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read about Cote d’Ivoire’s soccer heritage!

Prince Akabla writes [[link removed]]for Africa Is a Country about three dates that served as turning points for soccer in Cote d’Ivoire (where it is, of course, known as “football”) and what they have meant to the country and its people.

“As a footballing country, Cote d’Ivoire only started having real success at the club and international level in the 1990s,” writes Akabla, a sports consultant. He takes us through a brief history of the country: independence in 1960, a military coup in 1999, violent presidential elections in 2000, and rebellion in 2002. “From that moment on, Ivorians gradually stopped showing up on the stadium terraces, and soon enough, the great results of the 1990s also began to fade.” But if sports suffered from politics, so, too, did they help lead the way back to “this much sought-after reconciliation.”

Akabla points to October 2005, when, after qualifying for the World Cup, captain Didier Drogba launched a call for peace from the locker room; to March 2007, when Drogba was awarded the African Ballon d’Or and went to the rebel stronghold in the north to share the moment with fans there; and to June of that year, when Drogba and his teammates played their first match at Bouaké stadium since the war began. Akabla traces how each of these moments intersected with the peace process.

A Nation for Me, Not for Thee?

“Our world of 200 or so independent nations could easily be broken up into 300, 400, 500 sovereign states,” writes [[link removed]] Kal Raustiala in a recent Noema piece. “True respect for the principle of self-determination might demand — or at least permit — such an outcome. Whether the world can function effectively is another matter.” We accept as normative that people should be granted self-determination and, as Raustiala notes, self-definition. But which people? And at whose expense? And who gets to say?

Raustiala, a professor at UCLA and author, most recently, of “The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations, and the Fight to End Empire,” takes the reader through a brief history of the United Nations and the concept of self-determination, and of how empires unraveled more quickly than the founders of the United Nations predicted.

He then turns to how subsequent questions cropped up — Who draws the borders? Who gets to decide to govern themselves? — and have persisted through to the present day. Raustiala finally turns to where the United Nations and the European Union themselves fit into this.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Love story

Over at The Dial, Saumya Roy has a report [[link removed]] on one couple that has spent the past decade fighting against “Love Jihad,” the threat, pushed by reactionary Hindu groups and weaponized by right-wing politicians in India, of Muslim men ensnaring Hindu women, eventually turning the country’s Muslim minority into a majority.

Roy focuses on the story of “Pinky” and “Tariq,” who, even after getting married, weren’t able to move in together for fear of violence. Roy uses pseudonyms to protect their identities, but they are one of several couples interviewed for the piece.

Roy also shares political context: Since Pinky and Tariq met a decade ago, “12 of India’s 28 states have passed laws to curb religious conversion, and at least two additional states are currently considering similar measures.” This is in addition to pressure from Hindu social groups. For example, “The Special Marriage Act requires notices of interreligious marriages to be posted at the local registrar’s office for a month prior to the day of the wedding. Right-wing Hindu groups often photograph these marriage notices and make them go viral on social media alongside calls to halt the scheduled weddings.” Several of the couples with whom Roy spoke shared that the act’s public notice requirement was an impediment to their marriage.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE The ties that divide

“From the October 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to the April 2022 bombing of the Sufi Khalifa Sahib mosque in Kabul, Afghanistan, religious minority sacred spaces are a conspicuous target of societal violence.” So opens “Diversionary desecration? Regime instability and societal violence against minority sacred spaces,” a new paper [[link removed]] by Ariel Zellman and Andrea Malji, published in Politics, Religion, & Ideology. The authors undertook quantitative analysis to explore the link between severe violence carried out against minority sacred spaces and increased regime instability, especially in democratic states, where religious freedoms are traditionally supported (the authors also note that societies don’t actually need to be “particularly fractionalized or experiencing war” for religious minorities to be targeted). “Our findings,” they write, “suggest that the most violent outcomes tend to be diversionary, redirecting public anger toward internal ‘enemy’ others, rather than reactionary or retaliatory behavior toward already persecuted or genuinely threatening out-groups.”

In order to carry out this study, the authors used “data regarding the governmental and societal treatment of 701 individually measured religious minority groups across 162 states from 1991 to 2014 drawn from the Religion and State project’s Minorities module (RASM).” And statistical analysis by and large bore out what they had hypothesized: “the increasing extent to which higher levels of violence against minority sacred sites reflect diversion of societal unrest amid regime instability, rather than reactionary attitudes toward oppressed minorities or perhaps even retaliation for minority incitement.” Crucially, higher levels of violence tended to be associated with democratic states where the dominant religion was strongly supported. The authors also stress the difference between violence against religious sites of minority populations and violence against the minority populations themselves.

Drawing on the pre-existing literature, the authors devised a theory as to the difference between minor and major violence and when violence is reactionary, retaliatory, and diversionary: Minor vandalism of minority sacred sites tended to be reactionary, and major vandalism and minor violence was often retaliatory. However, “major violence targeting minority sacred sites, however, is most often diversionary, occurring especially in more religious states against the backdrop of rising regime instability, wherein societal actors employ such violence opportunistically as a tool of religious outbidding to claim power and legitimacy.” And this was what they turned to the data from RASM to test, using multinomial logistic regressions. While much of what they found matched conventional wisdom, “Less conventional are our nuanced findings regarding major violence targeting minority sacred sites. Herein our results show that such violence is very frequently driven by diversionary rather than mere retaliatory dynamics.”

The authors believe that this work has important policy implications (beyond the “obvious suggestion” that states respect the rights of all populations: “The ability to protect and preserve cultural heritage sites is directly tied to state discrimination, that is, states willing to discriminate against their religious minorities are also unlikely to protect their heritage sites.”

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

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Jon Lewis and Luke Baumgartner broke down [[link removed]] the threat posed by antisemitic “white replacement” conspiracy theories. They note that, even though nearly a dozen terrorist attacks have already taken inspiration from conspiracies like Great Replacement theory, such conspiracies are still being pushed by right-wing media figures and politicians alike into the mainstream. The basic contours of such theories are that Jewish elites are flooding non-white migrants into countries to remake their demographics. These ideas have found devout adherents in the United States and Europe. “As these influencers and media personalities continue to use social media platforms to spread antisemitic conspiracies, more ‘normies’ are likely to become radicalized and embrace increasingly dangerous and violent ideologies,” the authors warn.

Daniel Ofman reported [[link removed]] on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to the Baltic states, where he traveled to shore up support for Ukraine, which will mark two years since Russia’s all-out invasion next month. Ofman described the trip as a “whirlwind,” with Ukraine’s president heading from Vilnius to Tallinn to Riga, where “Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs said that there needs to be a ‘change in emphasis’ when talking about Ukraine. He said the message from many countries is that they’ll support Ukraine ‘for as long as needed.’ But Rinkēvičs declared, ‘We will support Ukraine until its full victory over Russian imperialism.’”

Dina Temple-Raston wrote [[link removed]] about how Chinese hackers “can hide the code they use to infiltrate systems worldwide.” Temple-Raston explained that China “passed a law in 2021 that requires any business operating in China to report any coding flaws to a government agency before patching the vulnerability or revealing its existence publicly.” State-sponsored hackers then use the information. This is all detailed in a new report by the Atlantic Council, a Washington, DC-based think tank, and Dakota Cary, one of the report’s authors, spoke with the “Click Here” podcast (a transcript is also available at the link).

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

Double, double, toil and trouble [[link removed]].

No, you really shouldn’t have [[link removed]]!

Doppelganger’s doppelganger [[link removed]].

Dinner and a Showtime [[link removed]].

What does this hyrax know [[link removed]]?

Choose your fighter [[link removed]].

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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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