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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 problems presented by global tourism.
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“While tourism is often romanticized, it is equally reviled and disparaged as shallow – or, worse, rapacious,” writes Henry Wismayer in Noema. The “tourist gaze,” he posits, cannot help but “despoil” that on which it fixes.
Travel, he says, has always straddled “the profound and the profane, the ennobling and the transgressive.” But it is Wismayer’s belief that there is a “gathering sense” that the demerits of travel are beginning to outweigh what’s good about it. Tourism is reportedly responsible for 8% of global emissions. And if that destruction is global, there are more locally based anxieties, too: “In places that have been overwhelmed or remolded in ways its inhabitants regret, there is growing resistance; taxes, prohibitions and no end of local antipathy are now as much an inconvenient feature of the holiday season as sunburn and gastroenteritis.” Wismayer points in particular to Europe, where tourism is both integral to society and also feels “problematic.”
Wismayer looks at the history of tourism, and how we have changed our thinking about it through the centuries. So, too, does he look at what hasn’t changed: “the comforting bromide we tell ourselves to counteract any unease about the burgeoning scale of travel remains unchanged. At its heart, any celebration of it is founded on an ethical ideal that a global human heritage should be open to everyone, exempt from the private marketplace.”
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ADL Departure
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Jewish Currents has a report on the departure of a top executive, who, the article said, left the job over disagreements with praise offered to Elon Musk by Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.
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Yaël Eisenstat was head of the ADL’s Center for Technology and Society. Three other staffers at the center had already quit over disagreements with ADL leadership. Though Eisenstat presented her decision as being motivated by the opportunity to work more directly on elections, an anonymous staffer told Jewish Currents that the move was, in fact, about Greenblatt’s platitudes for Musk. Per reporters Mari Cohen and Alex Kane, “Despite Musk’s promotion of antisemitic and white nationalist sentiment, Greenblatt has repeatedly extolled the billionaire’s business prowess and, recently, his pledge to censor pro-Palestinian phrases on X. Internal critics say Greenblatt is especially willing to excuse Musk’s white nationalist sympathies if it helps the ADL fight anti-Zionism.”
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Former ADL staff also discussed a broader trend of ordering “day-to-day work to target pro-Palestine activism rather than focusing on antisemitism in American life, a shift they say seriously undermines the organization’s credibility.”
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Behind Bars
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The Dial collected letters from five Iranian human rights activists, all women in northern Tehran’s Evin Prison, called “University of Evin,” a reference “to the many intellectuals, writers, actors, filmmakers, students, union organizers, lawyers and political activists who have served time there over the past 50-some years.”
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As author Ghazal Golshiri, translated by Katie Assef, put it in the introduction to the letters, there is a political and socioeconomic context to consider: Inflation is at nearly 60%, a record, and “the regime appears unwilling to make concessions on individual liberties, not least of which the compulsory hijab, adding to the general sense of despair and outrage among the population.”
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The letters were smuggled out of the prison and were originally published in France’s Le Monde. The writers include a Kurdish activist who has been imprisoned since 2008; a 54-year-old journalist who pushed for the end of the death penalty; a feminist journalist who was sentenced in 2018 for covering workers’ strikes; a 37-year-old environmental activist sentenced in 2020; and a 43-year-old writer who was re-incarcerated in 2022 after the beginning of the protests that followed Mahsa Amini’s death.
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Czech the Turnout
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How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect voter turnout? Or, more particularly: How did it affect perceptions of voter turnout? The latter is the question with which Petr Voda and Petra Vodová concerned themselves in “The Effects of COVID-19 Pandemic Perceptions on Voter Turnout in the Czech Republic,” published in the December 2023 issue of Communist and Post-Communist Studies.
The authors considered the Czech 2020 regional election in particular. Czech regional elections are held every four years across 13 regions with the list proportional voting system (assemblies, the authors inform us, enjoy “substantial regional autonomy,” but parliamentary parties campaigned around national-level issues). It was held over two days and was the first Czech election during the pandemic period. It is also worth noting that, at the time of the election, though there was a way for those quarantining to vote, infections were actually low compared with elsewhere in the European Union; it was only after the elections that they surged to the highest cases per million of any country in the world.
The authors hypothesized that “perceived danger of the pandemic deters people from attending an election, and that such a constraint would be higher for those who know many infected people than for those who do not, for elderly people more than for younger people, and for women more than for men.” They found that, in fact, there was no effect of interaction between age and perceived danger, and that the effect of perceived danger only worked for a certain kind of Czech voter – namely, for women, but not for men. Further, when people did not know anyone who was infected, there was no effect of perceived danger. However, when they knew many people who were infected, there was indeed a “strong negative impact.” This was determined through a “quasibinomial logistic regression with data on 866 respondents from a post-electoral survey.”
The authors concede that the “Czech case is a least likely case to observe effects of the pandemic,” since the election took place at the beginning of the second wave and voter turnout was actually higher than in 2016. However, they believe the analysis makes several valuable contributions to the literature: “empirical evidence from a less-investigated region”; a contribution to comprehension of the dynamics of elections in a post-communist country with comparatively little partisanship; and an extension of the logic of rational choice theory as an explanation for election turnout. “The theory is usually used to assess the costs of attending elections and the benefits of voting,” the authors explain. Since they’ve added perception of danger as assessed by voters, and as their study is related to circumstances between waves of the pandemic, “the perception of danger from COVID-19 may be
an important factor more generally, not only in the case of a real danger.”
The authors also suggest that future research asks “how the relationship between the perception of a pandemic and voting (or political behavior, generally) evolved after the real and strong impact of the disease.”
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Alexander Langlois argued that deterrence isn’t working in the Middle East, and that, in fact, the risk of Israel’s war against Hamas spiraling into a broader regional conflict is getting worse. “The exchanges of fire between US forces and the Iran-led Axis of Resistance reflects a concerning scenario for US policymakers amid the ongoing failure of regional deterrence to prevent Iran-backed militia strikes on US positions and international maritime shipping in the Red Sea,” wrote Langlois, who made the case that the United States should focus on de-escalating points of friction and keeping US soldiers and citizens away from harm.
Ramona Wadi explored the ways in which the US State Sponsors of Terrorism List keeps the blockade of Cuba in place. Wadi recounted the past several decades and more recent years of US policy toward Cuba, and noted that, despite campaign promises, US President Joe Biden has largely left in place former US President Donald Trump’s Cuba policies. Wadi concluded that keeping Cuba on the list indefinitely “diverts attention away from the 1960s blockade, which is the subject of countless United Nations General Assembly resolutions that the US ignores.”
Sushmita Pathak wrote about visa processing delays in the United States dashing the hopes and dreams of Indian students and would-be workers. Getting a visa to the United States has long been complicated for many around the world, and the pandemic and ensuing consular closures only made it more so. Even with consulates back open, delays remain. A first-time visa applicant in India may have to wait up to as many as 260 days, which is almost twice the global average of 140 days, but better than in 2022, during which some Indian visa applicants had to wait as many as 1,000 days or more.
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Critical State is written by Emily Tamkin 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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