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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 a London-based arts and entertainment charity!
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In Hyphen Online, Chaminda Jayanetti has a profile of The Samosa, an arts education charity founded by Anwar Akhtar in 2015. Akhtar works to encourage “more economically excluded Black and Asian students to consider a career in Britain’s cultural and political institutions”: in other words, to imagine that possibilities taken for granted by other people are also open to them, too.
The Samosa was originally started in 2009, but as an online current affairs and art platform for British Asians. It was only later, after Akhtar helped bring Pakistani play Dara to Britain, that Akhtar decided to focus on education, first by creating material for curricula and then through teaching directly.
Akhtar, who grew up in a working-class, Muslim family in Manchester, does this work by conducting hundreds of workshops in almost a dozen cities across the United Kingdom, giving students the tools they can later use to pursue such careers. One forthcoming project, for example, hosting an event modeled off BBC’s Question Time. “Akhtar hopes a filmed student debate will encourage them to research different issues and adopt unfamiliar perspectives,” as Jayanetti puts it. Akhtar also does things like explain how the marketing industry works — and how to keep from being played by it.
Akhtar insists he wants to change institutions, not destroy them. Case in point: Last year one of his students got an internship at the British Film Institute.
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Erasure
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Writing in New Lines, Wendy Pearlman looks beyond the killing of Palestinian people to examine the erasure of Palestinian society.
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Pearlman draws a parallel between dehumanizing language and what she describes as Israel’s tendency to “not see Palestinian society at all. Israeli leaders, and Western discourse generally, have long reduced the Palestinian national struggle to particular leaders or factions.”
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Pearlman traces the long history of this nonrecognition, which, in her telling, predates the creation of the state of Israel. What we miss when we look at leaders and factions, she writes, is that society itself is at the core of the Palestinian movement. Pearlman points to 2018, when tens of thousands participated in the “Great March of Return,” not as any one faction, but as a people. We also, she argues, miss the victims of Israel’s war: “the historical tendency of Israel and other states not to see Palestinian society has both continued and taken on horrific new dimensions. Israel looks at the 2.2 million people in Gaza and sees only Hamas or objects used by Hamas.”
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Labor’s Union
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David Bacon leads a conversation between Benedicto Martinez and Robin Alexander, who worked together for decades as general secretary of the Authentic Labor Front and director of international relations for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, respectively.
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As Bacon explains, “In the leadup to implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the two unions formed a strategic alliance to help organize factories in Mexico and the United States and to advocate for political change to meet the needs of the workers of both countries. Thirty years later, the alliance remains a model for relations between U.S. and Mexican unions.”
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The two begin in the early 1990s and trace the evolution of their relationship from that point. They look at early campaigns, but so, too, do they unpack the ways in which they came to consider themselves as being on the same side. They also, however, look at how the 21st century brought new challenges, and the ways in which organizing today is different. As Martinez says, it’s not clear how the labor movement is going—though, he admits, the economic situation is better. He also issues a warning: “I worry that the growth of new unions is based a lot on the present resources. But the status of the people who organize has changed, with high salaries for an organizer. In the past, you couldn’t even dream of this. If these resources stop, will the organizers continue?”
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Imagine That
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Journalists often imagine our readers. We try to picture our audiences, that we might serve them (and, more cynically, get them to subscribe to and buy what we are selling). But a new paper looks at this in reverse. It is not only true that journalists imagine their audiences. Audiences also imagine their journalists.
That, at least, is the case put forth by Ayala Panievsky, Noam Gidrom, and Lior Sheffer in “Imagined Journalists: New Framework for Studying Media–Audiences Relationship in Populist Times,” a new paper published in The International Journal of Press/Politics.
After reminding us that audiences hate journalists, particularly in times of hostile populism (a bit hurtful, but so it goes), the authors explain that by imagined journalists they mean “the entirety of ideas, feelings, stereotypes, and imaginaries that audiences hold regarding their imagined news producers.”
They looked to bring together research on trust in media, audience perception, what they deem an emotional turn in journalism, and antimedia populism. They did this by “analyzing 1,215 responses to an open-ended question regarding journalists’ traits in Israel in 2021.”
The authors found that right-wing and pro-populist respondents held more negative views of journalists.
The combination of open-ended responses and a large-scale survey was intended to both investigate people’s views as they themselves articulated them and also explore variations in how journalists are thought of across society. And Israel as case study made sense, they argued, as it is a place where journalists are under constant barrage of “populist media bashing” as well as online harassment.
The authors also found that right-wing respondents were more likely to offer personal or national criticism and less likely to offer professional critique than respondents who voted for center-left parties. Voters of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were even more personal and less professional in their critiques than those who voted for anti-Netanyahu right-wing parties. This suggested to the authors that journalists’ conduct is not, in fact, the only thing on which trust in media hinges.
Finally, the authors also found that bias is a concern, but democracy is not at top of mind when people share their thoughts on journalism. “Journalists might be interested in educating the public about the societal role of journalism,” they wrote, “as it does not seem to be a main lens through which audiences assess journalists and their work.”
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Katy Fallon described the situation in Cyprus, where anti-refugee sentiment, long simmering, is now bubbling over: On Jan. 5, an explosive device went off at the offices of Action for Equality, Support, Antiracism (KISA), an aid group that works with asylum seekers and refugees. The explosion, which was not the first of its kind in the recent history of Cyprus, is still being investigated by authorities, but Fallon made the case that it happened in the context of increasing anti-refugee feeling and an emboldened far-right, and spoke to those who worry that authorities themselves are not doing enough to stop such violence.
Anna Lekas Miller examined the question of whether violence by individuals who blame their lack of sex and dating opportunities on women, who call themselves “involuntary celibates” and are more commonly known as incels, should be considered terrorism. Miller noted that, unlike other acts of violence carried out by, for example, Islamic State gunmen, the 2018 attack on a Florida yoga studio by a man who shot six women is not typically considered an act of terrorism, even though the perpetrator had previously posted YouTube videos about how much he hated women. Miller’s interviewees offered that this is perhaps a matter of American perception: what is homegrown is often not considered terror,
and hatred of women is not understood as an ideology.
Rebecca Rosman reported on the few residents of Kfar Aza, a kibbutz that was attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7. Only around 20 have returned since that day, when 63 of the 970 people who lived on the kibbutz were murdered, 18 were kidnapped, and dozens more were injured. Rosman’s report focused on one couple, Ayelet Cohen and Schachar Shnurman, who prepare large lunches for those who come to visit. That group did not, per Shnurman, include anyone from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. The government, they said, has also not put forth money for repairs, “despite promises.”
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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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