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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 Chinese identity!
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Jacob Dreyer, a Shanghai-based writer and editor, considers what makes a person Chinese in a new piece for Noema.
Dreyer begins by considering his son. On walks, he recalled, “a retired Shanghainese would walk up. How handsome he is, they would say. He looks nothing like you. Our Chinese genes are much stronger than yours.” Dreyer’s son has a US passport, but “America is paper, one retiree told me; China is blood. What this person meant was that US citizenship is a matter of bureaucracy and paperwork — in theory, open to anybody. In contrast, Chinese citizenship is a closed loop. If you’re in, you can never really escape — and if you’re out, there’s no way of entrance.”
There are 56 officially recognized ethnicities that are entitled to citizenship in China. Meanwhile, not everyone who considers themselves Chinese is eligible to be a citizen of the country. Dreyer goes through a brief history of Chinese identity, writing that, from the beginning, “the community of the Han referred to a mix of different people thrown together by exigency, forming a collective for self-defense that ended up becoming one of the longest-lasting human social structures on Earth.” (Han, per Dreyer, “seems to be a malleable term that means ‘civilized’ more than it denotes an ethnic phenotype. And yet, modern China, and certainly the China that has existed since 1949, always conceived of itself as a biological entity very different than the ‘West.’”)
Dreyer also takes the reader across China and around the world, ultimately concluding that whether his son is Chinese is “up to him.”
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Just Like Magic
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Uros Kovac writes about African football and superstition — and concludes that it’s more about global dynamics than the continent itself.
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Kovac gives the reader a brief overview of recent magic developments: “In the ongoing African Cup of Nations, religion has made an appearance: a Ghanaian Christian prophet predicted a player’s demise, and the Egyptian Football Association sacrificed a cow to bring luck to the national team. The prophecy did not come to pass and Egypt was knocked out by the DR Congo.”
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There are some issues with how this is discussed, Kovac writes. “One problem is that much of the debate is framed in terms of tradition and belief, and endemic to Africa. There is a danger here of exoticizing the continent as being steeped in superstition.” Another is that debates around “football magic” rely more on rumor than anything else. And there’s also this: is mysticism really specific to Africa? “ In one team where I conducted research, coaches, and players speculated that the most powerful footballers and clubs around the world had all kinds of occult-like assistance…This perspective challenges the binary opposition between the West and the rest and de-centers Africans as exclusive alleged practitioners of ‘black magic.’”
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Speak, and See, Memory
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Writing in The Dial, Jessica Traynor writes about data centers, which have “become a common sight around the outskirts of Dublin and many other Irish cities and towns.”
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Traynor takes the reader briefly through Irish economic history, up to the present, wherein “Ireland’s economy is heavily dependent on tech companies, with low corporate taxes meaning that these companies contribute little to the Irish exchequer — and, by extension, to the Irish citizen left heavily indebted by the recession.” But the impact of data centers on Ireland’s energy consumption is “catastrophic”: “According to Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency, Ireland is set to miss its 2030 carbon reduction targets by over 20 percent.”
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“As world temperatures increase, data centers have migrated to places where the climate is temperate,” Traynor writes. But in these places, they consume large quantities of energy. “It’s a frightening and seemingly unsustainable pattern; we’ve trusted our memories to a system that might destroy them, and us.” Data centers could be using up to 70% of the country’s electricity by 2030. And in order to encourage more foreign direct investment, “the government has implemented measures aimed at streamlining the planning process for data centers, which would allow concerned citizens less visibility into the estimated environmental impacts of these centers.” After all, how can something be remembered if it was never seen?
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Love at War, What Is It Good For?
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“What does it mean to be in love while at war?” So opens Hilary Matfess’s study “In Love and at War: Marriage in Non-state Armed Groups,” part of a Cambridge series called Elements in Gender and Politics. Matfess found that “whether rebel groups commit themselves to marriage, bar it entirely, or reinterpret the ceremonies and practices associated with marriage, their decision has important implications for both the rebel organization and individual members.”
Rebel marriages, Matfess writes, “are an under-appreciated driver of gendered conflict and post-conflict dynamics.”
Matfess’s study is an academic work, but she acknowledges that it was shaped by her own experience of getting married one week after submitting her dissertation. “Getting married meant navigating formal requirements imposed by the state and informal expectations levied by family and friends,” she writes, continuing: “Though the insecurity and militarization that characterize rebel marriages are not present in most civilian marriages (including my own), the institution of marriage itself carries with it questions about gender roles and norms and, in the case of heterosexual marriage in particular, women’s role in society.”
Matfess’s work contributes to the literature in four ways: by providing an analytical framework “for understanding how and why rebel marriage systems vary between and within groups over time, as well as the implications of these changes for women’s lives”; by introducing the concept of “the other DDR,” or depoliticization, distrust, and reclamation, which can emerge as a response to rebel marriages after the war alongside the original DDR (disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration); by calling to consider dynamics of love and care that emerge during wartime; and by taking seriously women’s lives and experiences.
Matfess also considers that, beyond organizational repercussions, the impact of wartime marriages have individual consequences and long legacies. “These legacies can manifest in forced and voluntary marriages, as well as in those unions that continue into the postwar period and those that are terminated shortly after (or during) the war.” This can be true even if the marriage was coerced. How a marriage originates, Matfess writes, does not necessarily dictate how it is “experienced” by the spouses. “These legacies can manifest in forced and voluntary marriages, as well as in those unions that continue into the postwar period and those that are terminated shortly after (or during) the war.”
Divorces can represent “a sharp break from wartime patterns, where women were lauded for taking on traditional male tasks and defying gender norms.” And this is to say nothing of the stigma faced by former rebel wives.
Matfess considers a range of cases, including the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the Communist Party of Nepal - Maoists, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. “By providing a comparative account of rebels’ regulation of marriage during wartime and the post-conflict implications of these relationships,” Matfess writes, this work “is intended to spur further comparative research into rebel marriage systems and their implications for women’s experiences during and after war.” Matfess concludes by hoping this leads to “further interrogation of the nature of being in love and at war.”
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Clionadh Raleigh confirmed that at least one assumption is true: the world is getting more violent, and conflicts, more complex. “Overall, global conflict rates increased 12% in 2023, with more than 15,000 additional attacks, bombings and assaults compared to 2022. This adds to the 32% increase in 2022 from 2021, when the Ukraine war assumed close to 28% of the global conflict share. One in six of us is living in an area of active conflict,” Raleigh wrote. Conflict rates were high but stable before the pandemic, and dropped during the pandemic — but, as Raleigh put it, “there has been a swift and sudden drive upwards since.”
Delaney Dorsey argued that one of the lessons to be taken “from the failures of Western intervention in Afghanistan over the past 25 years” is “the senselessness of economic sanctions.” “Contrary to how sanctions are portrayed, they do not protect civilian lives — and gender plays a determining role in whose lives are affected most severely,” Dorsey wrote.” Sanctions have led to a cash shortage, which have, per Dorsey, made it difficult if not impossible for families to purchase food and other necessities, or to be able to afford medical care. Dorsey also wrote that foreign aid donors pulled out of the country in part due to sanctions, meaning parts of the country were “left in a lurch.”
Manuel Rueda introduced readers to a different kind of tour of Medellin, Colombia: a wheelchair tour. The wheelchair tours are organized by MATT, a local company that makes motorized wheels that can be affixed to most wheelchairs. Martin Londoño, who founded the company in 2018, lost the ability to walk when he was 18 due to a car crash that broke his spine. The wheelchair tours are one way the now 34-year-old encourages those without disabilities to consider those with special needs, and how slight changes might be made to improve their lives.
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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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