The system isn't broken—it's working perfectly. You're not failing—you're being failed, systematically and by design.
Not because of war. Not because of natural disaster. Because of something far more insidious and far more common: the systematic dismantling of everything that makes a place liveable for the people who actually live there.
You've felt this already, haven't you? The way housing costs consume half your income for spaces your parents' generation would consider inadequate. The education system that charges fortunes whilst delivering corporate training. The town centres that look identical everywhere - same chains, same shareholders, same extraction of wealth to places you'll never see. The way you're more connected to strangers online than to the people who live next door.
These aren't separate problems. They're symptoms of the same process.
This systematic process has a name: nationocide—the slow-motion murder of nations. And it's happening everywhere, including wherever you're reading this.
This isn't a book about politics in the traditional sense. It's not about left versus right, liberal versus conservative. It's about a pattern that transcends those divisions: how entire ways of life disappear, how communities fragment, how young people lose the ability to build meaningful futures in the places they call home.
The good news? Once you recognise the pattern, you can fight it. Once you understand how nationocide works, you can spot it early, resist it effectively, and help build something better.
The bad news? We don't have much time.
Your generation is inheriting a world where this process has accelerated dramatically. Social media amplifies it. Global finance enables it. Technology scales it. Climate change provides cover for it. And most people don't even realise it's happening until it's too late to reverse.
You're curious enough to read a book about how nations die, or rather, how they're being murdered. In a world where most people keep their heads down and headphones on, that curiosity, that has me and you having this conversation, might be exactly what saves ours.
Why I'm Writing This
I was eleven when I first learned to see the machinery of marginalisation. As part of a minority community in Karachi, I experienced being labelled 'different'—not by classmates, but by the headmistress and staff who either supported the labelling or remained silent. That early lesson created a lens: there are people, and there are systems, and the systems often turn people against each other.
Between eleven and fourteen, a whole world opened up. I realised it wasn't just about religious sects—it was language, ethnicity, economic status. The same systematic othering operated across different communities, different contexts. The machinery was consistent even when the targets changed.
Years later, I discovered I was good at helping organisations adapt when they needed to evolve. As I developed tools for understanding how complex systems change—or get stuck—I started wondering: what if you applied this same thinking to society itself?
For years, this wondering became what my wife Sahar and I, along with a select few friends, would chew over at barbecues and dinners. Hypothetical conversations, thought experiments, nothing more—fascinating questions with no urgency to find answers.
Then on 10 August 2010, my brother Abid was murdered by extremists in Karachi. Suddenly, this wasn't hypothetical anymore—it was existential. The monsters had come home. Those dinner table conversations became survival questions. Response and resistance were no longer intellectual exercises; they were necessities.
But I didn't want to just resist—I wanted to understand. So over the next few years, I started investigating. I created opportunities to interact with individuals and communities across the spectrum, interviewing people in marginalised communities, tracking patterns across different regions.
What I found wasn't what I expected. It was religious minorities and majorities—Shias, Sunnis, Christians, Copts, Alawites, Druze, Yazidis. It was ethnic communities—Kurds, Palestinians, Baloch, Pashtun, Nubians, Bedouins. It was professionals—lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, journalists. It was community builders—entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, trade unionists, student organisers, women's activists, tribal leaders. Anyone who could provide leadership, create alternatives, or maintain social cohesion. The violence looked indiscriminate, but it wasn't random. It was systematic social culling.
By 2014, I'd documented similar patterns across the Middle East—Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt. What I was witnessing wasn't genocide targeting specific groups, but something broader: the planned systemic dismemberment of communities that loosely make up what could be called a nation.
But the investigation didn't stop there. Over the years since, my travels to Malawi, Angola, Ethiopia, Zambia, and across Africa have revealed the same systematic patterns operating in different contexts, with different tactics but identical underlying structures.
By then, the pattern was undeniable. This wasn't random violence or even targeted persecution. It was methodical destruction of nations from within—not by conquering them, but by systematically weakening everything that makes them viable.
I coined the term "nationocide" to describe what I was seeing: the planned systemic dismemberment of nation states—a process that had been operating for decades but had reached new scales, sophistication, and acceleration.
But understanding the process was one thing. The question was: what do you do with that understanding? Those dinner table conversations with Sahar suddenly weren't hypothetical anymore—they became urgent planning sessions.
We'd already co-founded Peace Through Prosperity in 2010, initially as a localised intervention in Pakistan—an act of resilience and defiance to Abid's murder, working with communities to build their own solutions to systematic marginalisation. But by 2014, our learnings and experiences had changed our scope entirely—from local intervention to global pattern recognition. Peace Through Prosperity became—and remains—a social laboratory through which we study how systematic community destruction works and test how communities can resist it.
Over the past fourteen years, we've worked with over 4,500 people in marginalised communities across Pakistan, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, Turkiye, Angola, Ethiopia, and Malawi—not as researchers observing from outside, but as partners building economic alternatives whilst strengthening the social bonds that make communities resilient.
But here's what took me longer to understand, and like Joel Osteen in The Sixth Sense, I was seeing nationocide everywhere—the systematic slow murder of communities and nations. The same patterns I'd been recognising since childhood, the same systematic othering I'd witnessed in Karachi schools, the same enterprise-level destruction I'd documented across the Middle East and Africa, weren't confined to conflict zones. They were operating everywhere, including wherever you're reading this now.
The tactics vary—in war zones, it's bombs and assassinations; in stable countries, it's economic pressure, cultural manipulation, and making politicians serve other masters. But the systematic approach remains identical: methodical destruction of the conditions that make community life possible—stealing our agency as people, our power to actually change things.
Your generation is inheriting the global expansion of processes I first witnessed in Pakistan. The question is whether you'll recognise the pattern before it becomes irreversible in your context.