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campaign books!

Writing in The Drift, Mark Chiusana examines [[link removed]] the function of writing — and reading — books about campaigns.

Having read books by Republican presidential candidate hopefuls, Chiusana informs us that, “Unsurprisingly, these books are bad. Very. They are pompous and eye-roll-inducing, never surmounting the obvious central weakness of the genre: it’s riskier for an active politician to tell a good story than to slap some safe and boring words on a page. Before I get accused of partisan hackery, let me certify that Democratic campaign books are very bad, too.”

Most recent candidate books, Chiusana writes, take few risks, preferring instead to be sort of argument-driven self-help books, the tome equivalent of a stump speech. They did not really take aim at the probable nominee, former US President Donald Trump, or at least did not do so without squirming. And what’s more, “The establishment that once gave campaign books the nod of approval no longer really exists. Do any undecided voters really watch Meet the Press?”

They make some money, Chiusana allows, but these books will not do much else. After all, “The books were written, in the hoary tradition of the genre, in search of a broad American public that, in our fractured moment, does not quite exist.”

Prague’s Past

In CEU Review of Books, Anna West looks at [[link removed]] “Prague: Belonging and the Modern City,” the 2021 work by Chad Bryant.

Bryant’s book asks its readers not only what Prague has been, but who Prague has been for as time has passed. As West put it, “The book asks us to consider what it means to belong to a city, what it means to be ‘Czech,’ and how one might cultivate a sense of belonging in a place where one feels marginalized.”

The book is divided into five chapters, and takes the reader through Prague under Hapsburg control through to today. Each chapter focuses on one individual who is marginalized in some way — and yet who manages to create a sense of belonging in Prague. Though the book renders the beauty of Prague, it also doesn’t shy away from the contradictions — and, worse, antisemitism and racism — that are also a part of the city’s past and present. West, a Czech American, brings some of herself to her review, sharing that she related in particular to the last, contemporary chapter, in which a Vietnamese Czech-speaking blogger, living in Prague, negotiating belonging to the Vietnamese diaspora and the Czech community. “As a Czech-American myself, I related deeply to this chapter, as can anyone who has felt like their social worlds span more than one place,” wrote West.

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Thomas Moynihan, writing [[link removed]] in Noema, asks whether it’s inevitable that discussions of AI be infused with the rhetoric of religion.

Moynihan, a visiting researcher at Cambridge University’s Center for the Study of Existential Risk, writes that “the aim is to acknowledge whatever theological inheritances might lurk here and suggest what productively might be done with them, whilst ultimately exploring what it even means to uncloak secular religions.”

Moynihan takes the reader through a history of theological thinking — and through a history of debate on secularized religion. Moynihan believes that “there can be no such thing as ‘human values’ apart from the histories that spawn them. In ways shot through with contingency, of course, yet necessarily so. For they must be hewn from a certain gratuitousness, because otherwise the guides and guardrails we live by would not be our own, in the sense of being genuinely earnt through the precedent of voluntary effort and willful revision.” Nothing is free of the “theological residues” of yore, Moynihan concludes: this isn’t how intellectual history works.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE State of the Nation(s)

Borders define states — but what defines borders? A new paper [[link removed]] by Carl Müller-Crepon, Guy Schvitz, and Lars-Erik Cederman, “Shaping states into nations: The effects of ethnic geography on state borders,” published this month in American Journal of Political Science, looks at the impact of ethnic geography and nationalism on borders, beginning with the 19th century and through to today. Nationalism, they argue, creates pressure for borders to be redrawn, which means that states end up being more congruent with various ethnic groups.

The authors “introduce a Probabilistic Spatial Partition Model to test this argument, modeling state territories as partitions of a planar spatial graph.” The model was meant to address three challenges: border formation is an “intractable problem,” as there could be an infinite number of partitions, chopping territory into ever smaller units; borders entail “spatial dependencies”; and to assess ethnic geography requires an assessment of geographic features. The model let them estimate “the conditional effect of spatial features” on the partitioning of geographic spaces into states.

The authors believe that nationalism created the demand for ethnically homogeneous nation states, and that this, in turn, created a map of Europe that aligns with its map of ethnicities. The authors take readers of their study through a history of nationalism, unpacking the ways in which it transformed Europe.

They then turned their model to Europe, and used data on Europe’s ethnic geography going back to 1855 and found that the conditional probability that two locations separated by ethnic boundaries is increasingly likely to be divided or become divided by a state border. Secession is an important part of this, and the authors found statistically significant effects “of being ruled from a non-coethnic capital on demands for and realizations of secession.” The authors found similar dynamics at play in Asia — but not in the Americas or in Africa.

The authors believe that their model could, in the future, be used not only to develop borders, but also to “study partitionings like administrative units or electoral districts.” Ultimately, they found “that ethnic geography has an important and continuing impact on the shape of European states. In consequence, the common treatment of states (and other political units) as fixed and exogenous entities comes at the risk of selection and reverse causality biases.”

Where does that leave nations — and states? The authors end by wondering whether, just as nations changed the shape of states, so might a different kind of thinking about states change the shape of nations. Pulling the “nation” and “state” of “nation-state” apart could “succeed in depoliticizing ethnic divides.” More practically, the authors write of international territorial integrity norms — though they also acknowledge that rising nationalism makes these more difficult to uphold.

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Natasha Hill argued [[link removed]] that Central Asian countries can assert their identities in the kitchen. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan may be caught between China, Russia, and the United States, Hill wrote, but others are newly interested in the region, too: tourists. These countries are trying to capitalize on “this newfound interest” in a variety of ways, but, per Hill, cuisine stands out. “Cuisine may be an important part of Central Asian nations’ attempts to balance great power competition, build tourism, and maintain their distinct identities while asserting themselves as key middle-power countries,” Hill wrote.

Stacey Vanek Smith was off to the races [[link removed]] with a look at the ancient camel racing, which dates back to the 7th century — and the women who are claiming their spot in the sport today. The women’s team is part of the Arabian Desert Camel Riding Center and has “started to get real traction in the last few years.” Linda Krockenberger, 31, founded the team. She and her trainer, Obaid Al Falasi, decided to open a school together after Krockenberger was far enough along. Though a German woman teaching camel riding may make some skeptical, the school is officially licensed by the United Arab Emirates, with a new branch open in Saudi Arabia, and Krockenberger and company ride in the Bedouin style: barefoot and without a saddle.

Alicia Inez Guzmán explored [[link removed]] whether the United States needs new plutonium pits. The essay made the case that the nuclear industrial complex is revving back up, plutonium pit production is back, too — “as a deeply polarizing and political act.” While the government asserts this is a matter of need, activists have accused the government of exploiting uncertainty to jumpstart a manufacturing program worth roughly $60 billion, and “assert that the real reason America has resumed the production of pits is for the purpose of introducing a new generation of warheads for a new generation of missiles.”

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

Great question [[link removed]].

Artificial Infatuation [[link removed]].

A different kind [[link removed]] of service.

Gross Dune [[link removed]] Product.

Walkable urbanism is in the eye of the beholder [[link removed]].

That’s for Joan alone [[link removed]] to have known.

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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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