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In a [ [link removed] ]new review [ [link removed] ] at The Baffler, Jake Romm takes on the recent memoir of former Human Rights Watch leader Kenneth Roth, a prominent, longtime, and widely known voice in the international human rights space. Published in February, Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments chronicles Roth’s lengthy career at one of the most prestigious human rights watchdogs in the world.
Kirkus Reviews dubbed the memoir “a valuable call to action,” but Romm had a different read. Roth’s career, now memorialized in Righting Wrongs, “ultimately reveals the profound limitations of human rights work as currently constituted and signals the urgent need for a new paradigm to address a world in crisis.”
It isn’t just Roth’s writing that Romm takes issue with. “Beyond the dull prose, the book offers little insight into Roth as a person,” Romm argues. On top of that, the reviewer sets his sights on the human rights world as an industry.
In a US-dominated liberal world order, Human Rights Watch “will never endorse the kind of revolutionary change that would actually make the human rights system live up to its stated ideals,” Romm notes. “In a world-system dominated by the United States and, secondarily, its allies, HRW’s starry-eyed universalism will always, intentionally or not, redound to the interests of the most powerful states within this system despite their egregious violations of, well, human rights.”
For one, according to the review, Human Rights Watch has failed to take sufficient interest in economic and social rights. “The problem facing the world is not merely an insufficient enforcement of human rights — the result of burgeoning autocracy, disinformation, political division within democracies, and identity politics, as Roth would have it — but the enforcers themselves,” Romm sums it up.
In other words, those suffering from the denial of their rights do not only need “the right to have rights.” The way Romm puts it, they also deserve “the ability to make rights — to appropriate the powers of creation and enforcement for themselves.”
If You Read One More Thing: Congo Amid Collapse
At The Dial, Emmet Livingstone [ [link removed] ]reports [ [link removed] ] from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where conflict is driving the country to the brink.
Livingstone’s dispatch takes readers to Goma, a city in the eastern part of the country. It’s home to some two million people and serves as a base for dozens of international NGOs as well as United Nations peacekeepers.
When Livingstone touched down in Goma in late January, the area was “experiencing the worst upsurge in violence in decades,” he writes. “Rebels from the Rwanda-backed M23 group had besieged the city since 2022, occupying unassailable positions in the surrounding volcanic hills. The government now controlled only a pocket of about 150 square miles around Goma.”
Throughout February, M23 delivered a series of stunning to defeats to Congo’s armed forces. “Congo’s army and its allies have scattered. The defeat is total and bewildering,” explains Livingstone, adding later: “Congo stands at the precipice of another devastating war, with no clear way out.”
Terrorgram
At the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch, researcher Hannah Gais [ [link removed] ]reports [ [link removed] ] on the latest developments for Atomwaffen, the neo-Nazi group that landed in the headlines time and again during the first Trump administration.
Gais looks at a federal criminal court case against Brandon Clint Russell, an Atomwaffen cofounder. In February, the court found Russel guilty of conspiracy to damage an energy facility. Of particular focus in the piece is Terrorgram, a Telegram channel “where neo-Nazis shared instructions for making bombs and 3D-printed weapons,” as well as planned attacks.
Terrorgram peaked in 2019 and 2020, per Gais. “Still, even as the network’s popularity and spread on Telegram has crumbled in recent years, Terrorgram publications have inspired a range of successful and attempted attacks.”
Deep Dive: Digital Borders, Testing Grounds
The number of displaced people around the world grows every year, and no amount of border enforcement, walls, and ramped-up patrols have stopped people seeking safety from war, conflict, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe.
Yet, even as people continue to make risky journeys with the hopes of finding refuge, countries around the world have increasingly turned to technology like artificial intelligence and high-tech surveillance to try to stop them.
In a [ [link removed] ]recent report [ [link removed] ], the Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN) examined Croatia’s record on the matter. For years, Croatia has stood accused of routinely violating the rights of refugees and migrants on its borders with Serbia and Bosnia. In fact, BVMN has documented Croatia’s pushbacks — or extrajudicial expulsions — of more than 27,000 people across 1,024 incidents since 2017.
The country’s use of surveillance technology on its borders isn’t new, the report points out, but surveillance drones, helicopters, thermal cameras, and vehicle scanners have become routine features in the arrests of people on the move.
“The ability of the Croatian police to secure the border through technology is dependent on the geography and landscape of the respective border area,” BVMN explains. “Through the lens of a local journalist … we were able to draw a picture of the development and advancements in border surveillance technology at the Bosnian-Croatian [border] and Serbian-Croatia border.”
Technology won’t help Croatia or any other country stop migration, as one interviewee told BVMN, “but technology can be used to predict, observe, [and] surveil, and this is what’s been happening more and more in the context of prediction.”
In other words, technology helps insofar as it further enables Croatian border authorities to catch, detain, and expel refugees and migrants. BVMN did not find proof of “causal relationships between the deployment of technology and the restriction of illegalized migration within our period and field of research.”
With the aid of technology or not, border violence continues unabated. As the report notes, “pushbacks seem to take place even without the use of any advanced technology and illegalized migration takes place despite the deployment of AI and advanced technology at the border.”
Perhaps most importantly, the borders serve technology as much, if not more, than technology serves border enforcement.
“Finally, if one turns the question around, and asks not for the role of technology for borders but the role of borders for technology,” BVMN concludes, “the border areas emerge as an important testing ground of technologies [on] a vulnerable population without much access to their rights and data protection.”
In any case, the explosion of new high-tech advancements is changing the way governments look at migration. People around the world will no doubt continue to flee violence and poverty, among other hardships, but what they see when they reach borders might look a lot different in the coming years.
Show Us the Receipts
The Trump administration has deployed immigration officers to snatch international students up and toss them into the deportation system. One such case is that of Mahmoud Khalil, a Syria-born Palestinian who led student protests against Israel’s war on Gaza at Columbia University. As Danaka Katovich [ [link removed] ]argues [ [link removed] ] at Inkstick, Khalil’s arrest is part of a grim new reality, one that marks yet another Red Scare in the country’s long history of turning its ire toward immigrants.
Pakistan’s conflict with militant groups is a long one, but, as Marcus Andreopoulos [ [link removed] ]points out [ [link removed] ] at Inkstick, a recent upsurge in Balochistan separatist militancy has left Islamabad in a tight spot. This fact has put the country in a difficult situation vis-à-vis its two main allies, Beijing and Washington. With militant groups “showing no signs of relenting,” he writes, “a complete collapse of the Pakistani state is no longer an improbable outcome.”
In Ukraine, the Tartar ethnic minority group recently marked its fourth Ramadan since Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country, as Daniel Ofman [ [link removed] ]reports [ [link removed] ] at The World. The bulk of Ukraine’s Muslims are Tartars who come from Crimea, the part of the country Russia occupied in 2014. “Some left the country altogether,” Ofman explains. “For those who stayed in Ukraine, this Ramadan, which ends this weekend, is their fourth in wartime. Many say the circumstances have only strengthened their faith.”
A Call to Action
In the United States and around the world, it is a perilous moment. As wars in the Middle East reignite, a far-reaching crackdown on political dissent escalates, and the top-down pressure on nonprofits and watchdogs grows, the Trump administration has routinely threatened the media. Inkstick is a nonprofit newsroom, and we won’t change our approach in the face of intimidation. In fact, we will double down on our mandate: telling the stories of people who are impacted by, targeted by, enduring, and pushing back against war, conflict, and autocracy. If you appreciate our work, please consider subscribing to our Substack, sharing the articles we publish on our website [ [link removed] ], or even pledging to support [ [link removed] ] our journalism.
Critical State is written by Inkstick Media in collaboration with The World.
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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