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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 the foreign plundering of Ukraine’s war economy.
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Total war is a gamble for profiteers. The reliability of an embattled government depends on victory, production needs of everything from weapons to tents to foods to medical supplies are strained while demand skyrockets, and workers themselves are conscripted and drafted into battle. To ensure production meets battlefield needs, while sustaining the people doing the producing, countries often turn to nationalization, direct federal control and administration of industry in order to get the war won. In Ukraine, a country in as existential a war as any, such a move has been kept off the table by the government, urged by foreign and local anti-corruption organizations to buy foreign, instead, lest the war demands foster corruption at home. “Largely a result of this valiant ‘anti-corruption’ struggle, Ukraine has dramatically deindustrialized over the past eight years,” writes Peter Korotaev for Jacobin. “The situation was particularly bad in the military-industrial complex, with Soviet Ukraine’s once-great shipbuilding and rocket complexes essentially disappearing.” Korotaev goes deep across energy policy, fiscal policy, labor rules, and foreign aid, and finds that in every turn, Ukraine is abandoning sovereign control in order to make space for markets, markets that are failing to provide war needs. “Instead of effective wartime interventions, the government sticks to its old formula of justifying present sacrifices in the name of promised EU prosperity,” declares Korotaev.
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Slack Leviathan
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Where does responsibility fall when members of the public decide to execute a death penalty they feel the state is reluctant to murder? Deborah Samuel, a college student in northwestern Nigeria, was killed by her classmates over perceived blasphemy in a WhatsApp group. It’s a question of what kinds of murder are allowed by the state, and what murders states are unable to prevent.
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“Ultimately, the most difficult question after a vigilante killing such as the one that took Samuel’s life is the question of responsibility, which is a political question,” writes Alex Thurston.
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Vigilante violence is structural, Thurston continues, as a symptom of both state weakness (inability to prevent) or state toleration (preferring the vigilantes do the killing instead of other options). The lessons, especially as vigilante violence continues in other contexts, are about state capacity and what outcomes of violence governments are willing to tolerate or unable to prevent.
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Mapping Battlegrounds
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The physical world, and where people live on it, is a material reality and a materialist reality, driven by forces and structure of production that determine the facts of daily life. Turkish collective e-Komite interviewed communist geographer Phill Neff, author of “Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict,” about the ways place and people shape politics, and the possibility of organizing a way out of capitalism.
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“I use the term because it emphasizes that capitalism is a totality that has spread across the entire world. So the hinterland is global in scope,” says Neff. “There is no more ‘outside’ to the capitalist system.”
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Because there is no outside, the struggle over production and dispossession all takes place in the same context. Neff points to the geography of the summer 2020 revolts in the United States, and notes that they occurred where suburban poverty met the logistics industry. Understanding the where and how of breakdowns, in the US and across the world, provides the terrain for which different visions of the world can be built, if people are ready and able to do the work.
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Where Wolves: Part I
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Conserving the natural world means conserving natural predators within it. In Europe broadly and Germany specifically, conservation efforts have seen the reintroduction of wolves to forests and, in turn, wolves venturing beyond forests to hunt domesticated livestock in rural hinterland. How people live with nature, from passive habitat destruction that eliminates predators to campaigns to allow them a return alongside prey populations, is a political question, though it’s often not seen as such.
The reemergence of wolves, and with them, wolf attacks provides a series of discrete events whose effect on voting can be studied and measured. Which, in “Wolf Attacks Predict Far-Right Voting,” is precisely what authors Bernhard Clemm von Hohenberg and Anselm Hager do.
“To explore the connection between wildlife conservation and voting behavior, we study the reemergence of the wolf in Germany. After the species had become extinct in much of Western Europe before or during the 20th century, conservation efforts have recently allowed the wolf to make an impressive comeback,” write the authors.
While wolf attacks may call to mind the eaten grandmothers of a Red Riding Hood, the actual impact is more precisely felt by a farmer trying to protect their three little pigs. It’s the impact of wolves on livestock, and in turn on rural jobs and livelihoods, that is the most persistent factor in far-right campaigning after wolf attacks.
“Using a municipality-level panel of voting behavior, we find that communities that witnessed wolf attacks are significantly more likely to vote for the radical right AfD, which espouses climate-skeptic and anticonservationist positions,” write the authors.
One such ad run by AfD paints the farmers as part of the environment now threatened by efforts at biodiversity. These ads are reaching people through Facebook, Twitter, and the manifestos of the party itself. Wolf attacks, and campaigning on them, is a durable and recurring feature of the far-right in Germany.
In evaluating electoral performance, the researchers looked at federal, state, and local elections, and contrasted the performance of the far-right AfD with the environmental-left Green party. Wolf attacks had a minimal to mildly negative effect on Green party performance, but a significant and observable factor in AfD vote share. This was most pronounced at the state level, but was persistent in federal and local elections, too.
“The common interpretation of such findings is that witnessing environmental issues first hand leads to attitude change. However, this coin may have a flip side: Experiencing wolves killing livestock in one’s vicinity increases the likelihood of voting for far-right, conservation-skeptical parties,” write the authors. “Since these parties often oppose measures against climate change, this may lead to a perplexing backlash effect of policies intended to help the environment.”
The electoral impact of wolf attacks isn’t inherently a case against reintroducing wolves, or preserving existing wolf populations. But it should suggest that politics adapts to such actions. A proactive policy that aimed to protect farmers from livestock loss could take efforts to mitigate attacks on livestock, in turn protecting other environmental policies from opportunistic right-wing backlash.
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Ashley Westerman visited temporary housing for internally displaced people in Ukraine. Located in Lviv, close to Poland and as far from Russia as a city can be in Ukraine, these modular temporary quarters are accommodating some of 7 million internally displaced Ukrainians. The conditions are a step up from finding shelter in empty schoolrooms, but more must be done long term to house everyone. “Similar modular villages were erected in 2015 in a few cities in the east to house people who fled Crimea and the Donbas. The state promised to eventually provide housing for these refugees, but that housing never came,” wrote Westerman.
Jon Letman contemplated the casing of a Fat Man model atomic bomb, the type dropped by the US Army Air Force on Nagasaki in August 1945, killing either 40,000 or 80,000 people. The casing is on display at the National Atomic Testing Museum, which is a testament to the enterprise of bomb-testing, with less attention paid to the human toll of the weapons, or the perpetual risk of nuclear war. Writes Letman, “other than several passing references to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Marshall Islands, and to the health and environmental impacts of nuclear testing, one could visit and leave without understanding the ongoing suffering that continues to this day.”
Kendal Blust netted a story of turtle conservation among former fishers of the Gulf of California. In the Santa Cruz estuary where the desert meets the sea, the Becerra family of Sonora, Mexico, catch, tag, and release sea turtles back, all in the name of preservation. The family works alongside Indigenous people and conservation orgs, and the work is so well known that other fishers bring them live turtles snagged as bycatch. “Although the turtles have to pay this little bit, it’s worth it,” Cosme Becerra told Blust of the discomfort turtles suffer when being captured and handled. “That’s how we get the information we need to protect them.”
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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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