Read about Ukrainians and Russians fleeing the war in Israel. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing …

… read about Ukrainians and Russians fleeing the war in Israel.

War makes and remakes diasporas. Israel, itself a diasporadic creation that made Palestinians refugees in their own home, has become host to an influx of Ukrainians and Russians following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. At Jewish Currents [[link removed]], Soviet-born artist Anna Lukashevsky painted and interviewed six Ukrainians who fled, as well as one Russian dissident. The stories capture a full spectrum of experiences. “I had to explain that Dad stayed behind to defend our home from this war. And what’s a war? It’s when the soldiers of one country attack the soldiers of another. I said they’re not here to attack your dad, they’re just fighting each other over the territory where we live,” Marine Storozhenko, from Kharkiv, told Lukashevsky. Many spoke of why they had to flee, of what they lost in the war and flight. Daniel Rosenzveig, at 17, a year younger than the age of conscription, fled to Poland and then Israel. “I don’t want to join the army; I didn’t run away from Ukraine to build Israel. I’m not a patriot or a very political person in general,” he told Lukashevksy. Flight is an inherently political act, as much as fighting, but the demands of a new home can be as severe as that of an old one.

have a cow, man

Ever since domestication, livestock has been an important tool in the agriculturalists’ arsenal, a way to convert scrubland into stored calories and to convert those calories into plowed fields or future meals. While intensive, industrial-scale agriculture has distorted this relationship, treating all forms of pastoralism and livestock rearing as identical and equally harmful to the planet would cause disproportionate harm to the Global South, despite the difference in use and harm.

“livestock also provides vital and sustainable assistance in all aspects of farm management: cows pull ploughs, eat leftover crop residues after harvest, and convert residues into valuable manure for the next season — often when other fertilizer sources are simply not available or are prohibitively expensive. They also play an important role in managing rangelands sustainably,” argues [[link removed]] Simplice Nouala.

By treating traditional livestock raising as a form of resilience to climate uncertainty, governments and planners could work with farmers to manage animals sustainably and in turn, sustain people.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] dead bird tweeting

To write about Twitter in November 2022 is to capture the company and the service in a death spiral, with each day of ownership by billionaire Elon Musk filled with a new notice of vital employees fired and core functionality lost. This loss is unevenly distributed; while the product is bad for everyone, it is worse for people outside of the United States and a few other countries, where at least new Twitter has brought the opportunity to pay $8 to impersonate a company for a few days.

Brian Hioe, writing from Taiwan for Popula [[link removed]], sees Musk’s takeover as a major win for authoritarians worldwide and a threat to protesters.

“Without question, there is still a need for a mass platform with widespread reach in order to conduct public discourse, in preference to those in which people wind up locked in their own echo chambers. Disinformation spreads most rapidly through precisely those echo chambers, which are cut off from larger discourse,” writes Hioe. Should Twitter perish, it will leave a genuine void, one likely filled by much harder-to-track misinformation.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE State Reformation: Part II

If states told ghost stories, they would tell them of past partitions. Acts of partition, which span time and geography, unmake and remake states and people, often at the behest of at least one more-powerful third party. While lives may continue in partitioned states, it is not the sort of action undertaken willingly by the polity without other tension driving it to be a less-bad option. States are not living entities sharing campfire stories but instead are made up of people with historical memory. And the stories of partition are powerful in shaping how a state may react to future divisions or the possibility of reunification.

In “ Connected Memories: The International Politics of Partition, from Poland to India [[link removed]],” Kerry Goettlich talks about partition as a memory held collectively and one where past examples in faraway lands are used as a tool for understanding and arguing about the present.

“The idea of ‘memory communities,’ likewise, does not break with the idea of a community of some kind,” writes Goettlich. “While Western and Eastern Europeans’ memories of the Holocaust, the Second World War, and their outcomes may clash, they do so as a contest over the meaning of a series of tightly connected historical events, and ultimately as a struggle over what it means to belong to the collectivity called ‘Europe.’”

The way that people in countries in Eastern and Western Europe collectively respond to the experience of World War II shows shared events as contested memory and about memory in relation to other communities. What makes memories of partition so distinct is that they look for similarity and precedence in distant events, but events of a similar kind.

“The picture of partition that emerges from Poland to India here, however, is not one in which partitions are discrete, disconnected events, as assumed by much literature on partition, nor are memories of partition only relevant to those who experienced them,” writes Goettlich. “Instead, the argument here is that social memories of partition traveled, and shaped how partition was seen, one way or another, beyond their original context.”

To explore this concept, Goettlich takes the Partition of Poland, when from 1772 to 1795, Prussia, Austria, and Russia divided and occupied the land that had once been a distinct nation. This historical understanding of this event in the United Kingdom, while not leading to any change for Poland itself, shaped how British foreign policy approached a range of foreign policy decisions, including proposed partitions in Belgium, or how the gradual dissolution of the Ottoman Empire was to be handled.

“Only through the partition of Ireland, for example, particularly through the work of the imperial federalists,” writes Goettlich, “did it become possible for some to articulate ‘partition’ as a solution to intercommunal conflict, and to forget its negative associations with Poland.”

The story of Irish partition, in turn, echoed through the wider world. Goettlich opens the article with Ireland’s President Michael O’Higgins tying the partition of Ireland to the colonial struggles across the globe. If partition is a ghost story told by states, reunification after is a campfire song sung afterward.

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Eunwoo Lee placed [[link removed]] the tragic Oct. 29, 2022, deaths of 156 young people from a crowd crush in Seoul’s Itaewon district in a larger historical context. Long before the tragedy, the district had been the site of foreign occupations, with it once used as a staging ground for a Mongol invasion of Japan. More recent history has seen it occupied by China, Japan, and the United States, with industries catering to soldiers on leave a durable feature. But, wrote Eunwoo, “this place has also shown how resilient Korea can be, how it can return memories to its rightful proprietor, and how the nation should chart its future course.”

Michael Fox trashed [[link removed]] the government of Oaxaca’s waste management. In early October, the city closed its trash dump without a plan to reopen or a new location for collected trash to be stored. Consequently, residents are burning their trash, releasing harmful chemicals and darkening the sky, or releasing it into the environment, polluting with the intact matter. “On Nov. 4, the trash collector’s union protested the situation [[link removed]] by dumping truckloads of garbage across the city’s historic center and inviting residents [[link removed]] to do the same,” reported Fox. A government unable to act on trash is just a space of waste.

Ludovica Castelli parsed [[link removed]] a speech made by Josep Borrell, the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, at the inauguration of the European Diplomatic Academy. The institution is designed to usher in a new generation of European diplomats, and in the speech, Borrell argued that Europe was a garden and the rest of the world a jungle. “The ‘garden-jungle’ analogy is only one of the many representational practices upon which unlawful wars and, more broadly, the unlawful use of force has been justified,” wrote Castelli. The academy may be new, but the attitudes are passe at best.

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

Not much, secret space robot [[link removed]], how about you?

There’s always diminished stock value in the impersonate-a-banana stand [[link removed]].

Subscribe to Supercritical State [[link removed]] for advice on how to handle your Demon Core [[link removed]].

Can’t have an insider threat if you fire all the insiders [[link removed]].

Netflix presents: Machiavelli’s “ The Christmas Principality. [[link removed]]”

When the basketball team is outright dialectical [[link removed]].

Twitter is dying, but the good posts keep coming fast [[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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