Read about “Noctalgia” or “sky grief.” Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing …

… read about a pogrom in Dagestan.

Within the Russian Federation is the Dagestan Republic, located in the mountains of the Caucasus and along the western shore of the Caspian Sea. Dagestan’s capital of Makhachkala and its Uytash International Airport became international news on Oct. 29, 2023, when three different groups of Dagestanis protested the arrival at the airport of a flight from Tel Aviv. The protests featured older women picketing at the highway, middle-aged men breaking into the airport, and young men storming the tarmac, all informed and guided to some degree by antisemitic beliefs about the travelers on the plane, despite the flight largely returning families from abroad after medical treatments. But the protests also hit as a public expression of rage and discontent in a region of Russia disproportionately conscripted [[link removed]] to fight and die in the war against Ukraine. Harold Chambers, writing at Riddle [[link removed]], attempts to make sense of the Dagestan pogrom, clearly informed by Israel’s ongoing war against Gaza but driven by much more than that. “While North Caucasus regions have long been averse to public political expression, this has been even more pronounced in the wake of last year’s anti-mobilization protests. [Governor] Melikov has all but eliminated channels for moderate public expression. This leads to tactical outbidding that favors dramatic, extreme actions. An inability to protest built up pressure until a mob emerged,” writes Chambers.

Inherent Worth And Dignity

Every story about Israel’s continued violence against Gaza, waged in the name and pretext of rooting out Hamas, is rapidly out of date. The death toll continuously rises, and the specifics of the violence visited changes. It can be seen in the weariness and disgust [[link removed]] with which CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, who early in his career edited the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s monthly newsletter, when he responds to an Israel Defense Forces spokesman claiming that an airstrike on a refugee camp was just the tragedy of war. Writing for n+1 [[link removed]], Saree Makdisi talks about the impossibility of advocating for Palestinian humanity against a backdrop that assumes Palestinian death to be the baseline norm.

“What we are not allowed to say, in other words, is that if you want the violence to stop, you must stop the conditions that produced it,” writes Makdisi, before going on to suffer the horrors, previously existing and new, that beset Palestinians as conditions of the long occupation and entrapment in enclaves.

What we are witnessing, as he explains, “is perhaps the first fusion of old-school colonial and genocidal violence with advanced state-of-the-art heavy weapons; a twisted amalgamation of the 17th century and the 21st, packaged and wrapped up in language that harks back to primitive times and thunderous biblical scenes involving the smiting of whole peoples — the Jebusites, the Amelikites, the Canaanites, and of course the Philistines.”

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

On the night of Oct. 28, 2023, a small crowd of protesters gathered in front of Israel’s military headquarters on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv. For months, every Saturday has seen tens of thousands of protesters against the Netanyahu government gather, decrying his reactionary overreach and continued degradation of Israel’s remaining democratic institutions. Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, and the subsequent war footing adopted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had for a moment silenced dissent, bolstered in part by new prohibitions against political demonstrations (enforced unevenly, with a heavier hand applied to those calling for ceasefire than those encouraging more violence). Oren Ziv documented the Tel Aviv protest for +972 Magazine [[link removed]].

“Demonstrators held signs bearing slogans in English, Hebrew, and Arabic including, ‘Israelis for a ceasefire,’ ‘An eye for an eye until we all go blind,’ and, ‘If you condemn one war crime, you must condemn them all.’ There were no speeches, and the only chant was ‘Ceasefire Now,’” reports Ziv.

That night, the protestors escaped police harassment, possibly because they were so close to a separate protest by the families of those held hostage by Hamas. Those protesters demanded a full exchange: All hostages in Gaza for all Palestinians held on security charges in Israeli prisons, the “all for all.” Netanyahu has so far dismissed the possibility, but Ziv reports protestors are planning to go to the Knesset and directly lay the blame for deaths on Netanyahu’s hands.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Imagine The War Home: Part II

Violent conflict, especially at the scale of a total war or revolution, creates a rupture in the society that undertakes the war. This rupture is felt personally from the loss of individuals, especially young men who perished in the fighting. It is also felt structually, as the elites that led a country into a war must reckon with the cost imposed for pursuing it or risk being tarred as failures and expelled form power, allowing new elites to assume their position in society.

In “ War, Revolution, and the Expansion of Women’s Political Representation [[link removed]],” Aili Mari Tripp looks at how certain ruptures create paths for the expansion of women’s rights, most notably suffrage and representation in national government.

By examining the expansion of women’s rights after the World Wars, independence movements, and revolutions, Tripp writes, “I highlight a notable pathway by which women’s rights expansions occurred: conflict led to changes in the political elite and ruling class, resulting in the necessity to rewrite constitutions and other rules of the polity.”

World Wars I and II factor largely into this because their ends saw either the direct or draw-out dissolution of multiethnic empires, from which new ethno-nationalist states were created that could define citizenship in new ways. For example, “Women won the right to vote in at least 24 European countries in the six years following World War I with the demise of large empires such as the Ottoman, Russian, German, and the Austro-Hungarian Empires and the formation of new nations,” writes Tripp.

Decolonial wars, like those waged following World War II against some settler states in Africa, saw an expansion of suffrage along racial and gender lines, where previously suffrage had existed across the white settler population, and war’s resolution expanded it to cover all in the nation. In maintaining universal suffrage as a condition of post-war settlement, newly independent nations were able to align to an international norm, even if it had to be won through blood and struggle.

Revolution, too, creates a rupture from which new rights can be carved.

“Women had sought suffrage for some time, but it was during Finland’s bid for autonomy that the czar granted their demands for a new unicameral parliament and universal suffrage at the national level,” writes Tripp. “In Russia, women won the right to vote in the context of the 1917 Russian Revolution.”

Looking to more modern times, formal and informal gender quotas as part of post-war settlements have ensured greater participation and equality of representation in countries like Rwanda, Algeria, and Namibia, as well as Neap, East Timor, Serbia, and Nicaragua.

“Revolutions, civil wars, and wars of independence that resulted in changes in political power and in class or economic forces created opportunity structures (e.g., peace talks, electoral and constitutional reform processes) that opened up possibilities for actors such as women’s movements to press for reforms,” writes Tripp, noting that while not required, the presence of women’s movements before the war was more likely to guarantee such changes afterward.

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] RECEIPTS

Michael Fox reported [[link removed]] on protests in Panama, where thousands of protestors blocked roads and shut down lengths of the Pan-American Highway over objections to a fast-tracked copper mine project. The Cobre Panamá mine has been in production since 2019, but in 2021, Panama’s Supreme Court declared the contract with the mine unconstitutional for not serving the public good. “We are saying no to mining, no to exploitation. It brings contamination with it. And it hurts the environment. That is not what we want,” Juan Smith, who participated in a protest in Boquete, a town in the hills of western Panama, told Fox.

Mohammed Ali connected [[link removed]] the present peril for journalists in Gaza to the failure to hold Israel accountable for the deliberate targeting of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American journalist killed by Israeli Defense Forces in May 2022. Since Oct. 7, 2023, noted Ali, 31 journalists have been killed in Gaza, and that doesn’t even cover tragedies like the killing of journalist Wael Al-Dahdouh’s wife, son, daughter, and grandson from airstrikes on an area designated safe. “In the shadowed alleys and bombed streets of Gaza, the journalists’ pens, cameras, and voices refuse to be silenced,” wrote Ali.

ish Mafundikwa queried [[link removed]] Zimbabwe’s stone carvers about the state of their profession. Carving is a centuries-old tradition on the ground, and the works made from local rock are beautiful, but the sculptors making the work are often disconnected from what the international market remains for it. "One artist is making sausages; another artist is growing fruit trees; another artist is now a cattle rancher and other artists are just making do, maybe going back to the rural home and living off the land, subsistence farming. That's the reality," said Edith Mushore, co-director at the Chapungu Sculpture Park.

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

Not everyone will send state police to monitor college students for decrying slaughter, but then again, some folks'll be like New York Governor Kathy Hochul [[link removed]].

What a t hird world war would mean for investors [[link removed]]? Short futures.

Here’s the plan: Convince Congress to ditch the biggest nuclear bomb, we promise that we’ll refurbish the second-biggest bomb class [[link removed]].

Intellectually, I know this photo is from August 1957 [[link removed]], but spiritually it feels like it’s from 1917 [[link removed]].

If you squint beyond the war machine, there’s a beautiful sunset here [[link removed]].

Or consider, instead, the stark beauty of this polar bear [[link removed]], photographed by the Coast Guard.

This concludes my 81st and final entry at the helm of Critical State. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Find me [[link removed]] online [[link removed]] wherever bad puns [[link removed]] about horrific robots [[link removed]] are told.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Follow The World: DONATE TO THE WORLD [[link removed]] Follow Inkstick: DONATE TO INKSTICK [[link removed]]

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.

Preferences [link removed] | Web Version [link removed] Unsubscribe [link removed]