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Why did Pakistan’s Baloch women lead an unprecedented March? Writing in New Lines [[link removed]], Somaiyah Hafeez, a Balochistan-based freelance feature writer, explains that they were responding to extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances.

Previous marches in the region were led by men and less attended. As Hafeez explains, “the recent long march was not only predominantly led by Baloch women, but the scale and participation had increased, with a significant number of women from poor and lower-middle-class families participating in the protests for the first time.”

Hafeez explains that Balochistan has faced an insurgency since the early 2000s. At present, two prominent insurgent groups are at odds with the country’s security state. Separatists accuse the government of exploiting the resource-rich region. It is against this backdrop that disappearances and extrajudicial killings have increased.

Although the recent protests were not covered by national media, Hafeez writes, they garnered not only social media but also international attention. Hafeez acknowledges that “the military and insurgents continue to battle, with the latter carrying out major attacks in the past few months.” However, “Baloch women continue to lead peaceful protests to raise the issue of human rights violations in the province.”

Climate, Changed

In a feature [[link removed]] in The Nation, Wen Stephenson looks at how climate change has changed reality for the Tibetan community in Nepal’s Mustang region.

Last August, Kagbeni, a village in Nepal’s Mustang region, suffered a “devastating flood,” the result of extreme rainfall. The people who lived in Kagbeni found it and its aftermath to be unprecedented. “In all, 27 buildings designated as residential or hotels were destroyed or damaged, plus nine ‘crucial public structures’ — water supply and treatment, irrigation canals, sewers, electricity stations, bridges, and river retaining walls — ’were also severely affected.’ This in a town of just 600 people.” In response, the government sent 10 heavy tents and 15 blankets. International NGOs, per Stephenson, have provided no support thus far.

The community has thus relied on grassroots fundraising. But questions of longer term survival are front of mind, too, as Stephenson documents through interviews with the district’s residents. Nepal’s carbon emissions are “relatively negligible,” but that clearly doesn’t mean the community will be relatively spared from the impact of global climate change.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Past Is Prologue

Jewish Currents has published a translation [[link removed]] of an exchange by Yiddish anarchists following attacks on Jews in Hebron in 1929. Introduced and translated by Eyshe Beirich, the exchange is especially notable for how resonant its rhetoric is to debates within Jewish communities today.

As Beirich explains, “Up to this point, left-wing and Communist Yiddish newspapers in America had diverse positions on Zionism, ranging from passive support to agnosticism to explicit anti-Zionism. After 1929, many Yiddish papers slid rightward, openly embracing aspects of Zionism they once rejected in response to what they saw as antisemitic, Eastern European-style ‘pogroms’ at the hands of ‘the barbarous Arabs.’” The Yiddish-language anarchist paper Di fraye arbeter shtime (FAS) was one such case: though historically opposed, a week after the attack, it embraced what Beirich describes as “Zionist militancy,” arguing, “we have no choice.”

Months later, a group of young Polish Jews published a response: “As it turns out, you have granted a reactionary ideology citizenship in your minds,” they open, warning FAS, “The goal is to turn the Arab into a disenfranchised, degraded creature which should never stop shaking in fear at the thought of the Jewish landowner.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Losing Cite

Calls for inclusion can end up excluding that which they mean to bring in if they don’t recognize the representation that already exists. That is the premise behind Martin J. Bayly’s new article [[link removed]], “The Empire Cites Back: The Occlusion of Non-Western Histories of IR and the Case of India,” out this month from Jawaharlal Nehru University’s International Studies journal.

Bayly agrees that it’s right for calls for “global” and “non-Western” international relations to be gathering momentum, but asks whether such calls risk presuming an absence of international relations work in places like India. Bayly seeks to challenge the categories of global, post-Western international relations literature. As Bayly puts it, “A more historicized global IR debate offers a fruitful research agenda that explores the multiple connected beginnings of IR as a global discipline responsive to a variety of intellectual lineages, encompassing a variety of political purposes and revealing entanglements of imperial and anti-imperial knowledge.”

Calls for international relations to become more global are premised on the idea that it should become so to take into account global distribution of that being studied by the discipline and, additionally, universities and departments around the world. In this telling, “IR is a discipline born and raised in and for the West, but has diffused to the non-West to a greater or lesser degree requiring it to bring these alternative patterns of thought into the fold if it wishes to remain relevant.”

But the idea of global IR risks reinforcing the idea of “the West” as the starting point, Bayly writes. The narrative of “core” and “periphery” is reaffirmed, not broken. What is needed are “detailed intellectual histories of non-Western international thought.”

Bayly proceeds to carry out the kind of literature review he suggests by looking specifically at India, noting, for example, that Bengali sociologist Benoy Kumar Sarkar published on the “Hindu Theory of International Relations” in the American Political Science Review in 1919. And Sarkar was not the only Indian scholar publishing on international relations — and doing so from a “non-western” perspective, informed and motivated by anti-colonial struggles — in American journals around this time.

Alternative fora were established, too, like the Indian Council on World Affairs, established in 1943 “to encourage and facilitate the scientific study of Indian and International questions.”

Bayly concludes by stressing that it is not true that disciplinary trends in international relations did not sprout up in one spot and spread elsewhere: they were the result, he writes, of a global project that blurred the line between “Western” and “non-Western.” Or, as Bayly puts it, “The origins of international thought in India, therefore, resonated with disciplinary practices elsewhere, but crucially they were present at the same time that IR began to emerge in the ‘West’.”

Bayly argues that it’s important to remember this history not only to better understand the history of the discipline, but to improve understanding of the role of international relations in present policy debates, too.

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

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Katherine Voyles asked [[link removed]] whether we should make sense of war in fiction. Voyles was interested in not only who should tell such stories, but also when they should be told. Voyles argued that it matters whether fiction engages with a war currently being waged or looks ahead to what war might come. “Stories about war of necessity engage issues such as its very nature, the events that led up to it, events within it, and what comes after it,” wrote Voyles. “What happened and what it all means are at the heart of these narratives.”

Madeline Edwards looked at [[link removed]] the student movement for Palestine in Beirut. As Edwards pointed out, “Students in Beirut say their standpoint is different from those in the US, as Israel has bombed their own country nearly every day since Oct. 7.” However, while students are cautious, Edwards described the on-campus situation as calmer, given that campus security and authorities more generally have not cracked down as they have in the United States. Some students also stressed that they felt that participating in protests was more pressing and important than final exams.

Tibisay Zea wrote [[link removed]] of how Mother’s Day was a sad reminder for Mexican mothers whose children went missing years, or even decades, ago. The Mexican government has taken some steps to address the phenomenon: “Unlike previous administrations, the current government has publicly recognized the scale of the crisis and strengthened search and identification efforts,” Zea wrote. “President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (known as AMLO), launched the first National Registry of the Disappeared in 2018. It now contains over 116,000 reported cases of missing people. Over 70% of the cases happened in the last 10 years.” But AMLO also announced a census to review disappearances, which critics have said is an attempt to manipulate numbers and reduce the count of people who have disappeared.

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

It’s so over and we’re so back [[link removed]].

As it should be [[link removed]].

Walkable urbanism and determinism [[link removed]].

Uh … Macron [[link removed]]?

Cohn at home [[link removed]].

The gift that keeps on giving [[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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