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… read about the limits of treating Taiwan like a Cold War dispute.

Every nation is, by virtue of existing at present, a modern phenomenon, and should be understood as such. Writing for Dissent, Brian Hioe offers an overview of Taiwan [[link removed]]’s long disunity with mainland China, and situates the country and its national identity as quintessentially modern. That matters, as thinkers across the political spectrum guess at how the US should respond to any shooting war between China and Taiwan. Ignoring the meaningful difference in national identity, and the political preferences that go along with it, allows commenters to dismiss the self-identification of people in Taiwan in favor of Great Game or Cold War-esque analogies, seeing the people and the island as mere pawns for the United States or China to set policy for. While some realpolitik dictated the Cold War fates of Berlin and Cuba, an honest assessment of the present will find that any immediate invasion would require a military buildup China has not completed, and misses the way that present economic integration keeps both China and the US heavily invested in Taiwan. Writes Hioe, “Taiwan produces more than half of the world’s semiconductors, which are used in everything from cars and iPhones to the Chinese missiles pointed at the island.”

Sovereign Signals

Across the sovereign lands of Native American tribes in the United States, internet access has been kept artificially scarce, held back below the standards of other cities and national labs. To remedy this, many federally recognized tribes are applying for direct funding, so that they can extend existing high speed internet networks to the people living in native nations.

“I’ve seen where a fiber line goes in a straight line for a long time, then suddenly pulls a 90-degree angle and follows the outline of a reservation on the outside to bypass it,” Matthew Rantanen, director of Technology for the Southern California Tribal Chairmen's Association, told Karl Bode for Protocol [[link removed]].

The disparity is particularly stark given how some of the land held by the federal government has received massive internet infrastructure despite similarly remote conditions, like Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Smoking Traces

International tobacco is already big business, and while its fortunes may not be what they once were, the prospect of continuing to offer carcinogenic relief to soldiers measuring their lifespan in days not decades is hard to quit. At World Politics Review [[link removed]], Benoît Gomis looks at the role of Igor Kesaev, an oligarch in Russia who recently stepped down from his role selling tobacco so he could continue to oversee his company selling weapons to the Russian military.

“Following a letter from [Japan Tobacco International] Ukraine employees asking the company’s global headquarters to stop operating in Russia, JTI refused to do so, on the grounds that it was politically neutral and would not interfere in geopolitical issues,” writes Gomis.

The responses from tobacco companies to the war and sanctions indicate a deep willingness to cling to, for as long as they can, the ability to sell to soldiers, civilians enduring war, and the public in Russia facing brutal crackdown, maintaining profits until it becomes wholly untenable to do so.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE democracy, interuppted: Part I

When the reactionary populist party Vox came to power in Andalucia in Spain, it did so riding a wave of misogyny in the name of equality. This strategy, which has allowed Vox to form coalitions in regional and national governments with other right-wing parties, has helped transform what might have been a fringe player in a plurality system into a significant force in local politics, one wielded as a cudgel against the institutionalized improvements made by the left in the name of equality.

“Opposed to what it calls the dictadura progre — the ‘dictatorship of the progressives’ — Vox claims to be the sole party representing the traditional (‘authentic’) values of the Spanish people,” write authors Alba Alonso and Julia Espinosa-Fajardo, in " Blitzkrieg Against Democracy: Gender Equality and the Rise of the Populist Radical Right in Spain [[link removed]]."

One way that Vox took up this mantle was protesting existing laws on gender-based violence — specifically by using those laws to show “how gender equality policies had gone ‘too far’ in Spain and to portray feminism as part of the establishment.”

This strategy was paired with claims that Spanish women face special threats from foreign men, a challenge Vox believes should lead to stricter immigration policies. Paired, the policies express a patriarchal control over women framed as protection from hostile forces, and treat inequality as a past issue already solved, one that current laws go beyond.

By looking at party manifestos, agreements made with other center-right parties to hold and share power once elected, and policies implemented when in power, Alonso and Espinosa-Fajardo offer a clear picture of how the party turned its beliefs into action, and in turn used that to undermine and dismantle existing gender protections in the country.

Like many far-right parties claiming a populist mantle, Vox turned to trends showing a declining birth rate as cause for both criminalizing abortion and banning immigration. In addition to ending abortion, Vox argues “that public resources for these services should be entirely reoriented to protect the life of the “unborn” and the “freedom” of women to be mothers.” This framing, hardly confined to one reactionary party in Spain, imagines a generous state for mothers as an alternative to abortion care and access to reproductive rights. That the generosity of the state is linked to ending care, rather than paired with the continued right to bodily autonomy, reveals the hollowness of claiming the change as an expansion of freedom. (It is, as the authors follow up, also a policy perspective that restricts the right to parenthood to exclusively heterosexual couples.)

In its work attacking existing legal frameworks for gender-based violence, Vox has rhetorically attacked the government caseworkers responsible, the government data used to document claims, and the entire concept of a gender frame for understanding violence. Public faith in the data collected by the government has made the Spanish public resistant to some of these attacks, but the party persists in calling for an end to funding any organization promoting gender equality.

Vox regularly frames “equality policies as part of an allegedly ‘totalitarian’ project,” write the authors. “By fostering an atmosphere of general distrust toward institutions, professionals, and [civil society organizations], Vox actively delegitimizes critical components of the equality architecture and pushes for significant — and unprecedented — setbacks.”

Taken altogether, Vox in Spain follows a path taken by many radical reactionary wings in democracies, which treat inequality as an issue settled in the past, and modern interventions as attacks on traditional families. Understanding the mechanisms of reactionary policy masquerading as a defense of freedom is essential to limiting its success.

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FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Eloise Goldsmith interviewed [[link removed]] a Russian anti-war protester. “Anna,” identified under a pseudonym, was arrested in April 2022 at an anti-war protest in St. Petersburg, where she was formally detained for violating COVID safety rules. Anna’s story, like that of the at least 15,000 Russians detained for actions related to anti-war protest, highlights the greater loss of alternative perspective and possibility in a nation under increasing autocratic crackdowns on dissent. It also highlights a vulnerability autocrats fail to learn over and over. “I say that if you want to meet someone good in Russia you should go to a protest and this bus, all good people are there,” Anna told Goldsmith.

Patrick Cox spotlighted [[link removed]] the Radio Haiti-Inter archive at Duke University. This trilingual collection, in English, French, and most crucial Haitan Creole, was donated by Michèle Montas, broadcaster and widow of Haitian radio journalist Jean Dominique. Montas kept the station running for three years after the assassination of her husband, but shot it down in 2003. By preserving the archive, along with descriptions in Haitan Creole (or Kreyòl, as it is known in its distinct form), it offers a useful and durable archive of the language spoken by all people in the country. The archive in Hatiian Creole, Montas told Cox, “meant respect for the language that had had no respect before.”

Carolyn Beeler documented [[link removed]] the abrupt shift within Germany, and thus the European Union as a whole, toward the idea of banning oil imports from Russia. The move, sparked largely by the continued belligerence of Putin’s Russia against Ukraine, comes after waves of sanctions have been imposed on Russia. Germans are already feeling the cost from a reduction in supplies; Beeler quotes Fabien Neumann, a German optician, as noting that the price of filling her car is greatly increased, but “I think we have to stop Putin, so I think everyone has to pay a little bit more for stopping the war.”

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

Even catastrophic sea level rise won’t produce this [[link removed]], but it’s fun to imagine.

Neither’s Istanbul, it’s Constantinople [[link removed]].

The name’s Solo. Flute solo [[link removed]].

From the Battle of Puebla [[link removed]] to the shores of Trieste.

One rule when it comes to dissolution [[link removed]] of the British Empire: no learning [[link removed]].

Brb quitting everything to create a new comic detailing the exploits of this medieval feline, gonna call it “ Cat Francey [[link removed]].”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Follow The World: DONATE TO THE WORLD [[link removed]] Follow Inkstick: DONATE TO INKSTICK [[link removed]]

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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