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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 how politicians around the world are rethinking diaspora politics.
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From Mexico City to Mumbai, recent elections have shown politicians the importance of their diaspora populations and the impact they can have on domestic elections.
“Migration patterns, heightened communication and new technologies now mean that voters no longer have to be located within a country's borders,” Vita Dadoo writes in The Dial. “A new type of ‘diaspora politics’ now shapes domestic politics around the world.”
Dadoo takes readers around the world: first, to Mexico, where a 2021 amendment to the constitution allows for citizenship to be passed down indefinitely to children born beyond the country’s borders. There are 12 million Mexican citizens living in the United States, which, Dadoo explains, has become an important campaign stop – though, since campaigning abroad is technically illegal under Mexican electoral law, these visits are framed as “encounters” with Mexican citizens.
Dadoo also notes that, earlier this year, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pressed for more polling stations in Berlin (Berlin turned down the request, but Erdogan still won a majority of Turkish votes in Germany). And half a million Polish citizens abroad are registered to vote: in this year’s election, 90 percent of them, mostly in Great Britain and Germany, did. India has also seen pushes to allow “non-resident Indians” to vote abroad.
In the past, a country’s diaspora wasn’t necessarily seen as a political asset, Dadoo explained. But in this case, past was not prologue.
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The Empire Strikes Back?
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In CEU Review of Books, Ferenc Laczó offers a critique of Eurowhiteness, a new book out this year by Hans Kundnani. Laczó’s case is that Kundnani is primarily concerned with Western Europe – and thus less interested in Russian imperialism, which is the imperialism with which the eastern portion of the continent is primarily concerned.
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Laczó describes Kundnani’s project as pushing back against the idea that the European Union is a progressive, cosmopolitan project, and for the idea that Brexit Britain could be an opportunity for the political left. “However, even if non-white British citizens tended not to strongly identify as European, an overproportionate two-thirds of them still voted to remain in the EU,” Laczó writes. “It is a basic point, but it bears repeating in this context that you can reject racism in Europe without rejecting the EU.”
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But Laczó’s main critique of the work is the conflation of “Western European” and “European. “A basic lesson to draw from central and eastern Europeans’ all too abundant recent experiences with empires would be that imperialism can come in diverse shapes,” Laczó writes, later adding, “What we have here is a peculiar tradition of anti-imperialism within the geography of Europe and imperialism beyond it, often in the name of the very same ideas.”
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For the Birds
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Carrie Arnold, a Virginia-based health and science writer, went all the way to Scotland in search of … pigeons. But they weren’t the kind she would have seen in Washington, DC. Or were they?
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“For millions of years, before humans domesticated pigeons for food, communication and companionship, these birds existed as rock doves,” Arnold writes. But while most “modern rock doves now live in cities, descendants of escaped domestic birds that have since gone feral, with a few remaining strands of ‘wild’ DNA buried deep in their cells.”
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The journey to Scotland was also a trip to the heart of a debate over what, exactly, makes a given animal unique (what separates the humble city pigeon from a wild dove) — which, in turn, is a discussion about what makes an animal worth conserving. “With so much need and so few resources, we all must decide what species are wild and worth saving. And those answers will have life-and-death consequences,” Arnold writes. Ultimately, Arnold concludes, “animal species around us aren’t perfect museum specimens but a messy scattershot of mixed bloodlines … ‘wild animal’ is as much a human construct as any single species or pure genome.”
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The Acts of Killing
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“Systematic killing has long been associated with some of the darkest episodes in human history,” open Neil Renic and Elke Schwarz in their article, “Crimes of Dispassion: Autonomous Weapons and the Moral Challenge of Systematic Killing,” out this month in Ethics and International Affairs.
The authors are not attempting to dispute that systematic killing should be associated with dark episodes. Rather, they note that defenders of autonomous weapons systems argue that such systems “will surpass humans not only militarily but also morally, enabling a more precise and dispassionate mode of violence, free of the emotion and uncertainty that too often weaken compliance with the rules and standards of war.”
The authors, however, argue that, on the contrary, lethal autonomous weapons systems reproduce and even intensify past moral challenges, imperiling “essential restraints on the use of military force.”
To demonstrate that they do understand the argument they are debunking, opening with a section on “the allure of autonomous violence.” Some argue that such systems ultimately reflect the intent of those employing them; others, that, depending on how they’re designed and used, such systems could improve compliance with international law.
“This is a compelling narrative,” the authors admit, “but it rests on a speculative and superficial understanding of the logical implications of this technology specifically, and systematic violence more generally. It also decontextualizes these weapons to a problematic degree.”
“We ask, what if instead of preserving or improving upon the ‘goodness’ of human military personnel, an intensified system logic facilitates a worsening of battlefield conduct?”
The authors briefly take their readers through the history of systematic killing. They also reiterate that the issue with lethal autonomous weapons systems is not that of “inhumanity.” Rather, “at issue is the type of humanity this technology makes less and more likely. Autonomous weapons, in delivering us from the passionate, volatile misconduct of human individuals, risk plunging us ever further into the cold, dispassionate misconduct of human systems.” They point in particular to seeing as a computer (for example, seeing patterns and drawing inferences where none should exist in enemy identification); reducing or overwhelming the agency of the human participant; and truncating the space for commanders’ and operators’ own moral agency. “We should prefer conditions where those charged with doing violence understand the context and consequences of their actions, are able to recognize
when they should relent from violence, and have the ability to act upon this impulse rather than becoming removed from the process,” the authors write. It isn’t only that these systems will often fall short of standards, which humans do, too, but that they will lack the very capacity to meet them.
The authors conclude that these systems can be thought of as ethical in a vacuum. But war is not fought in a vacuum. “War is riven by a complexity that precludes certainty; and by extension, the smooth and reliable application of systematic violence to target objects. To proceed as if this is not the reality, to impose systematic violence upon environments structurally unsuited to such an approach, is to court foreseeable and ruinous moral harm.” Systematic killing should be considered a dark episode in the present, too.
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William Christou argued that Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza has presented a legitimacy crisis for King Abdullah II of Jordan, as well as for the country’s foreign ministry. “Jordan’s statements have not been enough to quell the anger spiraling among its populace, who have called for stronger actions from their government. Jordan’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests for comment,” Christou wrote, adding that some Jordanians want the country to cancel its 1994 peace treaty with Israel. Per Christou, Jordan has responded to dissent with “escalated rhetoric in public—and escalated repression in private.”
Jessica Sciarone made the case that misogyny may begin at home, but it doesn’t stay there. Sexism, Sciarone wrote, is often a gateway to the wider world of the far-right. Sciarone encouraged readers to look first at the internet, explaining, “While not all men posting within the manosphere support far-right ideology, for many men — and women — it is an important part of radicalization pathways to the far right and white supremacy.” Further, though the “trad community” may make appeals with a romanticized image of the 1950s, in reality, this period, rife as it was with segregation and discrimination, had a “violent underbelly.” So, too, can the world of misogyny online cross over into real
violence, going so far as to calling for action to “overthrow existing feminist structures.”
Gerry Hadden looked to La Gomera, an island in the Atlantic Ocean whose residents are trying to protect it from over-tourism. Forests on the island are special, having “made it through various global freezes and mass extinctions, partly because the maritime climate has remained more or less unchanged.” The isolation of the location has helped, too. And those on the island want to keep it that way. The forest is in a national park, only 25 percent of which is accessible to visitors—and which is protected territory. The island wants to keep tourism small and sustainable. Still, some worry it’s already too much. Island agriculture has already taken a hit as a result.
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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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