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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 Nigerian students in Ukraine turned refugees in Poland.
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When the war came to Ukraine, it didn’t just come for Ukrainians. International students, expecting another uneventful semester abroad, found themselves threatened by the same violence that rolled in with the Russian invasion. Navigating borders and language barriers can be difficult even in the calmest of times, and war exacerbates all of it. Many students from across Africa who were studying in Ukraine have fled, along the same paths and routes as the locals. When they arrive in Poland, they might find themselves put in touch with Dr. Tade Daniel Omoshoto, chairman of Nigerians in Diaspora in Poland. “Every day he has been driving to the border along Ukraine, in Polish towns like Przemsyl, Medyka, Lubyca Krolewska, and Korczowa,” writes Carol Schaeffer for The Nation. “He began by simply approaching any Black person he saw and asking if they needed help. Sometimes the language barrier was difficult. Some Black refugees from Ukraine only speak French or Portuguese, but he said has always found ways to communicate.” Omoshoto’s work is the kind that often gets lost in the grander picture of abrupt displacement, where living abroad for years can make an individual an anchor for an abrupt diaspora. His work is a reminder, too, that as Europe suddenly finds compassion for those displaced by war, that there have always been people willing to greet the stranger as a friend, even if governments hadn’t.
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The Torture Was Job Training
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To tell the story of the US War on Terror is to revist tragedy turned into malice over and over again. Journalist Spencer Ackerman, who writes the Forever Wars newsletter, shared the details of a 2008 CIA Inspector General report, revealing the extent to which detainee Ammar al-Baluchi was abused by the CIA, all but admitting that the torture was torture.
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“This torture was instructive as well as operational. The lead interrogator at Cobalt, described as NX2 — more on him in a moment — was also the head of interrogation training. He brought his students in to observe and participate in al-Baluchi's torture for what the report calls "on-the-job practice" so as to be certified in how to torture people,” writes Ackerman.
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The report is a damning historical document, showing that all useful intelligence on violence plotted by al-Baluchi had already been obtained by Pakistan’s security forces. What the CIA did afterward, it did out of either the belief that more torture would reveal more information, or that the subject was deserving enough it didn’t matter. Grotesque.
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Wheat Trends
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Armies on the march are historically bad for crop production. Crops get trampled under foot, the people who would harvest are called instead to fight, and the war makes fields into battlefields. Ukraine and Russia are both major producers of wheat, and are now both badly dislocated from the international market, through being invaded and being sanctioned for the invasion, respectively. That reads as grim news, another in a ticker tape list of tragedy, but agricultural economist Aaron Smith of UC Davis suggests the fear of famine is overblown.
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“The increase in wheat prices will not cause massive increases in the price of American bread. Most of the price of food is determined by the cost of processing, packaging and marketing, writes Smith, noting that a 50% increase in the price of wheat means a 7% increase in the price on the grocery store shelf.
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Futures markets are in a real sense prediction engines that, through their mechanism, reshape the reality they are trying to predict. Smith expects price shifts in wheat to drive production to meet demand in time for later-year harvests, while the crunch on winter wheat is both real and likely temporary.
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The Company And The State: Part I
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The role of the East India Company (EIC) in modern state formation is hardly unchartered territory. The company, chartered in 1600, was both an extension of the power of the British crown and also an agent free to act beyond it. From the start the EIC could call upon the Royal Navy for its own purposes, and over the course of the next century it gained more and more ability to function in a way we might expect a nation to operate. The EIC gained the ability to raise its own ships and soldiers in 1661, as well as the freedom to set or break peace.
“In 1669, the Company was granted control over Bombay (which had been gifted to Charles II by the Portuguese in his dowry), which was the first mention of sovereignty in the charters: ‘Cede Bombay together with all the Rights, Profits, Territories and Appurtenances thereof, and as well the Property as the direct, full and absolute Dominion, and Sovereignty of the said Port and Island.’ As of 1677, the Company could mint its own money,” writes Swati Srivastava.
Srivastava is the author of “Corporate Sovereign Awakening and the Making of Modern State Sovereignty: New Archival Evidence from the English East India Company,” a paper published March 4 by the Journal of International Organization. In it, she outlines how the East India Company claimed sovereignty for itself through war, and in turn, these claims forced a reckoning within the chartering state, one that ultimately resolved in the favor of the sovereign power of the company over the state, rather than the autonomy of the company-state within the state.
The East India Company’s exploits are almost fantastical to describe: That a company built around seeking profits from the spice trade ended up ruling over a population twice as numerous as that of the sovereign who chartered it. Through victory in a war against local Mughal ruler Siraj ud-Daulah in 1757, the East India Company came to be the sovereign ruler in Bengal, adding the tax revenues from a population of millions to its sources of revenue.
In making a claim to the tax revenues as exclusive to the Company, and not due in proportion to the Crown as well, the East India Company provoked parliament. This claim became the site of a series of fights between the company and parliament about the very nature of the Company’s sovereignty, especially as it related to the authority that had granted it rights and privileges in the first place.
“While eliminating the use of nonstate actors for sovereign functions was critical for institutionalizing nonintervention norms among late modern European states,” writes Srivastava, “the EIC's history underscores that states also confronted nonstate actors as sovereign rivals that could no longer be left unchecked.”
Massive companies can wield tremendous power beyond the control of the state, enough as Srivastava’s research shows to establish their own independent claims to sovereignty based purely on the company’s success at military conquest. This research complicates a tidy understanding of sovereignty as flowing from the state down, and instead shows that such a modern understanding of power had to be actively fought for by the state, in order to subordinate rivals to its monopoly on force.
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Ben Denison cautioned against advocating for regime change in Russia as a US policy goal. Denison’s argument is twofold: Calls for regime change are a threat and rightfully seen as escalatory, and the US in particular has a bad track record with regime change. In autocratic states, that fear of regime change can come from external placement of missiles, and it can come from vocal foreign government support for protestors. That foreign support makes it harder for any internal opposition to be seen as genuinely Russian. “The best legitimation the US can do is to simply shine a light on these brave actors rather than trying to further incentivize protest or provide material support for any
uprisings,” wrote Denison.
Manuel Rueda investigated how the war in Ukraine has already impacted food prices in Latin America and Africa. While macro trends suggest US consumers will likely not feel too much of a pinch, in the global south both food prices and fertilizer prices are rising, indicating hardship ahead. These shocks come to food systems already struggling in the pandemic. “The cost for Urea, one of the most common fertilizers, rose by 30% in futures markets since the war in Ukraine began. And that’s making it
harder to grow food in many parts of the world,” wrote Rueda.
Justin Salhani followed the long road from the disastrous August 4 2020 Beirut port explosion to the upcoming May 2022 elections. The country is one of bitter political gridlock, where the only foe entrenched coalitions hate more than their rivals is any popular movement to remake the existing order. That order has failed the population for decades, impoverishing the people, hindering attempts at justice or reform, and returning again and again to civil war hagiography. The next election will take place in the shadow of the exploded grain silos, or in the shadow of their memory, if the economy ministry can succeed in tearing them down over the objections of the families of the Aug. 4 dead.
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Critical State is written by Sam Ratner 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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