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CRITICAL STATE
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Your weekly foreign policy fix.
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If you read just one thing …
… read about the debate over debating Israel in the United States.
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The trouble with writing a book about an ongoing crisis is that it risks being overtaken by events just as it becomes most topical. At present, Israel is erupting in protests, with pro-democracy liberals organizing strikes and walkouts against a judicial coup, while the forces of reaction look to court ultra-nationalists into a parallel military, all taking place against the reality of a state whose apartheid nature remains, at least for now, outside the political question. Eric Alterman’s “We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel” was published in November 2022, a month before Israel’s present government was formed. Emily Tamkin’s review of Alterman’s work, published in the Spring issue of Democracy, catches the crisis closer to the present. Writing this paragraph now, two days before the newsletter is set to send, I am still unsure how much the situation will have changed by the time this is live in the world. Despite some limits on the topic of intermarriage, writes Tamkin, the book “is a rich, useful synthesis of decades of debate on US-Israel relations and American policy toward Israel, and on how it came to be that the debate is sometimes less a discussion on foreign policy and more an argument as to whether there can be any debate on Israel in the first place.”
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mothers and children
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For years, mothers in Ukraine and Russia have worked to take care of prisoners of war. This effort, coordinated on the citizen level, grew out of the reality of the Donbass war, which began in 2014 when Russia invaded and backed separatists in Eastern Ukraine. The conflict, while hard-fought, was much lower in intensity than the invasion of the rest of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022. Those cross-border civilian ties have struggled in the face of Russian crackdowns on such collaboration, writes Vera Mironova.
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“We work under the understanding that all soldiers are someone’s children, so there is never any animosity between us,” Alla Makruch, who leads the initiative from the Ukrainian side, tells Mironova.
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Valentina Melnikova, the director of Russia’s “Union of Soldiers Mothers,” is putting in requests for information about prisoners of war in Russia. Fears of Russian security services have made it harder for other mothers in Russia to continue to provide aid to Ukrainian POWs in the country, says Mironova.
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Toi and Toil
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In Kazakhstan, organized feasts known as toi were traditionally used to mark major life events like weddings, birthdays, or anniversaries, but now are a tool and function of a kind of informal economy. By borrowing money to throw a toi, then paying caterers, dancers, toastmasters, and more, and then receiving socially obliged donations from guests, hosts can make a modest profit. The performers and other workers who make the toi a spectacle can also earn supplemental income, especially helpful for those locked out of the formal economy.
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To understand toi as a phenomenon, Dinara Abildenova and Zarina Adambussinova visited the Zhetysu and Zhambyl regions of Kazakhstan. These regions are predominantly agricultural, though Zhambyl also has a chemical sector. Toi work provided an opportunity for people outside these sectors to earn some extra money, turning tradition into regular irregular gig work.
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“In the context of peripheral towns, the toi business is not a mere revival of old traditions. In fact, it has come to represent a way for local populations to adapt to a changing economic system. The thriving toi business is a prism through which it is possible to read the complexities of the present, namely chronic unemployment, underdeveloped infrastructure, and strategies of survival under capitalism,” conclude Abildenova and Adambussinova.
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States At Dawn: Part I
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From what raw material conditions does the field of International Relations (IR) emerge? The first recorded histories cover states and statelets in existence. But cuneiform writing that emerged in Sumer and ancient Mesopotamia is downstream from state formation, and thus downstream from the existence of earlier IR.
In “Prehistorical International Relations: How, Why, What,” authors Iver B. Neumann and Håkon Glørstad make the case for international relations to look into prehistory, both to try and study the emergence of state systems and to see how well the tools of IR hold up when working with evidence based on material cultures.
Part of their interest concerns the genealogy of the field IR field. “[W]e want to know when the phenomena we study emerged, and how and why they changed,” the authors write.
To treat changed perceptions of time and space, especially linear time and land as possessed territory, the authors look to changes in the material evidence left by two different eras of people in prehistoric Europe. These are House Polity Proto-systems, dating from 9000-4500 BCE, which were followed by Segmentary Polity Proto-systems from 4500-2500 BCE.
“The house and its household is the major structuring element of these early polities, with the complexity of the house and of the layout of the village being solid indicators of the marked but low level of complexity of these polities,” write the authors. In this system, there was minimal trade with other groups, but the lack of large surpluses and a fairly universal profile of resources kept such trade small.
The second system analyzed is Segmentary Polity Proto-systems, which emerged after House-Polity Proto-systems collapsed under pressures, including disease. In Segmentary Polities, the important unit is not the household but the lineage, establishing relations that are linear in time and expansive, as new families and kin can be folded into lineages. Domesticated animal labor and better agricultural tools meant bigger surpluses could be stored and sustained. It also meant that polities could trade local abundance for distant resources not available close at hand, like flint, for better axes.
“At the end of the European Neolithic, then, the key preconditions for increased interaction between polities were in place: stable food production, long-distance transport, uneven distribution of key resources (flint),” write the authors. This shows up in the bones and tools recovered from the era. “Conflicts are documented both as skeletal lesions from graves and as defense systems that bear the signs of attacks, especially in the latter part of the Neolithic. Special hand weapons also occur (battle axes and lances).”
While just an early foray into applying IR to prehistory, the study makes a real stab at showing how territory became seen not as a place where people are but as a place they and their ancestors claim. Solidified and enshrined in monumental ancestral tombs, this is a kind of historical memory held by a culture before written language. It reflects a way of living and thinking that was concerned with neighbors and outsiders, existing among and in tension with other similarly constructed formations.
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Sandip Roy transited Kolkata on India’s celebration of the sesquicentennial or 150th anniversary of its tram line. Streetcars were an early form of mass transit popular across the globe, though, in many places, they were removed in the face of automobile traffic. Today, Kolkata’s tram lines have to share the road with cars, adding to the congested streets. But different planning could change that. “Why don’t we make those roads which are narrow for pedestrians and trams only? Why allow vehicles there?” transport consultant Suvendu Seth told Roy. Restoring trams and tram routes could help with mass transit, a far more useful vision than keeping streetcars around as relics just for tourists.
Olatunji Olaigbe bemoaned the power of disinformation in Nigerian elections. Olaigbe, despite offline intentions, spent election day refuting false claims of a presidential candidate dropping out or explaining to a food vendor that bank transfers were not shut off for the election. “Much of the false information was quick to reach offline people — but not its debunking, which was a major problem,” wrote Olaigbe. Like that vendor, “older, offline Nigerians were deeply exposed to disinformation around these peripheral issues that, in the end, served the purpose of either swaying political opinion, creating panic, or disenfranchising voters.”
Levi Bridges toured the modern trendy cafeteria of Piscart, a tech company in Yerevan, Armenia. With an obvious nod to the office stylings of Silicon Valley, the cafeteria was also host to tech sector talent drawn for a very particular reason. Russian tech workers, fleeing conscription and legal consequences for protest, have set up in Armenia and are contributing to both rising prices and a booming tech sector. Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of the Armenian Coding Academy in Yerevan Narek Aslikyan told Bridges that “the number of tech workers in Armenia has more than doubled since the war started.”
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Critical State is written by Kelsey D. Atherton with Inkstick Media.
The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.
With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”
Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
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