Some Ukrainians are returning home. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing …

… read about the Ukrainians already returning home.

When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine failed to immediately achieve its planned rapid capitulation, it was unclear where, exactly, the fronts of a longer war would settle. Now, over two months into the war, there’s a clearer understanding of what the longer version of the conflict looks like. And, for some Ukrainians living abroad, that is enough to urge a return. Writing for The Nation [[link removed]], Carol Schaeffer talked to several Ukrainians who had been living abroad in Europe. For many, the life they had abroad was of necessity more than desire, doing low-paid work available to them. For Sasha that was easy to give up for a sense of usefulness in the war at home — or at least for the duration of the war. “Of course, I have dreams. I still want to find my love, have children, and open my own little steak house,” Sasha told Schaeffer. Life abroad, before and hopefully after the war, will likely be driven by the greater availability of work outside the country. Still, for returned workers abroad to get there, they first need to know that they’ll have a home to return to. It’s an outcome many are increasingly willing to fight for.

chopper coppers

There is no Sahel in France, but the prerogatives of colonial management meant that when the French ruled Niger, they did so in a way that ignored local agricultural practices in favor of orderly, manageable fields. This choice, imposed for decades, ruined the agricultural yield, but the country has recently succeeded in regrowing trees and letting farms thrive in the shade.

“Instead, farmers across the Sahel — and elsewhere in Africa — could be encouraged to let trees grow back naturally. The pre-colonial woodlands are still there, their deep roots buried in the ground, waiting to regenerate on their own.” write Katarina Höije and Craig Welch for National Geographic [[link removed]].

The example of Niger, where the estimated regrowth of forest is at 15 million acres, shows that returning to past land management practices can be a boon for farming and a xxxxxx against climate change.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Corpse Follower

War is a process by which people become past tense, and their bodies move from living vessels to objects of commentary. There’s a long history of war photography covering the truth of this violence, a journalistic practice that is adapted uncomfortably to social media norms. For Rest of World [[link removed]], Leo Schwarz profiled “Spook,” an open-source analyst who collects pictures of corpses from the invasion of Ukraine and shares them on Twitter and Telegram.

On social media, and especially on less-governed spaces like Telegram, it’s much easier to share pictures of corpses captured by participants in the war.

Old editorial standards for print media, essential to covering past wars, are struggling to adapt but emphasize the uncomfortable potency [[link removed]] of this kind of imagery.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Discourse of Justice: Part II

How do people carry on in the wake of violence? Much of international relations looks at the how of violence, at the ways and means of doing harm and shaping politics through it. The aftermath of that violence is then a fixed point, full of broken bodies and broken people, the harm done treated as a narrative end.

But human experience is much broader than that. The study of love and care as emotions and as having an impact of their own suggests there is much more of a political dimension to life after violence. In “ Taking Love and Care Seriously: An Emergent Research Agenda for Remaking Worlds in the Wake of Violence [[link removed]],” authors Roxani Krystalli and Philipp Schulz strive to bring discussions of love and care into the broader academic discourse over how to understand people’s reaction to violence through practices that sit outside of furthering violence.

Last week, we looked at how a human rights discourse [[link removed]] is used to advance political claims by Colombians who are excluded from the state. Krystalli and Schulz’s work on love and care, too, features interviews with the victims of violence in Colombia.

“Talking to you is political work. Talking to people all day — victims, state officials, the public — that is political work. I talk to people about being displaced, about losing everything,” a victim leader in Bogotá’s Rafael Uribe neighborhood told the authors. “Then I talk to people about the struggle (la lucha) to deal with all these entities. Talking to hundreds of students, from Universidad Nacional, from Spain, from Sweden, that's work. Knocking on doors all day to see if people have all the forms they need, if they have medicine, if they have services. That's work, political work.”

As the authors' document, there’s a space for conversations about harm and healing, but what can be more challenging for people is to express the loss of meaningful bonds forged by the conflict. The authors interview a former guerilla who said she experienced greater camaraderie and brotherhood among her former unit than she ever did with her siblings. It’s a loss felt acutely after demobilization.

This sense of disconnection from community and purpose after demobilization is not uncommon among returned soldiers. But for the former guerrilla interviewed, it takes on an additional political dimension when she feels that she cannot publicly express that aching loss of no longer serving with her former unit because it might give people the impression she longs for a return to violence, or it might suggest that she sees the war as still unsettled. This same sentiment is reflected in the other theater of field research, interviewing former child soldiers pulled into war in Uganda. Demobilization, even demobilization from a horrific force, means breaking the bonds of purpose and camaraderie that held the formation together in the first place.

“In more practical and applied ways, then, taking love and care seriously also carries the potential to craft more careful policies and programs in (post-)conflict and transitional settings,” conclude the authors, noting that an emphasis on the interdependence of people in and after war offers an alternative framework to just thinking about individuals. In the wake of violence, people can heal and pursue politics through the lens of care. Politics then becomes love by other means.

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Durrie Bouscaren observed [[link removed]] Bosphorus traffic spotter Yörük Işık, as he tracked Russian commercial vessels flowing into and out of the Black Sea. Işık, who runs Bosphorus Observer, has watched over the narrow passage that connects the ports of the Black Sea to the rest of the world, tracking especially the flow of Russian military equipment and, after Turkey invoked the right to close the passage to military ships, Russian commercial vessels. “Right now, we suddenly see ships carrying hydrocarbon goods — petrol and crude especially — to India,” Işık told Bouscaren. “Really, the Bosphorus is a place you can follow the world.”

Dana M. Moss reflected [[link removed]] on how collaboration between governments shrinks the spaces in which it is possible to protest authoritarianism. As a result, Emigre communities, long a refuge from abuses at home and the reach of the law, have become more dangerous, surveilled online, and open to violent recourse from foreign governments. “The cross-country collaboration between states under the “war on terror” has shrunken the places where activists can find sanctuary and threatens international human rights norms around the non-refoulment of refugees and anti-torture protocols,” writes Moss. To mitigate these harms, democratic countries must assert their own sovereignty while not giving in to xenophobic backlash.

Maher Akrami imagined [[link removed]] an aftermath. The short story offers a glimpse into a known but unknowable horror, the kind that waits in silos and code, ready to create the worst day anyone has ever known. In popular perception, the moment of nuclear disaster is instantaneous, and the brevity itself brings a kind of terror. As Akrami writes, the immediate moments and days in the atom’s wake are no less unsettling. It is, in an age when papers bandy about headlines about winnable nuclear wars, a reminder that the kind of violence packed in a thermonuclear warhead is fundamentally unwinnable.

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

Choose your own [[link removed]] Strangelovian variation [[link removed]].

Giant leaps are what you take/ legislating about the moon [[link removed]].

War is never good, but the moment it becomes the head of a country playing [[link removed]] Warhammer with real lives [[link removed]] is when it goes from managed violence to mismanaged violence.

Cry “but they’re comfortable” [[link removed]] and slip on the crocs of robot war.

Infinite monkeys, one typewriter [[link removed]]: hamlet, of sorts [[link removed]].

Project Blue Bookmarks [[link removed]].

The banality of cinema [[link removed]].

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Critical State is written by Kelsey D. Atherton 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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