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… read about what Ukraine means for universal decolonization.

Nearly one year after the full, and nine years into the partial Russian invasions of Ukraine, it is unsurprising that western commentators have turned to the frame of “decolonization” as how to think of the country’s struggle and scholarship. Writing for New Left Review [[link removed]], Volodymyr Ishchenko highlights how limited that approach is in scope when it fails to lead to any radical changes in material relations, instead just focusing on superficial signifiers. “Paradoxically, despite the objective imperatives of the war, Ukraine is proceeding with privatizations, lowering taxes, scrapping protective labour legislation and favouring ‘transparent’ international corporations over ‘corrupt’ domestic firms,” Ishchenko writes. Without that kind of change, “Ukrainian ‘decolonization’ is thus reduced to abolishing anything related to Russian influence in culture, education, and the public sphere.” What Ukraine is experiencing is an imperial relationship invasion but the problem isn’t Russian culture or language, it’s how Russia is plundering Ukraine. While few countries are likely to experience war on the scale of Ukraine, many are subject to the insistence that volunteerism will fill the gaps created by auctioning state capacity to private ownership. “The call to see Ukraine as a paradigmatic case of the far-reaching global crisis requires a completely different perspective on the country itself,” Ishchenko writes.

Seeds of Sovereignty

Agricultural metaphors come easy when describing processes over time, but the work of Vivien Sansour is both figuratively and literally about planting revolutionary seeds. Sansour is the founder of the Heirloom Seed Library [[link removed]] in Battir, Palestine, and she devotes her work to finding, preserving, and cultivating past strains of Indigenous crops, ensuring they have a place in the present and the future.

Sansour is one of several figures interviewed by Noura Erakat for “ Designing the Future in Palestine [[link removed]],” which looks at the work of decolonial organization beyond directly challenging the statehood of the colonizer.

“If decolonization typically pits native against settler in a struggle for the land, Indigenous resurgence focuses on how to belong most ethically in relationship to one another and to the land. The preservation and propagation of seeds is about learning how to do that. This daunting task, not Israel, now consumes Sansour,” writes Erakat.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Map Back

Within the geographic bounds of the United States exist sovereign Indigenous nations, many on fractions of the land once originally guaranteed to them by the federal government. A new policy brief [[link removed]] by the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development suggests that GIS, or geographic information system, techniques can be used to more readily identify land that was once promised, and can also be used to determine which lands need to be given back.

“In some cases, the land back process now can help tribes to have a place to even act with their own sovereignty to practice cultural traditions to come together as a community. I mean, it really encompasses a wide spectrum of goals and activities that can really help facilitate, just strengthen community and Native governance,” Laura Taylor, a research associate with the project, told The Daily Yonder [[link removed]].

As modern governments revisit their relationship with Indigenous people, finding ways to restore native stewardship of land, especially land contiguous with that presently under native stewardship, can allow for more sustainable land use, beyond being a restorative process.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Arctic Alternatives: Part I

The Arctic is one of the least hospitable places on the planet, but that has never meant inhospitable. For Indigenous people who have survived and thrived in the coldest reaches of the Northern hemisphere, the Arctic can be a world of abundance, with deep knowledge and practiced skill, making it a life-sustaining home. Yet, the Arctic is warming, thanks to human-caused climate change. It also has the misfortune of being located between the United States and Russia, two nuclear powers who have spent decades anticipating the danger of surprise war blowing in like a cold wind from the north.

In “ Pulling back the curtain: coloniality-based narratives of wilderness in US Arctic policy [[link removed]],” Gabriella Gricius examines 21st-century US policy on the Arctic, and specifically how the language used to discuss the region constrains thinking about policy.

To start understanding US Arctic policy, Gricius examined Arctic policy statements from across the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, all with an eye toward how the country handled anxiety over the region.

“Anxiety, here, is the ordering principle of how states interact with the world and what they must manage to feel secure. States can never solve anxiety, but they can manage it through routines and narratives,” writes Gricius.

Here, the Arctic anxiety was threefold: that climate change is making its resources more exploitable, that the resources would go unexploited, or worse, that other nations would exploit the resources of the Arctic faster and better than the United States. To justify aggressive investment in and policy to control the region, successive US administrations all adopted the language of “wilderness” to justify their policies.

“Importantly, wilderness in the American Arctic is not diminishing in any material way. Rather, its character is fundamentally changing because of climate change from a region that was relatively difficult for extraction purposes to one that is significantly more accessible,” writes Gricius.

While the planet is warming from human-caused climate change, the Arctic is warming the fastest, drastically changing life in the thawing north. But when US policy statements talk about the risk of a diminished Arctic, these statements largely sidestep climate change and instead highlight that reduced sea ice means easier access for drilling the ocean.

“In short, removing responsibility takes away settler blame and treats this diminishing as a blameless event rather than connecting this to capitalist and colonialist practices that are intrinsically connected to climate change. Furthermore, by treating the wilderness as a disappearing object with no subject, these policies even more so reinforce older American conservation narratives,” writes Gricius. “This has implications for Indigenous People, who still live in Arctic wilderness, and are not diminishing with the region, but in fact require more funding, visibility, and assistance in dealing with food and energy insecurity.”

By seeing the Arctic as unsettled, and thus open for settler exploitation, US policy across administrations treats the area as an untapped resource, rather than a lived-in and inhabited place. Adopting a different policy for the Arctic, including one of preservation versus exploitation, requires a different narrative among US policymakers. To get there, presidents and analysts likely need to abandon the notion of the Arctic as available for exploitation.

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Gerry Hadden spoke [[link removed]] with migrants in the Canary islands. One of them, Boujama al-Maabuub, arrived from Morocco in 2012 on a boat that capsized just 60 feet shy of shore, leaving eight survivors and 19 dead. The Canary Islands, as a Spanish possession, offer a route for migrants to try and enter Europe, though the danger of the journey, as well as European urged closure of other routes, is used to deter people from making the trek. Despite this, some migrants have found aid in the islands. Hadden notes that even without the migrants knowing Spanish, local hotels are eager to offer them work.

Manon Fuchs considered [[link removed]] the fate of the Crimean Tatars in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Annexed by the Russian Empire in 1783, the Crimean Tatars experienced periodic expulsions under Imperial rule, a 21-year respite under the USSR, and then a mass expulsion under Joseph Stalin in 1944. While the province was gifted to Soviet Ukraine in 1954, President Vladimir Putin had Russia seize it in the 2014 invasion, once again displacing the local populace in favor of ethnic Russians. Fuchs noted that Crimean Tatars are heavily conscripted into the Russian military, and despite calls to defect to Ukraine, “the battlefield position of Crimean Tatars makes this feat impossible to pull off.”

Ashish Valentine interviewed [[link removed]] young people in Taiwan who are expected to start shouldering year-long stints in the military, up from compulsory 4-month service. While the move is supported by almost three-quarters of the island's population, young people polled support it by just 35%. “I feel like if one day I really have to go into battle, based on my military training, I will just die,” Alex Tsao, a college student studying in Japan, told Valentine. He had just completed his four-month service, and found it full of downtime and tight restrictions on ammunition use.

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

Nine rings for mortal men doomed to die [[link removed]].

Faced with a thorn forest, a military has two options: never fight there, or make specialized Thorntroopers [[link removed]].

When the End of History keeps bending news in its wake, that’s manifesting destiny [[link removed]].

Perhaps the holiday’s biggest Twitter duel would have gone differently if the attacker trafficked in wit instead of people [[link removed]].

An explosive revelation [[link removed]].

Old autocrats don’t die, they just move to Miami [[link removed]].

It’s a new year; let’s not take it for granite [[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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