Book Club: When the World Sleeps by Francesca Albanese

What does it cost to confront injustice when the world would rather look away?

In the latest installment of The New Arab Book Club, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese discusses When the World Sleeps: Stories, Words, and Wounds of Palestine, her deeply personal book that interweaves international law, Palestine and her own experiences. Originally published in Italian last year, it’s now been translated into English by Gregory Conti.

Through ten deeply personal chapters, When the World Sleeps combined legal reportage with Albanese’s reflections on the encounters that shaped her understanding of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, the genocide in Gaza, and Israel’s apartheid regime before and after she took up her post as UN Special Rapporteur.

In an interview with The New Arab journalist Elias Jahshan, Albanese sheds further light on some of the individuals who formed the basis of some of the chapters in her book, while also raising critical questions about global accountability in a time of genocide.

Francesca Albanese is an Italian legal scholar who has served as the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories since May 2022, and is the first woman to hold that position. When the World Sleeps is available in the US via Other Press and in the UK via Hardie Grant Books.

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Elias Jahshan is a journalist and social media manager at The New Arab. He is also a writer who has been published in various media outlets and anthologies, and is the editor of the groundbreaking This Arab Is Queer (2022) and This Queer Arab Family (2025), both published via Saqi Books and available in bookstores globally.