Mohamad Najem

Mohamad Najem is the Lebanese Co-founder and Executive Director of SMEX, the Beirut-headquartered West Asia and North Africa (WANA) digital-rights organisation, and the corpus's on-record Arabic-language MENA / WANA voice on freedom of expression, privacy, surveillance, AI-and-human-rights, and the wartime political economy of digital sovereignty (see Person entry). He is tracked here as a Voice because his sustained public output — the named-byline op-ed register in The New Arab and the November 2025 Carnegie Endowment Diwan essay on AI-fused drone surveillance over southern Lebanon; the Global Voices and Global Voices Advox contributor record; the Wilson Center speaker register, including the April 2022 "Digital Activism in MENA: Protecting Voices for Change Online" event; the convening register he anchors as founder-and-host of the Bread & Net annual unconference SMEX has run in Beirut since 2018; the TIME magazine January 2021 recognition as one of the top activists in the Arab region; and the Stanford Draper Hills Summer Fellowship (2019) — carries the working argument that AI, surveillance, and platform policy are inseparable facets of the same regional political economy of repression, and that the WANA-region digital-rights argument is itself a leading contribution to the global field rather than a translation from Anglophone Northern framings.

The Voice anchors three movement-area registers that the corpus's voices slice had previously left empty.

• The first MENA / WANA / Arabic-language voice anchor. The corpus's voices slice had previously run UK x4 / US x6 / Continental Europe x1 / Africa x2 / Latin America x2 / South Asia x1 with no MENA, WANA, or Arabic-language anchor anywhere. The Person side has Najem and Nadim Nashif (7amleh Co-founder and General Director) as the two regional Person anchors; the Voice side now anchors the public-output footprint of the principal Arabic-language civil-society organisation on digital rights in WANA.
• The SMEX voice anchor. SMEX is in corpus with Najem named as Co-founder and Executive Director but without a corresponding Voice entry until this draft. The org-side body identifies the WANA-region terminology, the four-programme structure (Digital Safety Helpdesk, Digital Forensics Lab, Digital Rights Fund, Mariam al-Shafei Fellowship), and the Bread & Net convening as the surfaces through which the organisation's public-facing posture carries; the Voice anchors the named-individual public-output side of that posture.
• The convener-and-essayist sub-type on regional digital sovereignty under wartime surveillance. Structurally distinct from the corpus's existing voice anchors on litigators (Cori Crider, Mercy Mutemi), lawyer-founder-and-columnists (Apar Gupta), Public Policy and Research leadership lawyers (J. Carlos Lara), and journalist-researchers (Jamila Venturini) — Najem's distinctive register is the digital-rights organiser-essayist whose public output runs as a combined convening register (Bread & Net), op-ed and essay register (The New Arab, Carnegie Diwan, Global Voices, IFEX-syndicated), and operational anchor of the regional civil-society safety infrastructure (the SMEX Digital Safety Helpdesk). The convener side anchors the regional movement-building footprint, the essayist side anchors the named-byline argument in English-language pan-Arab and international policy outlets, and the operational side anchors the technical and political credibility on which both rest.

Public output and venues

Najem's public-facing work runs through four overlapping channels.

• Op-ed and essay register on regional digital sovereignty. Najem's headline named-byline op-ed register runs through The New Arab, the leading pan-Arab English-language digital outlet, where his March 2026 piece "Can Lebanon Survive the Digital War?" framed the Israeli digital assault on Lebanon as a coordinated surveillance-and-disinformation campaign comprising spyware deployment, AI-generated disinformation networks taken down by Meta and Google, and GPS spoofing and jamming across the Eastern Mediterranean documented by SMEX. The op-ed was republished by IFEX, the International Freedom of Expression Exchange, anchoring its international-civil-society circulation. The November 2025 Carnegie Endowment Diwan essay "An Automated Occupation in South Lebanon" — co-authored with Mohanad Hage Ali — is the on-record international-policy artefact of the same line, advancing the technical-and-political argument that Israeli drones (the Hermes 450 and 900 platforms) operate as airborne Signal Intelligence platforms intercepting mobile signals, Wi-Fi, GPS data, and communications metadata, and that the resulting data is organised by AI to enable a new pattern of remote occupation built on surveillance, intimidation, and population control rather than ground forces.
• Global Voices contributor record. Najem is a Global Voices contributor — the international citizen-media network whose own framing describes his work as "integrating digital rights into Internet policy and governance through research, writing, and campaigns" — and is listed separately on the Global Voices Advox digital-rights vertical. The Global Voices contributor record is the named-byline anchor of the international Anglophone digital-rights publishing pipeline his Voice carries beyond the regional Arabic-language venues.
• Convening register: Bread & Net. Najem is the founder-and-host of Bread & Net, the annual digital-rights unconference SMEX has run in Beirut since 2018 — described as the MENA region's first unconference addressing technology and human rights — which has carried more than 3,400 advocates through 500 sessions across seven years of activity and now anchors a partnership network of at least 18 regional and international organisations, including Access Now, the Arab Reform Initiative, ARIJ, Digital Action, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mnemonic, TIMEP, and Witness. The participant-set-agenda methodology — Bread & Net frames itself as "a living archive. A lab. A launchpad" rather than a conference — is Najem's substantive contribution to the convening form: a deliberate refusal of the panel-driven Northern conference template in favour of a movement-building practice rooted in regional civil-society peer convening.
• International-policy speaker register and recognition. Najem is a 2019 Stanford Draper Hills Summer Fellow and was recognised in TIME magazine in January 2021 as one of the top activists in the Arab region. He is a recurring named speaker at the Wilson Center, including the April 2022 event "Digital Activism in MENA: Protecting Voices for Change Online", and routes the SMEX regional posture into Anglophone international policy and digital-rights venues through this speaker and fellowship register.

Signature framings

Two formulations recur across Najem's public output and have done the most to install his register into the WANA-region digital-rights field.

• "WANA" rather than "MENA" — regional terminology as political framing. SMEX's self-framing consistently uses "West Asia and North Africa" rather than "Middle East and North Africa", and Najem's named public-output footprint carries the same terminology — the MERIP interview, the Wilson Center speaker register, the SMEX research portfolio his leadership anchors. The terminology is a deliberate political choice that displaces the "Middle East" framing used in much Global North reporting on the region and signals SMEX's self-positioning inside the region's own scholarly and movement vocabulary rather than outside it. The framing carries through into the named-byline op-ed register, where Najem's argument is presented from inside the region's civil-society field looking outward at the surveillance-and-disinformation political economy, rather than reproducing a Northern observer's posture on a "Middle Eastern" subject.
• AI, surveillance, cyberweapon supply, and platform policy as one connected political economy. Najem's running argument across the New Arab op-ed, the Carnegie Diwan essay, the MERIP interview, and the SMEX research line his leadership anchors is that the AI-and-human-rights question, the surveillance-spyware question, the platform-content-moderation question, and the cyberweapon-industry question are not separate policy domains but interconnected facets of the same regional political economy of repression. The Carnegie essay's "automated occupation" framing — drones as airborne SIGINT platforms feeding AI-organised data pipelines used to target an occupied population — is the most condensed single articulation of that argument, and it carries directly through into the SMEX research line on the WANA cyberweapon-industry supply chain, Big Tech cloud expansion in the Gulf, Arabic-language platform-moderation gaps, and AI deployment in regional state administration. The proposition refuses the separation between AI-and-human-rights advocacy and the wider regional political economy of surveillance and wartime repression that the corpus's Northern AI-policy framings often assume.

Organisational vehicle

Najem's public output runs primarily through SMEX — the Beirut-headquartered WANA-regional digital-rights organisation he co-founded in 2008 as Social Media Exchange and has led publicly throughout. His biographical pathway into digital rights runs through the post-2006 Israeli-Lebanese war reconstruction period in southern Lebanon: after leaving hotel management to work with NGOs distributing water and repairing infrastructure, he and a journalist-and-photographer partner began "using technology to train journalists and later different civil society groups" — the practical workshop-and-training origin from which SMEX's wider regional digital-rights programme grew over the next decade and a half. He held the title "cofounder and advocacy director" through the mid-2010s before becoming Executive Director, and his named public-facing register has remained continuous from that period. SMEX is the named convener of Bread & Net, one of the seven inaugural members of the Global Network for Social Justice and Digital Resilience (with Derechos Digitales as the Latin American counterpart and Paradigm Initiative as the pan-African counterpart in the wider Global Majority civil-society infrastructure), and the institutional vehicle through which the WANA-region argument Najem's Voice carries reaches both the regional Arabic-language audience and the wider Anglophone international digital-rights and policy networks.

Why this is a Voice entry

A Voice entry is created here, rather than additional structure on the Person entry, because Najem's public-facing output is itself the load-bearing object the corpus needs to track: the New Arab op-ed register on the Israeli digital war against Lebanon and its IFEX-syndicated international circulation; the Carnegie Endowment Diwan co-authored essay on AI-fused drone surveillance; the Global Voices and Global Voices Advox contributor record; the Wilson Center speaker register and Draper Hills fellowship; the Bread & Net annual convening Najem founded and hosts; and the regional-terminology and connected-political-economy framings that have done the most to install the WANA-region argument into the international digital-rights and AI-and-human-rights field. The corpus's voices slice carried no MENA, WANA, or Arabic-language anchor, no SMEX anchor, and no convener-and-essayist sub-type before this entry; this entry gives all three their first first-person voice. Affiliation and biographical structure are recorded on the linked Person entry per the corpus's Person/Voice split.