On authorship, institutional power, and what happens when the common good is built on someone’s erasure.
Author's note from 19 September 2026: Originally published on LinkedIn on 15 May 2026 as these events were beginning to unfold. I am gathering my writing here so it can be read together, preserving this piece as a reflection written in the midst of what was happening.
“Loving compassion is the grounded concern for our own well-being and that of others, recognising the validity of others’ basic needs. With compassionate love, we refrain from exploiting others, even in subtle ways, especially within intimate relationships, where our vulnerability is most heightened…”
– Åland Voluntary Review 2024, “Everyone Can Flourish on the Islands of Peace.” Chapter 4, page 15
I have reflected on this line a great deal as of late. I myself edited and refined it almost exactly two years ago, before the Voluntary Review was finalized on 30 May 2024 and sent to the United Nations.
The most dangerous forms of exploitation are rarely announced as exploitation.
First, it starts as a private email thanking you for your initiative and thought work, saying it was exactly what was needed.
Then it starts getting reframed.
As an always planned part of the process.
As collective ownership.
As generosity that is no longer freely given, but expected.
As “many people contributed.”
As “no one owns the vision.”
As “you have to understand how hard others have worked.”
And finally:
You know some of us have been here eight years.
The quote above continues immediately with:
…Curiosity and the thirst for knowledge flourish alongside contentment and compassion, fostering a commitment to pursuits beyond oneself and immediate circles, thereby nurturing a disposition towards generous acts. Everyone has the capacity to be generous with their time, knowledge, guidance, and practical assistance.
An institution does not hold a pen.
A governance framework does not emerge from magic or write itself.
Not everything is diffuse with vibes and ideas bounced around a committee.
Sometimes someone sits there. Of their own initiative and free will. Between work appointments.
Alone.
Late at night. Through days when the January sun rises and sets behind her.
With no secure title, permanent position, guarantees or applause.
With no direction and no expectation.
With her own drive, cognitive profile and unique gift for both symbol and synthesis, she tries to hold language, structure, philosophy and practice together while the rest of life keeps happening around her.
A mother writes while children ask her if she can play.
A wife writes while her loving husband quietly places food and drink beside her because she has forgotten to eat.
A citizen gives work in good faith because she believes in the place, the people and the possibility. She believes those words from May 2024.
And then, when the work that was articulated as necessary is finally seen, finally becomes valuable, the old pattern returns in softer clothes.
This is why the Matilda Effect and the Matthew Effect still matter— not as history, but as warning, mirror and question.
WHO did the work?
Who took the risk?
Who did the reading?
Who gained the educational know-how?
Who operationalised their own lived experience as marginal?
A beautiful language does not automatically purify power.
Status anxiety can still be there. So can defensiveness, insecurity and the urge to force a story into the shape that protects one’s own centrality, narrative and political preferences.
Sadly, such things do not disappear because we learn better words.
Sometimes they simply change clothes.
And suddenly the person asking for recognition for her own work is made to seem difficult, selfish or ungrateful when she refuses to remove her name from her own authored work, despite having made her boundaries crystal clear.
The consequences are real. She is punished. Repeatedly.
Even when she raises concerns, protection does not come.
And finally, if she does not resist, she disappears from the story of her own work.
But actual flourishing makes people more visible in their own lives.
It strengthens their connection to their own work, voice, dignity, belonging and future.
Flourishing as cover does something else.
It absorbs.
What was her work becomes “ours.”
What was her framework becomes “the process.”
What was her language becomes “the vision.”
What might have led to her future opportunities travels instead through other people’s names, titles and networks. People who have structure, security, and the power to take.
Meanwhile, her professional plans are affected: to build a doctoral trail on the work and expand upon the conceptual framework she conceived on her own.
She is warned off speaking up for her rights to her own work.
She is treated as difficult, unstable, disloyal or ungrateful, even by people she trusted — people who know how the work was actually done, when it was done, and by whom.
People who know she kept writing because she wanted to show care to her home.
That is not co-creation.
It is certainly not social sustainability.
That is not flourishing.
It is exploitation with better vocabulary.
And it is precisely why attribution is never, ever ego.
Attribution is how work remains connected to the human being who actually did it.
It is how future opportunities find their way back to the right person: invitations, citations, funding, doctoral openings, commissions, professional recognition.
It is how little girls see what women and mothers can do. What foreigners can do.
So that the gamble — and the loss of time to family, rest and other parts of life — receives, at minimum, truthful recognition.
But in Finland, attribution is not merely ethical.
So before we uncritically call something flourishing, we need to ask:
Who receives the recognition?
Who receives the opportunities?
Whose future is threatened?
And who actually did the work and took the journey necessary to create it in the first place?
Who is expected to stay quiet so the beautiful story remains undisturbed — to protect someone else’s comfort at the cost of the author’s own flourishing?
For me, this is no longer a side question.
It is central to my doctoral trajectory: governance, legitimacy, authorship, attribution, and the institutional conditions that either allow people to flourish — or quietly consume their work while speaking beautifully about the common good.
It is not a lesson I will need to be taught again.
If the price of protecting the story is the author’s erasure, then the story was never about flourishing.
It is merely the old world speaking in a kinder accent.
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