Manifesto October 2026

We are survivors of state-inflicted blindness.

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We come from different countries, speak different languages, and come from different struggles, but our wounds tell the same story.

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Our bodies carry marks that cannot be hidden. They remember what governments would like to erase. Every scar is evidence. Every blinded eye is a testimony that endures.

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Around the world, states increasingly deploy so-called “less-lethal” weapons against civilians. Presented as supposedly humane alternatives, in practice they have become instruments of blindness, mutilation, permanent disability, and death.

This is no accident.

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When a state deliberately inflicts permanent bodily harm to punish, intimidate, sow terror, or suppress protest and dissent, the boundary between crowd control and torture disappears. Mutilation is itself a form of public torture. Destroying an eye, changing a body forever, and condemning someone to live with the consequences of that violence are not temporary ways to disperse a protest. They are punishments inscribed on the body.

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The deliberate blinding of civilians has become a strategy of contemporary state repression. These weapons are not simply tools of crowd control. They are part of a global system that combines militarized policing, AI-driven surveillance, and impunity.

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To blind someone is to try to silence a witness, extinguish the imagination, sever the connection between seeing and acting, and teach an entire society to lower its gaze. The wound becomes a message that reaches far beyond the person who carries it.

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We reject not only these weapons but also the future they seek to impose: a future in which surveillance replaces trust, fear replaces participation, and permanent injuries are accepted as a normal cost of protesting, resisting, or dissenting.

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Those of us who have survived state-inflicted blindness are more than victims. We are living memory.
We carry knowledge that is not produced in laboratories, written from behind a desk, or learned by reading reports. Our experience reveals the true cost of these weapons. Those of us who have survived them must hold a central place in the struggle to abolish them.

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Our network unites survivors across borders to strengthen survivor-led organizations, document abuses, share knowledge, build solidarity, and turn our shared experience into collective action.

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The violence we face is international. Our resistance must be too.

We demand:

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• The worldwide abolition of weapons designed to blind, mutilate, or cause permanent disabilities among civilians.

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• The immediate negotiation and adoption of binding international standards governing the development, testing, manufacture, sale, export, transfer, and use of so-called “less-lethal” weapons. There is currently no comprehensive international legal framework specifically regulating this industry, despite the irreversible harm it causes.

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• Independent investigations and accountability for the states, security forces, and manufacturers responsible for these injuries.

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• Lifelong access to medical care, rehabilitation, psychological support, full reparations, and justice for all survivors.

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• Meaningful participation and leadership by survivors of all forms of state violence in national and international decisions concerning the regulation of the use of force, policing, and human rights.

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We believe another future is possible. One where governments cannot blind their own people with impunity. One where public safety is not built on fear, surveillance, or mutilation. One where those who have survived state violence help shape the laws and institutions meant to prevent it.

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Our struggle is not only against a weapon. It is against the normalization of blinding as a method of governance and against a vision of security that asks societies to surrender freedom in exchange for the illusion of order.

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Until that future exists, we will organize across borders, support one another, and continue fighting for a world where no one is ever blinded for demanding justice, dignity, or freedom.

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Across borders. Until no one is blinded again.