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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 how language can’t keep up with Israel’s war!
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Writing in n+1, Rozina Ali takes stock of the many superlatives used to describe the effects of Israel’s war in Gaza — the toll that it is taking on the civilian population.
In the eight months that Israel has been fighting with the stated goal of eliminating Hamas, which conducted an attack that saw hundreds killed and taken hostage on Oct. 7, Ali noticed “a growing number of experts, humanitarian workers, and investigators turning to superlatives to describe what is taking place in Gaza. What they narrate is a conflict that has surpassed their records, expectations, and imagination, and a scale of destruction in the face of which comparisons break down.”
Ali tracks statements made as the months passed, as the death toll climbed, as various landmarks were destroyed, as the White House sent more ammunition to Israel, and as disease and starvation spread. The statements come from a variety of NGOs and experts and newspaper articles, but they all try to describe the indescribable with words that somehow seem insufficient. “If there are limits to war, they have yet to be defined,” Ali writes.
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“Mother” Russia
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In The Dial, Anna Ryzhkova and Katya Bonch-Osmolovskaya examine the fate of children taken from the Donbas region — and then left to languish in Russia’s orphanage system.
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Translated by Sabrina Jaszi, the piece looks at children who have been taken from Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk, which are controlled by Russian separatists, and put into Russia’s orphanage system, from which point the Russian government stopped reporting on them. Since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and Russian separatists claimed parts of the country’s east, Ukraine has not had complete information on the children. Russia continued to deport children into its territory following its full-scale invasion in 2022. The authors report that the children were told they would be there “long term.”
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“Within Russia, these families have become a symbol of Russian charity and compassion. The faces of their adopted children have been shown on state-run TV channels,” the authors report. But they also share that, at present, “at least 187 children from Donbas are still living in Russian orphanages or attending vocational schools there.” They are also taught a different narrative than children back in Ukraine are living: “Together with local peers, orphans from Donbas participate in conversations about the homeland, here understood to be Russia, and in campaigns to support soldiers fighting for Russia in Ukraine — this goes on in almost every region of Russia.”
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Framing Kashmir
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Washington Post columnist Rana Ayyub takes to Noema to explore Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plans for “new Kashmir,” which, she argues, “masks the barren indifference, injustice and violence of the Indian state toward citizens it has long considered alien.”
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In 2019, Modi repealed Article 370, “which removed a longstanding constitutional guarantee of near autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir, made the Hindu nationalist BJP an object of powerful resentment in the Muslim-majority region,” which Modi promised would let Kashmir “develop along with the rest of India.” Although that has not happened, it “hasn’t stopped Modi from pushing a narrative that political and economic progress is arriving now that the ‘barrier’ that was Article 370 has been removed.”
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Reporting from Srinagar, Ayyub writes of how “injustice and indifference” on India’s part was on “full display.” Ayyub also writes that, using Bollywood, the Modi regime has been able to shape the view many in India have of Kashmir, who are consequently “considered innately violent, using and abusing their autonomy to attack the Indian nation and its democratic institutions.”
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Cracking Down
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In New Media and Society, Aytalina Kulichkina, Nicola Righetti, and Annie Waldherr look at how protests spread — and, in turn, were cracked down upon — in Russia in 2021, a moment they chose because it was a “significant milestone” in the struggle for political change in modern Russia: tens of thousands came out across Russia to rally for Alexei Navalny, the arrested opposition leader.
They did this by looking at social media: specifically, at the online dynamic between the pro-Navalny protest movement and the pro-government countermovement playing out on social media. The goal of the study, the authors wrote, was to integrate social media’s potential to both build up and break down protests. They also considered “the role of coordination in connective action, discerning three related yet distinct characteristics of coordinated networks: synchronization, centralization, and modularity.”
They were especially interested in the interplay between events that took place online and those that were carried out offline.
Social media was used both by those who were organizing and trying to call people out to the streets for the rallies, and also by pro-government individuals and groups to discourage people from attending. The authors note not only the salience of these protests because of Navalny and the moment in time in relation to Russian politics, but also the uniqueness of this moment: the protesters rallied during the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning both that organizers depended more on social and digital media to organize rallies and that officials thus tried to suppress online dissent. Twitter was of particular concern to the government, the authors write, despite its limited use in Russia.
The authors thus collected data from Twitter and then set about answering two questions: “How do the tweeting patterns of pro-Navalny and pro-government accounts relate to protest events and each other?” and “What are the synchronization, centralization, and modularity characteristics of pro-Navalny and pro-government coordinated networks on Twitter?”
What they found was the difference between coordination and clusters: “pro-Navalny accounts were more active and coordinated within more centralized Twitter networks than pro-government accounts. Contrarily, the pro-government camp employed preventive communication tactics and coordinated in more clustered networks.” Also, Granger causality tests showed that while pro-Navalny tweeting resulted in more pro-regime reaction during protests, pro-government posts led to pro-Navalny reaction during other protests.
The authors do warn that the findings should be treated with caution, since sample data does not account for deleted tweets. For future research, the authors suggest that researchers “collect data as close to the dates of protest events as possible while monitoring and documenting observations on trending hashtags.” Still, they argue that their study contributes to the understanding of digital protest and repression in authoritarian regimes.
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Marc Martorell Junyent looked at the century-old election that could hold a warning for Germany vis a vis the far right. Junyent is focused on Weimar, “at that time the capital of Thuringia,” for it was there “that the young republic first witnessed how fascist politicians could directly influence institutional politics through the co-optation of conservative political forces.” Junyent examined how, in the parliamentary elections of 1924 and the Thuringian elections of 1929, far-right forces took over, purging those they deemed insufficiently pure and taking over previously unthinkable positions of power. “The first participation of Nazi ministers in a regional government in Thuringia in early
1930 was a prelude to what was to come in the whole of Germany when Hitler took power in January 1933,” Junyent wrote.
Gerry Hadden reported from Barcelona on how rent control is failing locals in Spain. A law that was put in place a year ago was meant to control rising rent prices. But in practice, the government put checks on long-term rentals, leaving short-term rentals largely unchecked, a move that corresponded to a switch by landlords from with long-term contracts renters to short-term agreements with tourists. Francisco Iñareta, spokesman for southern Europe’s largest online property portal, Idealista, said that long-term rental supply has fallen 15%, while short-term supply increased 60%. Nearly a third of all rental apartments in Barcelona are now set aside for tourists.
Patrick Winn reported with Aya Asakura from Tokyo on fatherhood in Japan, and the Japanese fathers pushing to reform it. Japan is in the midst of a population crisis: for every baby born, two people die. While the average Japanese woman had five children in the years after World War II, today, “roughly one-third of women under the age of 50 do not have children. Couples who choose to raise kids usually stop at one.” One nonprofit, Fathering Japan, aims to change the mentality of Japanese men to create conditions such that their wives will want to have more children: namely, by teaching them to care for their own children and help out around the house.
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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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