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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 human policy shaping natural disaster in Pakistan.
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As of this writing, a third of Pakistan’s landmass is under water. The floods, while impossible without the glaciers that shape nature around them, are a disaster that’s human in origin. Human-caused warming of the planet means warmer summers with more moisture held in the air, leading to heavier monsoons. Over a thousand people are already dead and millions displaced. But while the timing of a given disaster is beyond human control, the way people build into disaster and the way governments manage or fail to manage that disaster are ultimately human decisions and policy choices. Construction in floodplains and wetlands, heavy-handed past response to disaster, and conditions prioritizing development over sustainability can all contribute to the shape and scale of a disaster when it comes. One particular obstacle in Pakistan, as noted by Jumaina Siddiqui in July, is that “issues like water, food and agriculture, and environment are ones where the provinces have the authority to pass governing legislation, while climate change is a federal issue.” Yet, as Afia Salam documents, the history of Pakistan’s environmental policy is one of lurching progress, especially as the scale of the challenge has become increasingly clear, and there are avenues of success the country can point to even amidst catastrophe. Every natural disaster is
ultimately a political crisis. With disasters increasing in frequency and scale, the opportunities to learn from the last one and get the next one right are only increasing.
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Markets, Gardens
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The art world is, as it were, a curated space. There are the exhibitions by galleries and museums that pick shows to make statements, to reflect present preferences and correct past injustices, and then there is the market itself, where contemporary art is sold as an investment vehicle for the already wealthy, with brief interludes of decorating halls in the meantime. Martin Herbert, at Art Review, dives into this duality of the art world.
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“Given the spotlight, finally, under-recognised artists are naturally airing their grievances,” writes Herbert. “Meanwhile, the ‘haves’ dependent on structural inequality in the first place are, as usual, shopping for baubles and using the biennials to network — the painterly Surrealism that was a signature of this year’s Venice Biennale is looking like a smart investment.”
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What is in flux, what is most of the moment, is the tension between a long-overdue highlighting of marginalized talents, and the fear that this will be a passing scene rather than a durable future, as the international art world adjusts not just to historical grievance but new conditions.
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ART AND ARTISANS
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“El Gran Movimiento” is a 2021 Bolivian film by Kiro Russo that entered wider international release this month. It is a story about miners in and outside La Paz that is, at its heart, about the invisible labor and sacrifice integral to capital.
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“Russo’s masterful film exposes the mine as a veiled foundation of life in this South American metropolis, and in so doing, indicts industry as the core of a rotting global economic system,” writes Eli Rudavsky.
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Russo cast an out-of-work miner as his protagonist, then built around his cast to create a fully realized cinematic world, with spectacle and choreography elevating the narrative, while never shying away from a story fundamentally about those kept from leisure and comfort.
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Rebel Alliance: Part I
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Wherever disaster strikes, it risks becoming a political crisis. This is partly because natural disasters are shaped and exacerbated by the policy choices of the government in place before the disaster. But it is also because the specific form and scope of a disaster can change or exacerbate the means and motivations of groups predisposed to resistance. In countries where armed resistance to the central government predates the disaster, the disaster can break the viability of armed groups. Or, it can spur more of the dispossessed and disaffected to join their ranks.
In “When Disasters Hit Civil Wars: Natural Resource Exploitation and Rebel Group Resilience,” authors Yasutaka Tominaga and Chia-yi Lee look at the variation in rebel survival after disaster, and find an explanation directly linked to how those groups sustained themselves before catastrophe.
One of the reasons to look at rebel group relationships to resources is that it can offer clarity in otherwise confounding situations. The authors specifically highlight how rebel groups in the same country and subject to the same disaster can respond differently, noting that “after the 2012 typhoon in the Philippines, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front cooperated with the government during relief operations but the NPA remained hostile to the government.”
Rebel groups can often sustain themselves beyond the reaches of state power and repression by guarding, collecting, controlling, and selling natural resources, everything from oil to diamond mines to opium fields. These resources are not evenly distributed, and access to them can and often does change drastically after a disaster. A mine might collapse, oil derricks may break, and crops could be washed away.
While disaster impacts the production of resources, not all rebel groups derive funding in the same way. The authors find that groups which smuggle resources are more resilient than those that tax or control directly. Direct control of resource extraction lends itself to a fixed territory and hierarchical structure, whereas transporting resources across a wider area leaves smugglers less hierarchical, more resilient, and able to take advantage of price shocks after production collapses in disaster.
The disaster itself is a disruption to production, but so is the intrusion of the state into rebel-contested areas, as both military and relief operations can reassert control and rebind captive populations to the central government.
“Relying on stable resource exploitation strategies such as extortion puts rebels at risk when unexpected shocks occur, as their single and steady source of funding can be easily disrupted,” the authors write. “Rebel groups that earn money from ad-hoc strategies of resource exploitation such as smuggling are more robust in the face of natural disasters.”
Resilience in the face of disaster is often seen as a civil task, one focused on the general benefit of people after tragedy. This time is also a moment of political reformation, especially in light of ongoing conflicts with armed groups. Understanding what makes armed groups vulnerable, and what makes them resilient, can help governments respond to crises. Given a warming planet and increasing disruption to patterns of life, knowing the shape of rebel movements to come can help states preempt them before a crisis.
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Michael Fox reported on the Confederate flag ban in Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, Brazil. Following emancipation and the defeat of the Confederacy in the US Civil War, some former enslavers fled to Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, where they could claim ownership of people and plantations again for a few decades. Every year, the city has a Confederate festival. In a June forum, a historian said “We can’t ignore or deny the racist connections that the Confederates evoke in Brazil and around the world, when the flag is directly related to racist movements in every country,” Fox reports. With the flag ban, the city rejects racist ideologies, domestic and imported.
Johanna Mendelson Forman bit into the fight between Ukraine and Russia over Borsch. On July 1, the UN Economic, Social and Cultural Organization added Ukrainian Borsch to the UN’s list of cultural heritage. The move was expedited by the invasion, and Russia contested Ukraine’s claim to the dish, with Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova stating in March that Ukraine was stealing Russian heritage with the claim. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is as much about Russian imperial identity
as anything else, an expansive claim reflected in Russia tracing the origins of Borsch to Russian residents of Kyiv. By acknowledging the beet-red stew as Ukrainian, the UN affirms cultural sovereignty in the face of imperial assault.
Patrick Cox spoke with the native French speakers of the Louisiana bayou about the loss of their homes and with it the loss of their community. This week marks 17 years since Hurricane Katrina and the first anniversary of Hurricane Ida, devastating storms that uprooted lives and wrecked the once-resilient area. Part of what has made Louisiana French durable is that the communities which spoke it, in bayou towns and on islands, were insular, able to retain a language community for generations. The loss of land, from rising seas and exacerbated erosion, means the post-storm life also breaks up those communities, possibly forever as the speakers integrate into other parishes.
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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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