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read about the market for violence work fueling civil war in Sudan.

Sudan is currently in the grip of a war waged since April by the Sudanese Armed Forces under de facto president Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces under the leadership of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo. Step back from the personal animosity, though, and the material of war, from chains of command to willing fighters to plundered resources smuggled abroad for funding, all point to an inherent tension in the economy of the country, long poised to spill over. At Phenomenal World [[link removed]], Adam Benjamin interviewed scholar Magdi el Gizouli about the war. “The two fighting forces share in the common resource of the pool of young people who have lost out in the rural economy, a surplus workforce. How do two brothers end up fighting in two different camps? This occurs not for ideological reasons, but because of the contingencies of a militarized job market and regional networks of power, commodities, and weapons,” Gizouli tells Benjamin. This made violence work the way forward for many, and for the Rapid Support Forces, using its armed workforce to capture the state was easier than dismantling it. “This was an alternative network of opportunities away from the state system — with its degrees and paperwork — and away from the crushingly exploitative agricultural labor system.”

Pharaonic Failings

It has been 12 years since Egyptians in Tahrir Square ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak after decades in power. That moment of democratic promise was concluded decisively when Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, an Egyptian general, overthrew Egypt’s democratically elected (if not particularly democratic) President Mohamed Morsi. Sisi has since delivered massive repression, but Egypt’s economy is suffering, and there’s little to show the country’s impoverished masses for a decade of drudgery.

“Cairo is an enormous megalopolis of almost 23 million people creaking under its own weight, but the construction of Sisi’s New Administrative Capital (as yet unnamed) — the first phase of which has cost over $45 billion [[link removed]], and it is not even complete — is a waste of precious resources,” writes Steven A. Cook at The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune [[link removed]].

Egypt’s debt is second only to that of Ukraine, and Egypt got there without the necessity of fighting an existential war. For countries that seek continued warm relations with Egypt, or at least open and continuous transit through the Suez, funding the country anyway might sustain it for a time. Still, the possibility of upheaval, like that seen in Tahrir half a generation ago, is very real.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Unsettled Colonials

Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have lived under siege conditions for 16 years, with their movements curtailed and controlled by Israel’s military. This has not stopped periodic waves of protest against the arrangement, movements met at varying times with violent repression and occasionally political compromise. Writing at +972 Magazine [[link removed]], Mohammed R. Mhawish describes the September 2023 marches in Gaza, which have earned surprising success.

“Among their collective demands, the protesters placed an emphasis on the goal of easing Israel’s severe restrictions on the movement of goods and people through the crossings. Yet the demonstrations were not limited to economic concerns only: they also voiced a call for an immediate cessation of Israeli settlers and soldiers storming the Aqsa Mosque Compound (with frictions increasing during the Jewish high holidays), and a halt to the oppressive conditions against Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails,” writes Mhawish.

What sets this wave apart, or at least places it as a distinct evolution in tactics by Palestinian organizers, is the way the protests are not the work of one faction within Gaza but suggest an emerging and durable united front. The work of protest may be asymmetric, but with Israel’s embattled government struggling under internal protests in Tel Aviv, the possibility exists that this moment, decades removed from old peace accords, may represent a new breakthrough.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Tilting at Windmills: Part II

We have arrived in the 21st century propelled by an explosion of power and productivity. The defining resource of the 19th century was coal and the defining resource of the 20th century was oil. The big question for the 21st century is if it will be possible for the whole of the world, but especially the industrialized and massively energy consuming countries, to move away from fossil fuels. Development of new, alternative, and renewable or long-lasting energy resources, instead, will come with their own politics, and those material changes could drive constitutional changes, depending on how they are managed and resolved.

In “ Climate Change, Energy Transition, and Constitutional Identity [[link removed]],” J.S. Maloy offers an approach for thinking how a change in energy production and consumption might lead to changes in the relative autocracy or democracy of governments. To build this theoretical framework, Maloy leans on two different notions of energy relationships to government, the “oil curse” and “carbon democracy,” both theories that hinge greatly on not just the type of resource extracted, but how that resource is managed.

“Carbon Democracy” is a term that comes from Timothy Mitchell, and it describes how the relationship between bulky, labor-intensive fossil fuel extraction in the 19th century can be seen in the ability of workers to secure demands.

“The key mechanism linking coal and democracy was industrial sabotage,” writes Maloy. “Organized groups of miners, railworkers, and dockworkers — small in numbers but strategically placed in networks for producing and distributing coal — possessed means of shutting down the urban economies of countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France by cutting off their chief source of energy. Wealthy industrialists and their political defenders therefore felt compelled to make concessions to organized labor as the price of keeping coal-fired economies in continuous operation.”

Oil (and by this Maloy notes petroleum and natural gas are often grouped under the same term) instead is geographically concentrated, and requires engineers more than laborers. That reliance on technical expertise, as well as the ability to ship it by pipelines instead of driven vehicles, makes it easier for states to control and hold onto, especially through national oil companies.

“The political question is about authority and control over the operations of an energy regime, however spatially centralized or decentralized,” writes Maloy. “It suggests that different sources of energy vary in their ability to be used by different parties in political competition. What counts is not the concentration of the energy source as much as its social and technical embeddedness in larger processes of production, distribution, and use.”

By looking at how governments have managed extractive power resources with different degrees of deference to workers, this approach offers insight into how factors around renewable resource development might change the political composition of the states in which they take plane.

“The logic of leverage forces us to ask how far the organized masses have the practical wherewithal to interrupt the production of wind turbines and solar cells, of the new generation of ‘modular’ nuclear reactors, or of the transmission of electricity on the grid,” writes Maloy.

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FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] RECEIPTS

Gerry Hadden plowed [[link removed]] through the work of Rewilding Spain, which is actively working to reintroduce cows bred to resemble aurochs, a once-extinct species of European bovine herbivore. Before humans hunted them to extinction, with the last dying in Poland in 1627, the aurochs played a role in managing vegetation, eating brush and small trees in forests. The absence of these smaller combustible plants limited the spread of wildfires, and the new aurochs could play a similar role as risk of wildfire increases. The eaten away undergrowth, a farmer told Hadden, meant a recent lightning strike burned just one tree, not a whole forest.

Molly Hurley clocked [[link removed]] the modern media pathways that let late-night video scrolling lead people down rabbit holes of discovery, with obvious or not so obvious ties to larger structural forces a quick reveal away. Hurley starts her dive on the long-running mystery of what industry buys glitter, noting TikTok videographers have put together that glitter inventor Henry Rauschmann Jr. also sold mica washers to the US government [[link removed]] during World War II, washers that show up in atomic production [[link removed]]. “Why the level of secrecy and severity from the Glitterex spokesperson, then? Well, perhaps in an unexpectedly predictable outcome: because of military project secrecy,” wrote Hurley.

Theo Merz watched [[link removed]] “The Lemberg Machine,” a stop-motion film by Ukrainian director Dana Kavelina, which examines the history of Lviv (known as Lemberg in Germany) during World War II. The film is unsparing in showing the role of some Ukrainians as collaborators with the Nazi government in past violence. “Yes, we have been collaborators. Of course. It happened with us then. That doesn't mean that we are Nazi now, and it doesn't mean that someone can kill us right now and we should not defend our own country," Kavelina told Merz. Ignoring that history, she argued, lets Russia fill the void with falsehoods.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL-PLAYED

Who knew SkyNet would be so thirsty [[link removed]]?

World’s least subtle man picks a dog whistle so loud [[link removed]] cerberus can hear it.

It’s a mistake to say the United States left Afghanistan unchanged. The ruling Taliban adopted American weapons, camouflage, and now, even American-style mass surveillance [[link removed]].

In another era, this enterprising designer would be making rockets for ACME [[link removed]] to sell to Wile. E. Coyote.

A century after escaping the rigid confines of the academy, naturalist painters are now inadvertently making scientific contributions [[link removed]].

All your face are belong to us [[link removed]].

Who called it a film of World War II footage scored by other artists doing Beatles songs and not Covering Fire [[link removed]]?

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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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