Critical State: Hidden in the Countryside

Writing in Hyphen Online, Corinne Fowler explores how colonialism hides in the British countryside, where it shaped both the landscape and the people.   

“Knowing of the vast profits generated from colonial trade, investment, taxation, raw material extraction, and transatlantic slavery — and as a historian who loves green spaces — I went on 10 walks through England, Scotland, and Wales to learn how far that imperial wealth had penetrated the British countryside,” she writes.

It was, she explains, an influx not of domestic but rather colonial wealth that gave imperial figures enough funds “to pay lawyers and commissioners who authorized the planting of hedges and erection of fences around so-called ‘unproductive wasteland,’ thereby depriving local people of their right to use it.” Fowler also looks at the connection between, for example, mills in Lancashire and India’s independence movement.

Successive governments have “failed” to teach this history in Britain’s schools, she writes. And the heritage sector, per Fowler, has not fully explored or examined this part of history. Neither have rural organizations or historic housing associations. “Without knowing these stories, we cannot fully acknowledge our colonial histories, or even address them,” she concludes.

Fowler further explores this in her book, “Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain.”

If You Read One More Thing: Taking Refuge

In VSquare, Kristina Veinbender, Mariya Merkusheva, Miglė Krancevičiūtė, and Olivia Samnick offer an investigation into how Europeans have taken advantage — and exploited the labor of — desperate Ukrainian refugees.

• As the authors explain, “They are part of approximately 6.5 million people who have sought refuge all across Europe. Germany is the top destination, housing over a million war refugees; it is closely followed by Poland, where over 950,000 now live.” And in these countries, various employers have found ways to work around the law so as to exploit refugees’ labor.

• “The struggles Ukrainians face in European labor markets range from missing wages and illegally low pay to unlivable housing conditions, psychological violence and a complete disregard for the wellbeing of workers and standards set by employment law,” the authors write. Labor experts describe clear labor law violations committed by people who then turn around and say they are simply acting out of love for Ukrainians. Some individuals also link labor to housing — taking advantage of fears of finding shelter in Europe’s housing shortage — to make employees still more dependent on going along with the exploitative and illegal labor practices. 

Culture Warrior?

In Prospect, Marie Le Conte asks whether the UK’s Labour government can successfully kill off the culture war.

• Lisa Nandy, the new culture minister, gave a speech in the first days in her new position in which she said, “in recent years we’ve found multiple ways to divide ourselves from one another, and lost that sense of a self-confident, outward-looking country which values its own people in every part of the UK. Changing that is the mission of this department. The era of culture wars is over.”

• But as Le Conte notes, it’s not that simple. Culture wars don’t just go away because someone wants them to. On the other hand, voters do seem to agree with her: A majority of British people believe that politicians exaggerate the culture wars. “A government deciding to focus on other issues instead may well turn out to be a popular one. After all, it seems worth noting that, though the country is divided on culture war issues, it actually doesn’t care about them all that much,” Le Conte writes. Still, “The Conservatives failed because they assumed that they could make the public care about things the party cared about. Labour could yet fail by trying to tell the public not to care about issues people do want to focus on.”

Deep Dive: A Different Kind of Coconut

Coconuts have been in the news lately, what with US Vice President Kamala Harris’s viral invocation of her mother asking, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” But Lars Waldorf and Nilanjana Premaratna look at a very different kind of coconut in “‘This coconut was the one that finally worked’: cursing for peace and justice in Sri Lanka,” an article newly published in Peacebuilding.

The authors were interested in “how Sandya Ekneligoda repurposes cultural and religious cursing rituals to challenge disappearances, impunity, and illiberal peacebuilding in post-war Sri Lanka. Drawing on several cosmologies (principally Buddhist and Hindu), she invokes archetypal female deities/demons for healing and revenge.”

The authors open by introducing us to Sandya Ekneligoda, a human rights activist who, in 2022, “publicly performed a cursing ritual against Sri Lanka’s ruling Rajapaksa clan,” appealing to female deities for vengeance in the case of her disappeared husband — and against illiberal peacebuilding. When, six months later, a popular uprising drove the Rajapaksas from power, some credited Sandya Ekneligoda’s curse.

The article then turned to the role of healing and curse rituals in transitional justice. “Unlike healing rituals, ritual cursing can be viewed as the dark side of hybrid (liberal-local) peacebuilding and transitional justice. It can be seen as an illiberal or non-liberal challenge to liberal peacebuilding’s secular, rationalistic, and legalistic rationality,” they explain. But, in fact, women activists turn to them in moments of disempowerment and in struggles for justice. 

The authors then looked at cursing in the history of Sri Lanka, which has a “long history of impunity for disappearances” — and a land of cursing as a form of justice seeking. 

Consideration is then given to how the strongest women’s movement transformed cursing from private ritual to public protest. They pay particular attention to the Southern Mother’s Front in the early 1990s, which used cursing to address the disappearances of their husbands, brothers, and sons. 

Finally, they analyzed Sandya Ekneligoda’s ritual cursing for peace and justice. It is not that she only cursed for her husband: on the contrary, she “has relentlessly pursued justice through domestic courts despite military obstructionism, judicial delays, and personal threats …” But she combines a legal approach with a cultural one. “She uses performative rituals and cosmological power to keep Prageeth’s disappearance in the public eye and critique the justice system,” the authors write. She “smashes coconuts” to invoke the curse of Goddess Kali against those responsible for her pain — and to drum up public attention in the process. 

The authors conclude by stressing the importance of another part of Harris’s coconut speech: the context. In the context of Sri Lanka, Sandya Ekneligoda was appealing to the liberal and the local, the legal and the cultural, and both pushing back against illiberalism and advocating resistance.

Show Us the Receipts

William D. Hartung argued that, in cheering Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he addressed the Senate and House of Representatives last week, members of Congress undermined US security. “Whatever one’s position on the status and future of Israel, it should be universally agreed that its actions in Gaza are unacceptable and must be stopped,” Hartung wrote, adding, “outside the friendly confines of the US Congress, Israel’s reputation — and that of its primary arms supplier, the United States — has been severely damaged in a majority of the world’s nations.” Hartung urged Washington to withhold military aid as leverage.

Hanan Zaffar and Jyoti Thakur reported on how Chinese-Indian couples navigate longstanding geopolitical tensions between their countries. They explained, “Longstanding tensions between India and China have led to deep-seated prejudices between their citizens, shaping how they view one another … As such, marriages between Indians and Chinese are rare and often face significant pushback from families on both sides.” That pushback has serious consequences, “especially for the women in the relationship. Some women endure confinement, others experience violence, and their partners frequently face humiliation from their own family members.” Some in such relationships hope more stories of romances like theirs surface.

Carolyn Beeler discussed how Japan’s oldest village is trying to attract younger residents. Japan’s population is the oldest in the world: nearly one third is over age 65. And the oldest village of the oldest country is Nanmoku, where more than two thirds of the roughly 1,500 inhabitants are over 65. The village is trying to reduce that to around 40%, in part by giving younger people a role with the elderly: “The mayor has opened two new nursing homes in recent years, partly to provide jobs for working-age people. Young people can also do three-year stints in Nanmoku in a government community revitalization corps.”

Well-Played

50,001 bottles of beer on a wall, 50,001 bottles of beer.

Plus, he can turn it into wine!

The duality of mail.

They know what they did.

A word.

Do not disturb that Wolf!

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.