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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 what Russian anarchists thought of Wagner’s march to Moscow.
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From June 23 to June 24, the Russia-based private military contracting company Wagner staged a mutiny against the Russian government, under the command of its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. The group captured the headquarters of Russia’s southern military district in Rostov-on-Don, then marched toward Moscow, stopping outside the city while an end was negotiated. Prigozhin’s challenge came to President Vladimir Putin directly from the right, dressed in the language of harder nationalism and better execution of the war. An alternative perspective was published, mid-mutiny, at CrimethInc., which collected three statements from Russian anarchist organizations. “In the current situation around the
Wagner mutiny, there is no side we can choose but ourselves…neither the Putin regime nor those competing with it for authority will act in the interests of all the peoples in Russia,” said the Irkutsk Anarchists. The Combat Organization of Anarcho-Communists urged allies to let the mutiny play out before rushing into attacks on the military, saying, “Attacking such objects right now means wasting your resources, practically attacking the fortified fortresses of the enemy with bare hands.” Avtonom/Autonomous action offered a similar assessment, saying, “if we want to create an alternative to both of these monsters, then we must learn to unite to solve our problems, support the struggle to end the war and repression, defend ourselves against violence, and defend our interests and rights.”
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Rebel bones and reactionary lies
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By 1939, Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia was stuck firmly in the brutal stages of counterinsurgency. While Ethiopia’s emperor had fled, partisans and patriots raided Italian camps and supplies. One such camp from which these rebel patriots hailed was the cave at Ametsegna Washa. Deep enough to house hundreds, with a lake for water and room to store the food to sustain them, the cave was hard to assault, as any attacker would be silhouetted against the bright opening. This is why, when it came to taking the cave, Italian forces used mustard and tear gas, killing defenders where they stood and forcing others, incapacitated, to surrender, before being marched out into a massacre.
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Frederic Wehrey, writing at the New York Review of Books, spelunks into the cave at Ametsegna, and the undeniable evidence of war crimes it offers. While the horrors were well recorded in oral traditions and testimony among Ethiopians, corroboration of the cave and the crime would wait until 2006.
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The massacre itself, acknowledged in Italian primary source documents as well as Ethiopian accounts, has become a political flashpoint within Italy, as the country’s far-right government seeks to claim past glories without acknowledging the specific cruelties and war crimes carried out by elite military units in a war nearly a century ago.
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monkey business decisions
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There’s no easy way to fit mining equipment into the delicate balance of an ecosystem. For companies looking to extract resources, minimally invasive mining practices can be hard or unwieldy, but outright destruction of the land in which they operate can cause obvious harm, and leave investors squeamish or locals wary of the project. “Biodiversity offsets” are a tool in which extractive companies, seeking to balance against the harm caused by their operation, take action like relocating endangered species, or restoring similar environments elsewhere. In a deep dive at ProPublica, Lisa Song with Jaime Yaya Barry investigated the world of biodiversity offsets.
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The story focuses on five villages in Guinea, all suffering from the spillover effects of mining by Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinée. This mining displaced chimpanzees, strained food resources, and left the villagers who had lived in the area with little recourse or comfort in familiar lifeways.
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“Residents described increasing chimpanzee raids, dwindling resources, wells that had run dry and explosions that cracked the foundations of their homes. Their hopes for better-paying jobs were dashed when the mine provided few opportunities. One village was relocated from a shaded grove to a scorching, windswept hilltop, barren as the surface of Mars. Residents said they had little choice in the matter,” writes Song.
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Sea Something Say Something: Part II
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When a ship starts to sink at sea, the most important thing for rescuers to know is where it is, speeding any attempts at life-saving action. In the Mediterranean, the ships most likely to be in jeopardy are vessels of desperation, adapted for transporting people from the near east or African coasts toward a hope of refuge in Europe. Operating these vessels can be anyone from a complex social milieu to a fisherman trying to add extra revenue to criminal enterprises charging exorbitant fees on the promise of disembarking, not arrival. For rescuers, what matters most is that when they find such an overstuffed, underpowered ship in the sea, they’re able to save as many lives as they can.
In “Floating sanctuaries: The ethics of search and rescue at sea,” authors Itamar Mann and Julia Mourão Permoser interviewed search and rescue workers about the ethical dilemmas of rescue at sea. In so doing, they offer an in-depth portrait of maritime rescue work as built around creating sanctuary, amidst a literal and metaphorical sea of hostile factors.
“The act of rescue is based on an ethical imperative to save people who are at an imminent risk of drowning, and that imperative takes precedence over all other considerations,” write the authors. “Confronted with the drowning person, so the narrative goes, there is no choice to make and there is no dilemma.”
While at sea and engaging in rescue, the actions are clear and their necessity immediate. What complicates this role is the way European states, which are the port of destination for migrants, can work to criminalize rescuers for their role in life-saving action. This is not helped by the fact that many such smugglers, transporters, and traffickers see rescuers as a tool to complete the sea transit they initiate. For European prosecutors so inclined, this rescue work can be seen as a “transfer at sea,” or the taking of passengers in an illegal fashion.
“The accusation that NGOs are carrying out ‘transfers at sea’ implies that there is no real emergency, no real risk of drowning. But our interviewees stressed that knowledge about the location of a migrant boat does not eliminate the risk of shipwreck. Migrant boats are all unseaworthy and can sink at any time, they argued, even in the middle of a rescue,” write the authors.
That legal risk hangs over rescuers, who in interviews repeatedly told the researchers that they make an effort to learn the minimum amount about their rescued passengers. Instead, rescuers vouch for migrants as simply people who needed rescuing. It’s a legal and ethical move, letting the rescue ships attempt to deliver people to safety without immediately subjecting them to harsh border laws.
These rescuers “seek to create a different kind of deterritorialization, one that establishes spaces of resistance against state sovereignty. By adopting internal regulations that suspend as much as possible the applicability of criminal and migration laws, rescuers seek to transform the ship into a floating sanctuary,” conclude the authors.
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Tibisay Zea interviewed Trigidia Jiménez, a farmer in the Bolivian Andes. Twenty years ago, Jiménez left urban life in La Paz and started cultivating an acre of cañahua, a grain related to quinoa. “That's what our ancestors used to eat every day. A cup of cañahua for breakfast,” Jiménez told Zea. “We make it like oatmeal.” The crop is now in cultivation on over 5,000 acres, and thanks to subsidies from Bolivia’s government, it’s become a staple of low-income diets again, as well as a livelihood for 1,500 families. In a warming world, it’s also a hedge against vulnerable crop monocultures.
Narayani Sritharan and Jeffrey Crittenden played through the implications of Saudi Arabia’s acquisition of PGA Golf, creating a professional golf monopoly in the hands of the Gulf monarchy. Saudi intends to merge PGA with LIV Golf, which it already owns, in a high-profile purchase that was met with public criticism. Write Sritharan and Crittenden, “To better understand the attempts to repair its image, the level of skepticism toward LIV Golf should be applied to Saudi Arabia’s political rights, social equality, and economic diversification projects.” Golf may have the world's attention, but the kingdom moving its Vision 2030 goalposts should really give investors pause in the country’s
actions.
Orla Barry reported on the looming surrogacy ban in Italy, a law urged by the reactionary government that will punish parents for the crime of having a child with the aid of a surrogate. The move, which fits into a broader natalist and forced birth package, would likely specifically target gay men who work with surrogates to have children. While heterosexual couples can likely hide the use of a surrogate abroad, Italy, which still has not legalized gay marriage, would be able to deny rights to the children of gay men, a process already underway. The government has also ordered Milan's City Council to stop registering same-sex parents’ children as their children.
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Hello readers! We interrupt this regularly formatted Critical State to invite you to apply for the Creative Capsule Residency. This virtual residency, supported by Inkstick Media and Bombshelltoe Policy x Arts Collective, is looking for journalists, artists, and international security experts, at all
skill levels, interested in working on a project about global security issues. The deadline for applications is July 21, 2023. Apply here!
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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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