NO NIIN Zine 1: Sites of Record and Resistance

What does it look like when ordinary people confront the extractive machinery that institutions—universities, corporations, states—are built to protect? The two essays featured in this zine answer that question from the ground up, with the clarity that comes only from being inside the struggle rather than observing it.Disrupting Complicity: Students Organising for Palestine in Finland, written collectively by Students for Palestine Finland, documents how students at three universities across the greater Helsinki region have been organising, since the Al-Aqsa Flood, for an academic boycott of Israeli institutions complicit in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. This is a text about tactics and friction: the encampments, the walkouts, the membership initiatives that force student unions to take an official position, and the university administrations that call the police and invoke neutrality.A Mine That’s Not Ours: Land, Labor and Resistance in Armenia’s Syunik Region, by documentary photographer and journalist Gayané Ghazaryan, takes us to Syunik in southern Armenia. On January 31st, 2025, over two thousand workers at the Zangezur Copper-Molybdenum Combine launched an unprecedented wildcat strike. Around the mine’s expanding tailings dam, communities in the village of Artsvanik have watched their farmland disappear under toxic waste. Ghazaryan traces the colonial logic running through both sites: the privatised mine with its foreign shareholders and contemptuous management, the state that positioned itself as revolutionary in the 2018 so-called “Velvet” Revolution and yet continues to prioritise investment over the people who bear its costs.These are different movements in different geographies. But they are placed in conversation because they operate against the same structure of power: institutions that extract value from land, labor, bodies, and minds while concentrating profits at the top. The specific forms of retaliation differs. Helsinki students are met with procedural delay and accusations of creating opposition; Armenian miners are sued for billions; communities near toxic tailings dams are bought into a dependency too small to live on and too crucial to risk losing. The institution never defends extraction directly; it just keeps repositioning resistance as the transgression.What the writers actively witness is that organising is possible even when it is met with intimidation, dispossession, and legal retaliation, and that it is made more possible by being documented, shared, and connected across contexts. Underlying both texts is an understanding of inheritance: that what is achieved today in Helsinki or Kajaran is built on the movements of others worldwide, and that strengthening that web by sharing what you know, how you know it, and what might come next is itself a form of resistance. Holding these realities in the same frame is not to flatten them, but to make each one more legible and more urgent in light of the other.

__

Layout: Ahmad Ali Kadivar

Logo Design: Samar Zureik

Font Design: Léo Guibert

Riso Print by Golrokh Nafisi (Sunset Studio)

Year: 2026