Read about W.E.B. Du Bois, fellow traveler in left foreign policy. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing …

… read about W.E.B. Du Bois, fellow traveler in left foreign policy.

“Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and his lifespan overlaps almost exactly with the Jim Crow era, a period during which Black Americans faced severe restrictions on their ability to participate in political, economic, and social life,” writes Zachariah Mampilly for Foreign Affairs [[link removed]]. His piece dives deep into W.E.B. Du Bois’ life and role as an advocate of left foreign policy, within the United States and within the pages of Foreign Affairs itself, before Du Bois’ ultimate exile to Ghana. In Mampilly’s reclaiming of this legacy, which includes a Du Bois piece published in Foreign Affairs’ preceding publication, the Journal of Race Development, Du Bois’ keen sociological eye is applied maximally, to the problems of a world bound by global empire and global capitalism. It is no coincidence that Jim Crow lined up with US wars of imperial expansion, against Indigenous populations in the Americas and then overseas colonies in the Caribbean and Pacific. Concludes Mampilly, “In his writings on international politics, Du Bois argued that the domestic could never be divorced from the global, and that Washington’s quest for a liberal order could never be reconciled with a Jim Crow system at home.”

Crown Terraformation

To exist in the 21st century is to live in the wake of the British Empire and, especially, the way the crown shaped that empire and our present. As Priya Satia writes for Time [[link removed]], “the frantic analysis of the monarchy remains blind to its role in the existential climate crisis we face: the surrogate sacred object it offered to a society that ceased to find meaning in the earth and fellow beings.”

For historian Satia, to understand monarchy is to look at an entity given form and power by its subjects. In Britain, this monarch saw the world as a commons to enclose, rather than a resource to manage, and in its violent expansion across the globe brought with it the same plunder enclosure had unleashed at home.

“The monarchy’s romance, ritualism, and materialistic allure substituted for the loss of meaning in human relations to one another and the earth that was unleashed by capitalist colonialism,” writes Satia. “As the Earth was disenchanted, the bodies and homes of the ordinary humans who served as monarchs were enchanted instead.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Scepter and Specter

In his long and gilded life, new monarch of Great Britain Charles III made himself a student of religion, Islam specifically. Right before his ascension, note Peter Oborne and Imran Mulla of Middle East Eye [[link removed]], “Liz Truss took over as prime minister of what many consider to be the most Islamophobic government in British history.

As Oborne and Mulla document, Charles has long had an interest in understanding the history and meaning of Islamic traditions, arguing against any notion of a “Clash of Civilizations” between a Christian west and an Islamic east.

Having already spoken as king about British society as one of many faiths and traditions, it is possible Charles III will clash with Parliament over religion, as the world waits to see if monarchical powers long assumed vestigial or dormant remain out of the question of the first new British monarch in 70 years.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Political Theatre: Part I

All the modern world’s a stage for revolution. But before the Age of Revolutions, the notion of overthrowing a monarch and installing a new form of government altogether was the stuff of antiquity, of fiction, and of minor Italic states. For people in England in the 1600s, or France in the late 1700s, the well of revolutionary references in history was shy, with scant immediate precedent to point to, one possible predecessor for revolutionary mood could be the themes of theater.

In “ The rise of prosociality in fiction preceded democratic revolutions in Early Modern Europe [[link removed]],” authors Mauricio de Jesus Dias Martins and Nicolas Baumard examine the language and word dynamics used in plays before and after early modern revolutions.

“We show that prior to both the English Civil War and French Revolution, there was a sharp rise in the frequency of words associated with prosociality, trustworthiness, and sympathy vs. words related to authoritarianism, strength and anger,” the authors write. “Interestingly, in postrevolutionary reactionary periods, characters became stronger and less trustworthy.”

Plays offer a useful corpus of popular media over the eras, in part because the work of staging and incorporating existing actors into productions meant that form and style stayed relatively consistent over time. To test their method of word association, the authors first demonstrated that their tool could sort plays into tragedies and comedies, with tragedies tending towards authoritarian themes and comedies trending towards sympathy.

Bound the study of this change in England was the English Civil War of (1642-1651), which pitted Parliamentarians against Royalists, the royal Restoration under Charles II (1660 - 1688), and then the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which saw an adamant catholic Royalist driven out and replaced by a protestant monarch much more amenable to Parliament. The Protectorate, in which Oliver Cromwell ruled not by royal right but as Lord Protector as appointed through the proto-constitutional Instrument of Government, is “in line with our hypothesis, trust, sympathy, and prosociality rose during the period preceding the Civil War,” the authors write. They continue, “Crucially, we found that in comparison with the Restoration, the [slope of trust, sympathy, and prosociality] was significantly higher in the periods before the Civil War and after the Glorious Revolution. For sympathy, the absolute level was higher before the Civil War than during the Restoration.”

In France, the authors looked at these trends from before the French Revolution (prior to 1789), during the Revolution (1789-1799), in Empires and Restorations (1804-1870), and in the Third Republic (after 1870). In plays in France through that time, the authors found “that the trustworthiness-to-strength ratio rose before the political revolutions, and declined afterward.”

The authors also checked these trends against change in GDP for the respective nations, noting “our results are consistent with the hypothesis that rising living standards might contribute to the shift of psychological orientations toward cooperation.”

Looking at further research, the authors suggest these trends can be used to explore other changes in behavior, ones that don’t reach the abrupt breach of trust and violence in revolution and reaction.

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Jumaina Siddiqi and Sahar Khan explained [[link removed]] the factors that made flooding in Pakistan such a disaster. While the floods are exacerbated by climate change, a problem no country can tackle alone, many of the decisions for where and how to build in Pakistan were decided on a provincial or lower level. This meant entirely preventable mistakes, like building homes and hotels in areas washed away during Pakistan’s 2010 floods. “The fault lies with not just the construction companies or communities, but also with the local governments [[link removed]] that did not monitor or regulate this illegal activity [[link removed]].”

Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman interviewed [[link removed]] Black Americans who took up Ghana’s call for a “year of return” and moved to the African nation. In 2019, Ghana’s government said it would set aside 500 acres of land for Black Americans moving to the country, and would facilitate citizenship for those who wanted it. “The last straw for me was George Floyd. So, what I [saw] as anomalies was just normal for the system. So, at that point I told myself that I will leave and I will go where the system is different,” Kwaku Asantu Maroon Asare, who moved from Florida to Ghana, told Dini-Osman.

Ashleigh Subramanian-Montgomery outlined [[link removed]] how the War on Terror, 21 years old this week, has also been a war on peacebuilding. In the US, laws allow prosecutors to go after people and organizations for providing “material support” to terror groups, a term that in a 2010 case expanded to include not just physical material or financial aid, but training or expert advice, as well. For negotiators trying to bring an armed party to the table, the mere act of coaching for negotiation could open them up to liability. One way to mitigate this harm, suggests Subramanian-Montgomery, would be adding sunset clauses to terror designations, letting time remove risk from attempting peace talks.

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

The Mandate of Heaven is dead [[link removed]], long live the Mandate of Heaven [[link removed]].

What is War of the Worlds if not Guns, Germs, and Feels [[link removed]]?

Tired: fantasy sports teams. Inspired: alternative history sports teams [[link removed]].

We all know the worst role in Omelas, but public affairs has gotta be the city’s second-worst job [[link removed]].

In the imagined community of Twitter [[link removed]], an historic death turns news into the shared ingredient [[link removed]] of newly formed social bonds [[link removed]].

Rest in Posts [[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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