Read about the hollow invocation of past glories to preserve specific market relationships in post-Soviet wars. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing …

… read about the hollow invocation of past glories to preserve specific market relationships in post-Soviet wars.

As Russia struggles to fill the ranks of its ongoing “special operation” in Ukraine, the country has done what many nations stuck in quagmire do to make meaning: turn to the symbols of the past, as though the explanation for virtuous violence is found there. “This is related to the post-Soviet ideology crisis. This is a reason,” Volodymyr Ishchenko told Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat of Cross-Border Talks [[link removed]], “why Russia relies so much on Soviet symbolism now — the red flags, returning the ‘decommunized’ Lenin statues in the captured cities. Since 30 years of the post-Soviet collapse, they still do not have any more meaningful and powerful symbols, even though they are far from the beliefs of the Russian elite.” The crisis, Ischenko notes, goes beyond Russia and is part of the whole post-Soviet space. It is one where the chief access of ruling elites, held in common even in countries as bloodily divided as Russia and Ukraine, is capital with specific access to the state, government privileges that cannot be directly extended to transnational corporations. Fighting for exclusive oligarch-friendly markets is not an ideology people will die for, so Russia leans on WWII while Ukraine’s calls for national unity allow its own class of political-capitalists to sweep through horrendous labor laws shielded by blood from critique.

Bare borders

US immigration law is built to keep people out, with the begrudging acceptance that some families should be allowed to reunite. To prove the validity of their, ahem, intimate connection, some couples seeking to demonstrate that their marriage is in fact built on intimacy have taken to documenting that love, and sharing that documentation with immigration officials.

While these materials are expressly discouraged by immigration officials, with some going so far as to post on TikTok not to send them, materials continue to end up part of immigration bids.

“Is it any wonder that couples misread the subtext and send in NSFW stuff? They are registering the fact that a consummated marriage is central to one of the biggest (and often only) available pathways to U.S. citizenship,” writes Tanvi Misra for Lux [[link removed]]. “For mixed-status couples, the entirety of their relationship — including its most intimate aspects — is under the purview of the U.S. government.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Sweaty Bourgeoisie

In an old bridal photography studio in Guangzhou, Nellie Chu followed up [[link removed]] an interview with a family of migrant bosses who had moved their family operation to the vacant property for cheaper rent. One of an infinitesimal number of links in the global fast fashion supply chain, these workers are constrained in benefits they can access, and fill a minute void in the precarious perpetual world of clothing production.

“They are stuck in their nodes on the supply chain, bound by the uneven rhythms of fast-fashion production, able only to collaborate and negotiate with other migrant laborers and clients as dictated by the demands of transnational outsourcing,” writes Chu.

Should the family enterprise fail, the garments will still be made and the sellers and workers will find other outlets. But the family will return home, resigned to work as employment for others, a precarious gamble erased by the faceless cruelty of markets.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Civil Workshopping: Part II

When a state builds a standing military, it is forging a promise in blood: In exchange for pay, privilege, and weapons, the armed forces will become synonymous with the state, fighting to preserve it against internal and external threats. Indeed, 75% of the time when a state falls to armed rebellion, it is because forces outside the military take up arms. Coups, where the military itself seizes the state, constitute just over 13% of armed takeovers. But in 11.2% of cases, it is the splintering of the military itself that causes the rebellion, leading to open conflict among the formerly unified armed agents of the state.

“ State breakdown and Army-Splinter Rebellions [[link removed]],” the new paper by Theodore McLauchlin from which those above statistics are drawn, looks at what factors can lead an army to fracture instead of launching a coup. Examples of this include the breakdown of military unity in Lebanon in 1976, of Libya and Syria in 2011, and in conflicts beyond that. When a personalist regime falters, or when foreign support for a national unifying figure is withdrawn, it opens the possibility that some portion of the military will go directly into rebellion, instead of trying to assert itself as the new head of a collapsing government.

“My findings show that regimes that protect themselves well against coups are far from invulnerable to military disintegration,” writes McLauchlin. “Instead, their armies can fall apart in a different way: when soldiers directly launch civil wars.”

Even in cases where army rebellions fought and quickly won control of the state, McLauchlin distinguishes rebellions from coups based on the preparation and form of action taken. If any army prepares for and wins a short war, that’s distinct from an army seizing the government all at once. The choice to rebel matters, in part because of what it shows about the government being rebelled against.

In personalist regimes, those centered around authoritarian figures and molded to the preferences of such a leader, it is likely that the leader has taken considerable effort to coup-proof the military. If potential rebel leaders are kept away from the capitol and locked out of positions that would allow them to organize openly and claim to represent the whole of the military, then building power and networks gradually, while avoiding surveillance, lets the rebels prepare for a rebellion on their own terms.

“Personalist rulers are not only likelier to lose power violently when they lose power ( Geddes, Wright, and Frantz 2014 [[link removed]], 321), to engage in international conflict ( Weeks 2012 [[link removed]]), and to have ineffective armed forces ( Talmadge 2015 [[link removed]]),” concludes McLauchlin. “They are, additionally, especially prone to the direct resort to rebellion through army-splinter rebellions.”

Because personalist regimes are increasingly common, it is worth understanding their propensity to violence, the limits of their ability to achieve political aims with that violence, and how risky it is that when they collapse, it will come not with a smooth transition of power but instead a new, potentially lengthy war, one sparked by defection among armed forces.

This paper offers a warning to authoritarian regimes, and also a word of caution to foreign backers who would arm them. If the weapons handed over are left in the hands of a military prone to shatter, any peace kept by threat of violence is only at best a mirage.

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

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

Hajer Naili called [[link removed]] for an end to the War on Terror, in light of last week’s assassination by drone of Ayman al-Zawahri. The killing of al-Zawahri came over 4100 days after the killing of Bin Laden, with drone missiles striking him in a room that once held US contractors but was now known to be a Taliban-held safehouse. On the path to killing al-Zawahri, writes Naili, “ 929,000 people [[link removed]] died due to direct war violence, including armed actors on all sides, contractors, journalists, and humanitarian workers.” With nearly 1 million dead and tens of millions displaced by the war, it is impossible to see continuing the violence as doing more good than harm.

Carol Hills interviewed [[link removed]] Yadvendradev Jhala, dean of the Wildlife Institute of India, about efforts to reintroduce cheetahs to the subcontinent. With barely more than a dozen asiatic cheetahs left in the wild, and those all in Iran, India’s program will instead bring cheetahs from Namibia, South Africa and Botswana, sharing in those country’s surplus cheetah population. “The cheetah was hunted to extinction in India, and now, we have the economic ability, the threats to the extinction have been exterminated and [we have] the scientific know-how to bring back the lost element of our ecosystem and our lost heritage,” Jhala told Hills.

Joshua Coe charted [[link removed]] the success of PAF.no, a multilingual song with a chorus in Arabic that hit number 1 on the Norwegian charts in February and has remained in the top 40 ever since. The song, recorded by Norwegian duo Karpe, is informed by the artist's experience growing up in immigrant communities in Norway in the 1990s. Funds from the song are donated to refugee and immigrant assistance; it's the power of music that keeps it in circulation. “Oslo-based musicologist Kjell Andreas Oddekalv said that even if you don’t understand the cultural significance of the tune, the song is “a banger” with a strong hook that has people humming it for days,” wrote Coe.

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

Following this logic [[link removed]] to its inevitable conclusion, every Sbarro is now a forward operating base of a resurgent Italian Cuisine Empire.

Magyar [[link removed]]? I’m hardly differentiated [[link removed]] from her.

Didn’t make sense not to live for gun [[link removed]].

Sex and death in the passionate world of septugenarian electoral campaigns [[link removed]].

Weak conjecture on the precise relation of the boys relative to the town [[link removed]] can only come from thinly-sourced Lizzy [[link removed]].

The mundane office politics [[link removed]] of extrajudicial murder by sky robot, but not without a die-o-rama first [[link removed]].

Things that go boom [[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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