Why this project exists

Abdullah Saqib grew up in Islamabad without a village to call his own. His family’s Partition story meant there was no ancestral home to return to — no place to point to and say, this is ours.

His earliest memories are shaped by that absence: sitting beside his father at night as he tuned a battered radio to the BBC World Service, listening to news of Bosnia, and hearing the stories of 1947 told at his grandparents’ home — always in the same words, in the same order.

Fifteen years across lines on the map

That early awareness of displacement and state-drawn lines quietly shaped a 15-year career across South, Central and Southeast Asia — including Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan and Indonesia — as well as the Middle East and North Africa, East Africa and the Caribbean.

He has built and scaled initiatives with corporations, multilaterals, fast-growing startups and social enterprises: launching digital services inside telecommunications companies, designing climate resilience and anticipatory action frameworks with international agencies, and driving growth across global impact portfolios. Along the way he saw both enormous institutional scale and deep structural fragility.

Questioning the frame

His MSc in Sustainable Development at the University of Sussex took him deep into decolonial thinking — challenging top-down development and asking how power, governance and borders are built and kept in place.

As a certified coach and lead facilitator, he has spent years mentoring social entrepreneurs, displaced founders and emerging leaders through organisations such as MIT D-Lab, Ashoka, Seedstars and Acumen, and has spoken on foresight, resilience and systemic impact across Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.

The turning point

After the escalation of October 2023, the space for “drawing-room paralysis” ran out. He co-founded the Amal Initiative and Volunteers for Palestine, building grassroots pathways for economic resilience, mental well-being and narrative sovereignty among displaced communities.

Inherited Borders is where that journey comes together: an attempt to set down what he has learned from the people he met along the way, to bridge grassroots action and global strategy, and to ask what a community might look like if it did not depend on the lines we were handed.