media organisations in the Middle East each produced an average of around one article about climate change in August 2025 – compared with 66 articles for North American media in the same month.
Wars and climate change are inextricably linked. Climate change can increase the likelihood of violent conflict by intensifying resource scarcity and displacement, while conflict itself accelerates environmental damage. This article is part of a series, War on climate, which explores the relationship between climate issues and global conflicts.
The lack of climate coverage in the Middle East is because media outlets there face a number of structural problems. How does one talk about climate change when armed conflicts are spiralling out of control, or when public discourse is monopolised by what are perceived to be more pressing issues?
Jordan presents a useful example to help us understand these challenges and how to overcome them.
Media in Jordan
Jordan has long played a stabilising role in the Middle East. It has accepted large numbers of refugees from neighbouring conflicts and has acted as a mediator and peace broker between Middle Eastern rivals. However, climate change is threatening Jordan’s stability.
Raed Abu Soud, Jordan’s minister of water and irrigation, said in May 2025: “Jordan is grappling with one of the most severe water crises in the world, with per-capita water availability dropping to just 60 cubic metres per year.”
A host of other factors are worsening the situation. Economic underdevelopment in Jordan is leading to persistent unemployment and public unrest, while regional conflicts are undermining social cohesion.
How Jordan responds to the risks presented by climate change, and preserves its stability, is extremely important for the Middle East and beyond. Public understanding of this challenge is going to be pivotal to an effective response. And here enters the role of media.
Our research on climate change in Jordan has involved analysing more than 2,500 news articles in the country’s major print media and carrying out extensive interviews with local people. We have found that, while climate change is becoming a more important topic in the country, there are still many barriers preventing a coherent climate change discussion there.
It is common in Jordan, as in many other countries affected by conflict, for conversations related to climate change to be pushed to the background when other crises emerge. Since 2023, when the war in Gaza began, Jordanian media outlets have understandably been drawn to covering the humanitarian crisis there at the expense of climate change.
This has been exacerbated by the fact there are very few journalists in Jordan who work consistently on climate-related issues and can offer accurate and timely coverage. The shortage of climate journalists is a common problem across the Middle East.
When climate change is covered by Jordanian media, it is often discussed as a secondary consideration relative to geopolitical threats – not as a challenge in its own right. Due to the country’s policy of hosting refugees, Jordanian media outlets have often portrayed their country as a “second victim” of the civil war in Syria and the intractable Israel-Palestine conflict. Refugees are depicted as another strain on scarce resources.
Climate change discourse in Jordan tends to be heavily influenced by international partners including foreign governments, charities and funding bodies.
There are numerous externally funded educational and vocational courses focused on climate change available in Jordan for various audiences, including media professionals. While this facilitates the advancement of climate change discussions, it can distance climate coverage from the local context and knowledge. This is particularly true if external partners merely “teach” Jordanians what they believe is necessary, without fully understanding the specific challenges Jordan faces.
It can also erode trust between Jordanians and these foreign partners. In some of the cases we studied, journalists in Jordan saw climate change as part of a western-imposed agenda aimed at controlling developing countries.
Jordan is highly important for the Middle East, Europe and beyond. Without effective climate adaptation, it risks losing its role as a refugee haven and regional stabiliser.
Media can play a vital role in advancing climate change discourse in the Middle East, both by holding governments to account and raising awareness of climate issues. Some studies suggest that public concern correlates with the volume of media coverage, and attention can fade when other issues dominate the media space.
Sustained, inclusive coverage is essential to ensure long-term engagement and informed public participation in climate action, even during times of political and economic turbulence.
Marianna Poberezhskaya received funding for the associated research project from the Climate Social Science Network.
Imad El-Anis receives funding from the Council for British Research in the Levant and the Climate Social Science Network.
Marwa Mustafa received funding from Climate Social Science Network.
Global security indicators suggest a significant deterioration in peace and stability. By most accounts, the world is now more violent and more dangerous than at any point in recent history.
In 2024, the number of state-based conflicts worldwide reached its highest level since 1946. Military expenditures have risen for 10 consecutive years, surpassing $2.7 trillion annually.
A record number of children have been victims of armed conflict, and gains in women’s rights hang in the balance around the world amid record levels of conflict.
The world is confronting converging crises. In September 2024, the United Nations convened the Summit for the Future, an initiative by the UN secretary-general aimed at addressing the collapse of the post-Cold War multilateral system, as well as the increasing number of conflicts and humanitarian emergencies. All of this is occurring in the climate change era.
These crises are interlinked, as violence becomes more likely as a consequence of rising temperatures and drought conditions. Militaries are also responsible for high levels of greenhouse gas emissions and environmental destruction from war amounting, in some cases, to the crime of ecocide.
Increased military spending
The overwhelming response to rising global violence and insecurity has been to boost military funding.
In Europe, this is partly driven by a justified fear of Russian aggression following its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The risk of Russia dragging NATO into a conflict remains a constant concern, which was evident when Russia recently sent drones over Polish and Romanian airspace.
At the 2025 NATO summit, under pressure from the Americans, members pledged to allocate five per cent of their GDP annually to core defence needs and defence and security-related expenses by 2035. Most European countries had already increased their military budgets in 2024; so has Russia.
China’s military spending has consistently increased over the past 30 years. The United States, the world’s largest military spender, also boosted spending in 2024 as it continues to send vast amounts of military aid to Israel amid allegations it’s committing genocide against the Palestinians.
Meanwhile, organizations invested in peacemaking and peacebuilding continue to face funding shortages. The sector has been described as “being stripped and downsized.”
This was on display when Donald Trump’s administration defunded and shut down the United States Institute of Peace, a congressionally established institution, within months of taking office.
Nevertheless, peace organizations have struggled with funding cuts for some time, experiencing reduced support for core costs and a shift towards more project-based funding, which has increased competition and pressure from donors.
Nonetheless, violence against women and girls remains severe in places like Afghanistan, where the Taliban has created a system of gender apartheid, and Palestine, where the Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, has called Israel’s deliberate killings of Palestinian women and girls a femi-genocide.
A Taliban fighter stands guard as women wait to receive food rations distributed by a humanitarian aid group in Kabul, Afghanistan, in May 2023. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi, File)
A global crisis of violence
In this more globally fragmented world, international peace architecture is crumbling amid growing tensions between powerful states, and humanitarian needs continue to rise largely due to violent conflicts. So why do governments persist in spending more on their militaries and arms, while investing very little in peacebuilding and peacemaking?
This trend is only making the world more dangerous for everyone. As Chris Coulter, executive director of the Berlin-based Berghof Foundation, a non-governmental and non-profit organization supporting people in conflict, reminds us: “A truly secure world needs dialogue and peacebuilding, not just defence budgets.”
Many others in the peace community have made similar appeals.
The world is still learning how to build sustainable peace. Many of the peace agreements signed over the past few decades have fallen apart, and parties have resumed fighting. Even in places where agreements have held, structural and everyday violence remains widespread, especially for women.
Deal-making rather than solutions
We are also witnessing a concerning shift from peacemaking to deal-making, along with the abandonment of liberal peacemaking norms, such as inclusivity and impartiality.
Further evidence of the failure of peacemaking is the move towards short “tactical pauses” in fighting rather than the negotiation of more sustainable solutions to conflicts.
Unless states rebalance their investments towards peacebuilding, the current trajectory points to escalating insecurity, further undermining international norms, human rights and security. Disproportionately relying on military spending for security purposes fails to prevent conflict and has a detrimental impact on gender equality, human rights and peacemaking.
States must resist the urge to continually increase their military budgets to the excessive levels they are now approaching; instead, they must also invest in peace research, mediation efforts and peacebuilding organizations.
Jenna Sapiano does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
A tree-lined street in downtown Vancouver providing shade to pedestrians.(Adam Skoyles), CC BY
The housing affordability crisis is top of mind for many around the world, including Canadians. Between 2019 and 2024, house prices in Toronto and Montréal had an average annual increase of 6.7 per cent and 10.2 per cent, respectively.
Prices throughout the country are expected to continue increasing over the next decade and as a result, the pressure is intense to rapidly increase residential development.
Yet, municipal governments must balance this pressure with other tasks, like preparing for the effects of climate change. Some of the most pressing challenges for cities include meeting their housing and climate change goals without massive changes in land use to maintain green spaces and the benefits they provide to people.
Natural spaces like parks and woodlands provides many diverse benefits to city residents, from helping to cool off surrounding neighbourhoods to providing recreational areas.
The advantage these spaces have over grey infrastructure is that they can simultaneously help combat multiple challenges faced by cities, including poor air quality, heatwaves and flooding. When nature is intentionally used to combat these types of challenges, it is referred to as nature-based solutions.
Nonetheless, nature-based solutions are still rarely implemented in developments. Therefore, it’s important to identify and use key opportunities that can help communities balance their competing goals by increasing the use of nature-based solutions.
By highlighting these opportunities, we can inform municipal governments, developers and residents about how communities can be built to successfully combat climate change and other challenges.
In our recent study, we interviewed planners and developers throughout Ontario to identify these opportunities.
Nature in development
A green roof at the Woodward’s 43 building in downtown Vancouver. The trees provide habitat for birds, store carbon, absorb rainwater and cool surrounding areas. (Adam Skoyles), CC BY
Municipal planners and private land developers across Ontario are obliged by provincial policy to consider nature in their decisions about the planning and development of neighbourhoods.
However, this largely happens because they are required by law to protect municipal natural heritage systems (large woodlots or wetlands, for example), and not because they understand or support the benefits from nature, such as flood prevention.
Natural features that fall outside the natural heritage system, such as smaller woodlots or individual trees, are not protected by provincial policy. Instead, they can be protected by municipal policy or bylaws. However, these policies and bylaws vary, and some municipalities do a better job than others in protecting nature for their residents.
Developers often see protected nature as a barrier to development, but some of them also understand that it provides benefits to residents. Some try to make use of nature in innovative ways, like building natural pathways or naturalized creeks through a subdivision.
Unfortunately, municipalities sometimes push back against these innovations because of concerns over maintenance costs and worries about possible interference with infrastructure.
They stated that planning policies and bylaws are also starting to change in ways that can address these concerns. For example, many municipalities have established tree canopy targets or introduced more restrictive stormwater management requirements.
But climate change is rarely stated as the reason for a change to policy and bylaws. For example, a city might recognize tree cover is important for the city environment and introduce a tree protection bylaw, but that does not mean the bylaw addresses climate change.
Similarly, developers might plant trees to beautify a neighbourhood and make it more desirable for home buyers, but they might not do this to reduce climate change impacts. Addressing climate change only implicitly or as a side effect makes it much harder to co-ordinate different actions and can limit their overall effectiveness.
A main reason why the climate change benefits of nature are considered only implicitly is that planners and developers are uncertain about how reliable the information is for quantifying these benefits.
Another problem is that municipalities differ in how they address these issues, which creates highly variable regulatory conditions. Having province- or nation-wide standards would help fix this issue.
Though they are not yet widely implemented across Canada, some municipalities use green development standards as a key mechanism for introducing benefits of nature in developments. These standards work, for example, by mandating a minimum percentage of green landscaping on a development site. Unfortunately, Ontario’s recently passed Bill-17 has created uncertainty around these standards.
Ways to support nature-based solutions
There are key opportunities to support building more sustainable and climate-ready communities through increased use of nature-based solutions in developments. These opportunities largely come through policy, tools and people:
Provincial and municipal policy changes that consider the climate change benefits of nature-based solutions could help increase its use in development. This could be done by strengthening and expanding green development standards, like those currently implemented in some cities.
Developing and using tools that can rigorously quantify the climate change benefits of nature-based solutions could also have substantial impact. These tools could clarify the benefits of nature-based solutions and provide a solid argument for their increased use.
Collaboration between the public and private sectors is crucial to encourage increased use of nature-based solutions. Whether it is working together to craft realistic policy goals or to incorporate new tools, both sectors are key to ensuring changes are effective and efficient.
Adam Skoyles has received funding from Environment and Climate Change Canada.
Michael Drescher receives or has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness, and the Natural Assets Initiative. Michael Drescher has had a volunteer position for Carolinian Canada and has worked with the Ontario Land Trust Association.
De la variété aux refrains de soirée en passant par le punk, la musique francophone garde une place singulière dans nos vies.Gallery 73/Shutterstock
On n’écoute pas de la musique en français comme on écoute de la musique en langue étrangère : souvenirs, émotions, proximité liée à une compréhension instantanée des paroles… Tour d’horizon des spécificités et des contextes d’écoute de notre chère (ou parfois boudée) musique francophone.
En France, tout le monde ou presque écoute de la musique en français : 79 % des personnes interrogées disent en écouter régulièrement. Selon la même étude d’Ipsos (2023), pour 27 % des Français, la « chanson ou variété française » est même le genre musical favori et, pour 67 % d’entre eux, il s’agit de l’un des cinq genres préférés. La pratique est assez uniformément répandue entre les sexes (83 % des femmes et 74 % des hommes) et les milieux sociaux (81 % des ouvriers, 85 % des employés, 77 % des cadres). En ce qui concerne les tranches d’âge, 77 % des 25-39 ans écoutent de la chanson ou variété française, contre 85 % des plus de 65 ans. Seuls les moins de 25 ans déclarent significativement moins en écouter, mais l’effet serait sans doute compensé par la prise en compte du rap français.
Les personnes que nous avons rencontrées dans notre enquête menée en 2024 reflètent ces ordres de grandeur. Elles déclarent, à parts à peu près égales, soit écouter principalement de la musique en français (le plus souvent, du rap français ou de la chanson française), ou alors écouter indifféremment de la musique en français ou en anglais, ou enfin écouter principalement de la musique internationale. Dans ce dernier cas, s’y ajoute souvent l’expression d’un rejet pour l’une des formes de la musique en français, rap ou variété.
Du point de vue des usages sur les plateformes de streaming musical, on ne constate guère de différence dans les façons de traiter les musiques francophones et internationales. Elles sont, de manière équivalente, recherchées et archivées dans des playlists, écoutées via les suggestions algorithmiques, explorées sur les pages d’artistes, etc. Mais il existe des attachements spécifiques à la musique francophone, qui donnent aux morceaux en français une place particulière dans l’expérience musicale.
Une bande-son de l’enfance ?
La musique en français occupe toujours une place spécifique dans l’expérience et l’histoire musicale des auditeurs et auditrices rencontrés durant l’enquête. Elle est décrite en premier lieu comme la musique de la prime enfance ou de l’adolescence, que l’on connaît encore par cœur, que l’on ré-écoute à l’occasion avec un plaisir plus ou moins assumé (selon l’âge des interviewés sont mentionnés Jenifer, Lorie, Les Négresses Vertes, Louise Attaque, Sexion d’Assaut…). C’est aussi la musique des parents ou des grands-parents (Patricia Kaas, Julien Clerc, Charles Aznavour, Jean-Jacques Goldman…), présentée comme repoussoir ou madeleine de Proust, selon les trajectoires biographiques. La musique francophone est enfin la musique environnante, celle des lieux publics, des radios musicales, de l’écoute collective au travail, des soirées, qu’on ne choisit pas mais qu’on apprécie souvent.
Émotions « augmentées » en VF
Qu’elle occupe ou non une place importante dans leurs goûts musicaux, auditrices et auditeurs font des usages spécifiques de la musique en français : de manière triviale, mais décisive, on en comprend facilement les paroles. Dans l’écoute en français, la compréhension du texte est plus immédiate et les mots sont une composante importante de l’expérience musicale : on « fait plus attention aux paroles », on « s’y retrouve », « quelques mots nous ont frappé », « des phrases sont touchantes », « on comprend donc c’est plus facile de bien aimer ».
Plusieurs amateurs ajoutent qu’il est plus aisé de ressentir une forme de proximité avec les artistes français, que les expériences qu’ils relatent dans leurs chansons sont plus proches de celles vécues :
« JuL, c’est quelqu’un qui me correspond, même si on a des vies différentes, j’imagine. »
Il est plus facile de se renseigner sur la vie des artistes français, de s’y comparer, mais aussi de les voir en concert, de les suivre tout au long de leur évolution, qu’il s’agisse de JuL, Téléphone ou Stupeflip. Les auditeurs et auditrices construisent des attachements spécifiques fondés sur la résonance de leurs expériences.
Enfin, qu’elle occupe ou non une place importante dans leurs écoutes quotidiennes, la musique en français est considérée comme plus propice à la production ou l’accompagnement d’émotions, les paroles jouant un rôle important dans la formulation et la canalisation des sentiments. Il s’agit d’accompagner des moments mélancoliques, « C’est mieux quand j’ai plus envie de ressentir des émotions fortes » ; d’une chanson d’Indochine dont quelques mots cristallisent les émotions ressenties pendant un deuil, ou encore de chansons de Serge Reggiani accompagnant la maladie d’un parent ; d’un « retour au punk français » pour exprimer la colère ressentie pendant le confinement ; plus généralement de musiques « qui vous portent pendant un moment ». Dans ces contextes, les paroles immédiatement compréhensibles jouent un rôle important dans la mise en mouvement des émotions. Il ne s’agit pas de dire que les musiques internationales ne jouent pas de tels rôles émotionnels ou identitaires ; mais, pour la majorité des auditeurs qui comprennent le français beaucoup mieux l’anglais ou d’autres langues, l’écoute de chansons en français rend possible des émotions spécifiques.
Chanter en conduisant
Les travaux sur la numérisation de la musique ont montré qu’elle favorise la « backgroundisation » de l’écoute, la musique étant susceptible d’accompagner la quasi-totalité des activités quotidiennes.
De ce point de vue, la musique francophone est considérée comme plus ou moins adaptée selon les contextes. Elle est jugée appropriée aux routines domestiques (ménage, cuisine…) auxquelles elle vient ajouter de l’entrain, en incitant à reconnaître ou fredonner les paroles. Elle est plébiscitée dans les situations de travail en col bleu, boulangerie, garage ou atelier, car susceptible d’être support d’échanges.
En revanche, elle est unanimement proscrite du travail en col blanc, du travail sur ordinateur ou des situations de travail scolaire (lectures, préparation d’examen) nécessitant une forme de concentration excluant le français : la reconnaissance des paroles perturberait alors l’activité en cours, faisant « sortir de la bulle » ou « décrocher ».
Inversement, la musique en français jouit d’une certaine préférence au volant, permettant tout à la fois de se concentrer sur la conduite que d’investir les paroles en les écoutant attentivement ou en les chantant, y compris « les répertoires plus kitch », « les goûts non-avoués ». Associée aux moments festifs, faite pour être chantée en chœur et participer à une liesse commune, elle est cependant moins mobilisée quand il s’agit de converser entre amis, celle-ci pouvant interférer, justement, de par sa compréhension trop immédiate, forçant l’oreille à se détourner de la conversation.
La musique en français bénéficie ainsi d’une place singulière dans l’oreille de la majeure partie des auditeurs et auditrices. Qu’elle soit appréciée ou non, elle est l’objet d’usages et d’affections spécifiques que les modes d’écoutes contemporains ne semblent pas avoir encore bousculés, tout du moins en France.
Jean-Samuel Beuscart a reçu des financements du Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication dans le cadre de cette recherche.
Romuald Jamet a reçu des financements de Ministère de la Culture et des communications du Québec dans le cadre de cette recherche.
Source: The Conversation – France in French (3) – By Dulaurans Marlène, Maître de conférences en sciences de l’information et de la communication, spécialisée en criminologie appliquée au numérique, Université Bordeaux Montaigne
La mort en direct du streamer Jean Pormanove, en août 2025, illustre un système où la cruauté humaine est convertie en spectacle et se transforme en source de profit. La plateforme Kick, qui hébergeait son émission, n’est pas une exception dans le paysage du « trash streaming ».
Le 18 août 2025, Raphaël Graven, influenceur français connu sous le pseudonyme de Jean Pormanove, est mort en direct après 298 heures de diffusion ininterrompue. Sa chaîne, le Lokal, hébergée sur la plateforme Kick rassemblait près de 193 000 abonnés. Pendant douze jours, ce quadragénaire a enduré des sévices infligés par ses partenaires de live stream devant une audience massive. Bien que l’autopsie ait conclu à une cause médicale, ce drame dépasse le fait divers. Il illustre surtout un système où la cruauté humaine est convertie en spectacle et chaque instant de souffrance se transforme en source de profit.
Les circonstances de la mort de Jean Pormanove, si extrêmes soient-elles, s’inscrivent dans une histoire déjà longue de la violence médiatisée. Dès les années 2000, le phénomène du happy slapping, qui vise à filmer le passage à tabac d’une personne pour l’exhiber ensuite sur les réseaux sociaux, met en scène une véritable théâtralisation de l’agression en ligne (Marlène Dulaurans, 2024). L’acte violent cesse d’être un simple débordement pour devenir une performance destinée à un public.
Comme l’analyse Umberto Eco (2004) à propos de la « carnavalisation » des mœurs, les frontières entre spectacle et réalité s’effacent et les limites de l’outrage sont constamment repoussées. Là où le happy slapping restait à l’époque ponctuel, impulsif et plutôt confiné à des cercles adolescents, le cas Pormanove marque une bascule vers un dispositif beaucoup plus construit et planifié. Cette évolution fait écho à Zygmunt Bauman (2010), pour qui l’exposition répétée à des images de violence conduit à une désensibilisation progressive face à la cruauté. Son stream de 298 heures en constitue l’aboutissement : la violence n’est plus improvisée, mais devient un flux continu de souffrance exploité en contenus médiatiques.
Quand la souffrance rapporte
Cette affaire révèle surtout la naissance d’un marché de la cruauté en ligne, où chaque coup et insulte se traduit par un don, un abonnement ou un « tip », transformant la douleur en revenus. Plus de 36 000 euros ont été récoltés au cours du dernier live stream de Jean Pormanove. Une véritable économie du sadisme numérique s’est enclenchée, reposant essentiellement sur trois piliers : la marchandisation de la vulnérabilité (Jean Pormanove devient un produit), la gamification de la violence (les dons déclenchent des sévices), et la fidélisation de l’audience par l’escalade permanente des sévices infligés.
Les spectateurs ne sont plus de simples voyeurs, mais deviennent dans ce contexte des investisseurs actifs dans la production du morbide. Jacqueline Barus-Michel (2011) soulignait que ces pratiques mêlent « violence, jouissance, voyeurisme et exhibitionnisme ». Dans l’affaire Pormanove, cette combinaison devient ici un modèle d’affaires structuré où chaque émotion négative génère de la valeur marchande et alimente un circuit économique fondé sur la souffrance.
La fiction du consentement
Les deux principaux instigateurs des sévices, identifiés comme « Narutovie » et « Safine », affirment que Jean Pormanove aurait consenti à ces violences, qualifiant leur implication de participation à « une pièce de théâtre géante », avec du « contenu très trash » (RTL, 2025) mais totalement assumé. Cependant son isolement social, sa dépendance financière et la manière dont la culpabilité pouvait lui être imputée (trois éléments caractéristiques de l’emprise, selon Marie-France Hirigoyen [2003]) mettent en lumière un écosystème qui semblait exploiter ces vulnérabilités.
Dans l’affaire Pormanove, ces trois mécanismes se combinent : l’isolement progressif par des streams répétés coupant tout lien avec le monde extérieur ; la dépendance renforcée par des revenus cumulés constituant une part importante des ressources du groupe ; l’inversion de la culpabilité, où les sévices présentés comme du divertissement macabre mais consenti, transfère la responsabilité sur la victime, qui devient « complice » de sa propre exploitation.
Cette dynamique transforme le prétendu consentement en une façade légale qui semble masquer une autre réalité. Dans ce contexte, la victime apparaît comme instrumentalisée. Ses choix et sa dignité semblent conditionnés par la dynamique de groupe, la pression des pairs et l’intérêt économique. L’illusion de libre arbitre peut alors servir de justification aux auteurs des faits pour se déresponsabiliser.
La distanciation comme désinhibition
Cette économie du sadisme prospère grâce à la distanciation que le numérique instaure entre l’acte violent et ses témoins. L’écran fonctionne ici comme un filtre moral qui transforme la souffrance réelle en un divertissement consommable, sans confrontation directe au visage de la victime (Christine Delory-Momberger, 2022).
Cette absence de contact, cette impossibilité de croiser le regard, voire de percevoir la vulnérabilité physique, opèrent une forme de déshumanisation. D’un côté, la victime se trouve réduite à une image sur un écran, privée de sa réalité corporelle et émotionnelle. De l’autre, le spectateur peut exercer sa cruauté par procuration sans assumer la responsabilité morale qu’imposerait une présence physique.
Le voyeurisme se trouve ainsi décomplexé par le dispositif technique. On ne torture plus une personne, on participe à un stream, on ne finance pas des sévices, on soutient un créateur de contenu. Le numérique permet ainsi à des individus ordinaires de devenir les financiers d’actes qu’ils n’oseraient jamais commettre en personne, une nouvelle forme de banalité du mal (Hannah Arendt, 1963).
Kick, l’infrastructure idéale de cette économie du sadisme numérique
La plateforme Kick incarne ce marché de la souffrance en ligne. Fondée en 2022 par les propriétaires de Stake, l’un des sites les plus importants des casinos et jeux d’argent en ligne, elle s’est positionnée comme l’anti-Twitch, misant sur l’absence de modération pour capturer les contenus interdits.
Ses dispositifs techniques (dons directs, compteurs d’audience, mécaniques de surenchères) transforment chaque interaction en incitation à intensifier la violence. Kick encourage ainsi une course vers le fond, cherchant à attirer les créateurs en abaissant ses standards éthiques, et propose des rémunérations plus avantageuses que ses concurrents, parce qu’elle accepte de monétiser ce que les autres refusent de faire.
Kick n’est toutefois pas une exception dans ce paysage de trash streaming. DLive, BitChute, ou encore Rumble, aujourd’hui inaccessible en France, sont autant de plateformes permissives accueillant des contenus tout aussi controversés. Leurs dispositifs monétisés (cryptomonnaie, financements participatifs externes, etc.) transforment également à leur manière les spectateurs en complices économiques de cette violence devenue produit.
Réguler l’irrégulable ?
L’inaction apparente des autorités révèle les limites du Digital Service Act face à cette économie du sadisme numérique. Avec seulement 3,5 millions d’utilisateurs en Europe, Kick reste une plateforme de taille intermédiaire qui échappe aux obligations renforcées imposées aux Very Large Online Plateformes (VLOP) fixées à partir de 45 millions d’utilisateurs. Elle aurait toutefois dû, depuis février 2024, désigner un représentant légal dans l’Union européenne, comme l’exige le DSA pour toutes les plateformes opérant sur le territoire européen. En réalité, nombre d’acteurs de taille moyenne ont longtemps tardé à se conformer à cette règle, profitant d’une zone grise de la régulation.
À cette faille juridique s’ajoutent la complexité technique et la dilution des responsabilités, qui empêchent le système pénal de traiter efficacement un modèle qui marchandise la souffrance. La régulation reste limitée, faute d’avoir conceptualisé cette économie comme un secteur d’activité spécifique nécessitant un cadre juridique plus adapté.
Jusqu’où sommes-nous prêts à aller ?
Cette économie repose sur un cercle vicieux : les plateformes fournissent l’infrastructure technique et prélèvent leur commission, les organisateurs produisent du contenu sadique et en captent les revenus directs, tandis que l’audience finance le spectacle et alimente la surenchère par ses dons et par ses abonnements. Chaque acteur peut se déresponsabiliser, invoquant son rôle limité dans ce mécanisme pervers, alors que tous participent à sa perpétuation.
À la lumière de ces éléments, la mort en direct de Jean Pormanove ne peut être considérée comme un accident. Elle illustre l’aboutissement logique d’un modèle qui transforme méthodiquement la dignité humaine en marchandise. Cette économie du sadisme numérique n’existe que par notre participation. Jean Pormanove est mort pour notre divertissement, dans un système que nous avons collectivement contribué à créer et à entretenir.
Dulaurans Marlène ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.
Economists have argued for years that council tax in the UK was rushed in and badly thought out. After the poll tax fiasco of the early 1990s, a substitute was urgent. The answer was council tax, but this was almost as unfit for purpose as the poll tax it replaced.
So if the experts know council tax is an unfair mess, why has there been no reform? There seem to be three main reasons. First, while everyone can think of big improvements, there is no consensus on what exactly should replace it. So although almost any sensible reform would be better, nothing changes.
The second reason is politicians’ and policymakers’ fear of rocking the boat. There would certainly be losers as well as winners from any decent reform – and those losers would complain vociferously.
Finally, council tax is cheap to collect and yields a lot of revenue. Perhaps there is also the fear that if the stone is lifted, we would also need to address the problem of paying for local government.
Historically “domestic rates” were the main source of local government income in the UK, but their contribution to local spending had fallen to a low of about 10% by 2010.
Since then, local governments have increasingly borne the burden of austerity, however, with the result that council tax now covers 30% of their spending. But the system is creaking. The Thatcher government’s deeply unpopular flat-rate “community charge” (poll tax) was a per-person levy supposed to pay for local services. Council tax was a hybrid – part property tax and partly a charge levied by local government.
These days, the house values providing the tax-base for council tax are still fixed at hypothetical 1991 values, even for new houses. But in the real world, UK house prices have increased, more than fivefold since 1991. And in London they have increased by a factor of eight compared to only 3.5 in the north, creating another problem of perceived fairness.
To make matters worse, the house values themselves were not used to calculate the tax, but rather eight value bands. These have not been updated, still stopping at £320,000 – reflecting the prices of a forgotten world. The result is the single occupant of a house worth £2.5 million may pay less than their married neighbours with a child in a one-bedroom flat.
The poll tax was supposed to represent a payment by residents for local services, so is levied on people not property. To retain an echo of this per-person charge, council tax has a 25% discount for single people. Paying is the liability of the occupier, not the owner.
So how could it be improved?
The most obvious reform for property taxes is to revalue all houses at current prices and wrap up stamp duty (another bad and unpopular tax) and council tax in a single payment. This could be charged as a percentage of a home’s value – a “proportional property tax” (PPT). Then all houses would be revalued every year.
There are objections and complications to such an obvious reform. It would be impossible to remove the government’s stamp duty revenues without replacing them. So a proportion of the total revenue from any PPT would go to the Treasury, with the rest helping to fund local government. The total revenues would still have to be divided between the two.
A second complication is older people who bought houses in the 1980s, for example, and who are now retired. For them, paying the same proportion of current values as those in work might be a stretch. One suggestion is that housing-rich, income-poor people could roll up their tax liability, so it was only paid when they sold the house or after they died.
However, some oppose such a delay since it removes the incentive to downsize (a move that would cost less if stamp duty had been abolished as part of the reform).
But could people suddenly find their liability leap fivefold if their house was revalued?. This fear is unfounded, since the tax would not be the assessed value of the house but some very small proportion – maybe 0.5%. Still, it might need strong and articulate political leadership to convince people of this.
As for the task of revaluing houses every year, these days AI can give accurate and almost instantaneous valuations. But homeowners should have a right to appeal the valuation. This would be free if experts judged the AI value was more than 5% out. If not however, the homeowner would be stuck with that valuation and would also have to pay the costs of the appeal.
To solve the problem of dividing the revenues of a PPT, there should be both nationally and locally set rates of tax on the value of houses. A recent calculation concluded that a rate of 0.11% of house values would offset the Treasury’s lost stamp duty revenue. On a £1 million house, that works out as £1,100 a year.
Councils would then set their own rates, with the receipts paying for local services. This would provide some incentive to permit new house building, as tax receipts would rise to cover the extra costs rather than disappearing into national coffers.
This would also resolve the problem of how to divide PPT revenues between local and national government and avoid imposing a sudden, massive jump in property tax liability for people in southeast England. This is where the majority of £1 million-plus houses are located.
Setting the local rate at a uniform national 0.51% – yielding the same national total as council tax – would mean the owner of the £1 million house suddenly being hit with an annual bill not of £1,100, but £6,200. This would create serious opposition. So where house prices were higher, the local rate could be lower and still yield the same revenue.
An advantage of the PPT is that it could also be an effective and collectable wealth tax. Houses are the biggest element in personal wealth so the national rate of PPT could even be set higher than the 0.11% rate, increasing Treasury revenues and addressing appeals for a wealth tax.
This article was co-published with LSE Blogs at the London School of Economics
Paul Cheshire receives funding from ESRC. He is affiliated with the Centre for Economic Performance.
La mine d’uranium de Rössing, dans le désert du Namib, en Namibie.Ikiwaner, CC BY
Le numérique ne fonctionne pas sans électricité et l’électricité décarbonée dépend du numérique. Comment sortir de ce cercle vicieux, qui exerce une pression intense sur la disponibilité en ressources minérales nécessaires aux deux secteurs ? Nous proposons de dépasser le mantra de l’efficience et d’axer l’innovation sur la sobriété afin d’améliorer la qualité et la durabilité des services numériques fondamentaux sans puiser inutilement dans le réservoir limité des ressources minérales.
Le numérique occupe une place de plus en plus centrale dans notre quotidien. De nombreux services, y compris ceux de l’État, en rendent l’utilisation incontournable. Une multitude de solutions sont mises à disposition des citoyens, qui les adoptent volontiers pour effectuer des démarches à distance, s’informer ou se divertir. Le numérique est ainsi vécu comme un compagnon facilitateur dans un mode de vie rythmé par la quête d’efficacité et l’optimisation du temps.
Cependant, bien que souvent considéré comme immatériel, le numérique a un impact environnemental, tant pour les générations actuelles que futures. Cette réalité, encore mal comprise, s’explique en grande partie par sa consommation énergétique.
La consommation électrique des terminaux (ordinateurs, smartphones, objets connectés…) augmente avec leur nombre, dopé par l’essor des usages du numérique. De son côté, la consommation électrique des réseaux reste stable une fois l’infrastructure en place. Celle des centres de données, enfin, explose, entraînée par les besoins croissants de l’intelligence artificielle (IA), l’un des usages informatiques les plus énergivores de l’Histoire d’après l’Agence Internationale de l’Énergie (IEA).
En France, les services numériques représentent déjà 11 % de la consommation électrique nationale, sans compter l’électricité importée via l’utilisation de services hébergés à l’étranger.
Bien au contraire, le gouvernement français a annoncé durant le Sommet pour l’Action sur l’IA début 2025, la création de 35 nouveaux centres de données dédiés à l’IA nécessitant à eux seuls 3 gigawatts d’électricité — l’équivalent de deux réacteurs nucléaires EPR.
Sans numérique, pas d’électricité décarbonée
Une réalité souvent ignorée de l’électricité décarbonée est sa dépendance au numérique.
En effet, le numérique joue un rôle clé dans le pilotage du réseau électrique. Ce pilotage est rendu plus complexe par l’introduction d’énergies intermittentes (solaire, éolien) et par les véhicules électriques. Il s’appuie sur un vaste déploiement de capteurs numériques qui collectent de nombreuses données sur le réseau électrique. Celles-ci sont ensuite traitées dans des centres de données pour modéliser le réseau, anticiper les variations et optimiser sa gestion.
Par ailleurs, les acteurs du numérique sont incités à réduire leurs émissions de gaz à effet de serre, ce qui les conduit à investir massivement dans les énergies bas carbone. Ils le font d’autant plus volontiers que cela contribue à leur image de marque. Google a par exemple acquis en 2025 une capacité de production de 8 gigawatts d’énergie « verte ».
Paradoxalement, la transition vers une électricité décarbonée accélère ainsi l’essor du numérique — qui est entièrement tributaire de l’électricité. Ce cycle entraîne un emballement de la production électrique et numérique sans qu’aucun mécanisme de régulation ne soit, à ce jour, envisagé pour en limiter l’ampleur.
L’omniprésente dépendance minérale
Rappelons que la décarbonation de l’électricité ambitionne de réduire un des multiples impacts des activités humaines sur l’environnement : les émissions de gaz à effet de serre responsables du dérèglement climatique. Ces émissions sont identifiées par le GIEC comme étant l’impact environnemental le plus urgent à juguler car il menace directement l’habitat et l’existence de nombreuses populations du globe… mais les autres impacts liés à l’activité humaine n’en sont pas moins importants.
Or, le déploiement massif d’unités de production d’énergies intermittentes, de bornes de recharge et de stockage d’électricité (batteries…) réclame des minéraux en grande quantité. Ainsi, le géologue Olivier Vidal calcule que pour les seuls besoins de la décarbonation de l’énergie, nos sociétés doivent miner autant d’ici 2055 que depuis l’aube de l’Humanité. Sachant que la durée de vie d’un panneau solaire est d’environ 25 ans, il s’agit d’un investissement récurrent, à moins que l’amélioration du recyclage ne permette de réduire drastiquement la demande de minéraux directement issue des mines.
Les minéraux concernés sont principalement le cuivre (conducteur d’électricité irremplaçable), le lithium, plomb et cobalt des batteries, les terres rares (néodyme, dysprosium…) des éoliennes qui peuvent en contenir des centaines de kilos par unité, le silicium dopé (au bore, phosphore, cadmium, indium…) et l’argent des panneaux solaires, sans oublier l’aluminium et l’acier des pylônes électriques, dont la fabrication demande manganèse, nickel, chrome, molybdène…
Du côté du numérique, la diversité de minéraux nécessaires atteint des sommets. Un « simple » smartphone en contient plus de soixante : le tantale pour la miniaturisation des condensateurs, le germanium pour le dopage des semi-conducteurs, l’or et le molybdène pour les connecteurs inoxydables, à nouveau le cobalt pour la résistance des alliages…
Plus le matériel électronique est dense et miniaturisé, plus il contient d’alliages métalliques variés et fins, comme le processeur Apple A18 qui équipe les iPhone 16, ou le processeur nVidia Blackwell (5 nanomètres) qui domine le marché de l’IA.
Les minéraux sont une ressource finie. Ils existent depuis la création de la Terre, et se concentrent dans le sous-sol au gré des événements géologiques. Actuellement, deux origines d’approvisionnement co-existent : la primaire (l’extraction minière), et la secondaire (le recyclage).
Notons que la perspective d’une exploitation des ressources au fond des océans ou spatiales reste à ce jour un pari risqué.
Concernant la seconde source — le recyclage — le « gisement » est insuffisant pour répondre aux besoins d’aujourd’hui. En effet, avant de pouvoir recycler un objet, faut-il encore qu’il soit en fin de vie. Or, la demande en électricité nécessite l’addition de nouvelles capacités de production décarbonée, et non — à ce stade — leur remplacement.
Ainsi observe-t-on un cercle vicieux entre les transitions énergétique et numérique qui accroît exponentiellement la demande en minéraux et ses impacts environnementaux.
Des coopératives commerciales émergent pour répondre démocratiquement à de nombreux défis : Enercoop fournit de l’énergie décarbonée, Commown de l’électronique écoconçue, Mobicoop assure la mobilité, Telecoop la téléphonie…
Du côté du numérique, il existe la fédération CHATONS, constituée de 90 collectifs qui fournissent au public divers services : e-mails, sites web, sauvegardes…
Mentionnons en particulier l’association Deuxfleurs à laquelle nous contribuons.
Plutôt que reposer sur des centres de données, Deuxfleurs propose des services numériques en utilisant comme seule infrastructure matérielle d’anciens ordinateurs de bureau répartis au domicile de quelques-uns de ses membres.
Intégrer de telles initiatives pourrait permettre de maîtriser notre consommation minérale grâce au réemploi, à la réparation électronique, à la conception de services numériques durables… Pour nous, voilà ce que « sobriété » veut dire.
Adrien Luxey-Bitri appartient à l’Université de Lille, est membre de l’association Deuxfleurs et du centre de recherche en informatique Inria.
Catherine Truffert est PDG de IRIS Instruments, filiale du BRGM. Elle est par ailleurs présidente du Centre de Ressources Technologiques Cresitt Industrie et membre de l’association Deuxfleurs.
