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… read about “precolonial” as a hollow term.

The choice of how and where to start a story shapes every understanding of what follows. When it comes to history, dividing it into eras can offer an easier entry point to stories and events by putting time in relative terms — provided the eras are useful concepts. Writing in Aeon [[link removed]], Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò takes to task the entire notion of “precolonial Africa” as a coherent frame and one useful of study. “The deployment of ‘precolonial Africa’ is undergirded by a few implausible assumptions. We assume either that there were no previous forms of colonialism in the continent or that they do not matter,” says Táíwò. Egypt, Rome, and Carthage all get time as obvious examples of colonial history, but so do empires like Ethiopia, which has colonized neighbors for far longer than it was ever occupied by Benito Mussolini’s Italy. “Do we speak of precolonial Spain?” writes Táíwò, noting how the country monetizes its Moorish past even as it debates the role of the conquest in its own history. “Meanwhile, Moorish rule lasted longer there than British rule lasted in any part of Africa.” By abandoning “precolonial” as a category, thinkers, writers, and historians free themselves to tell stories about Africa the same as everywhere else: in history, contemporaneous with other histories.

Aides decamped

In the space of less than a year, the United States has provided $113 billion in military aid to Ukraine, a sum larger than Russia’s military budget. It’s a number with caveats: much of that aid is for the purchase of future systems, while the United States pays for the transfer of weapons and vehicles that were otherwise headed toward retirement. Still, the aid is real — and massive —and it poses big questions about what ends the United States can fund a fight against autocracy.

“The Biden administration initially approached military aid [[link removed]] with maximum caution, given the nuclear ramifications of direct conflict with Russia. As trust improved and Ukraine advanced, though, the US became comfortable [[link removed]] sharing weapons that were once regarded as too risky,” writes John Carl Baker in September [[link removed]].

As the aid has shown tangible results on the battlefield, it’s important for US policymakers, with the distance afforded from the conflict, to consider what the weapons might mean for the future, especially since so many purchases are for still-to-be-manufactured supplies. Self-sufficiency in the post-war period (whenever that may be) could be a goal, even if foreign largesse is vital in the short term.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Democracy attacked

PiS, Poland’s ruling party, has steered the country down a hard-right, autocratic pivot, rolling back democratic reforms and curtailing essential rights, like banning abortion. It’s a deeply troubling move away from what was once an open partner. It’s also a backslide that, unfortunately, lined up with increased US reliance on the country to funnel military aid to Ukraine.

“To the extent that Washington decides to exert pressure, it’s clear that it can work. PiS did eventually back down on the proposed media law, and after years of defying Brussels over judicial meddling, it has inched closer to a compromise since European officials cut off more than $35 billion in funding,” reports [[link removed]] Akbar Shahid Ahmed.

As the United States sends arms through Poland to defend democracy in Ukraine, nudging Poland’s government back toward democratic openness is essential if the country is ever to stand against autocracy rather than becoming another one.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Random Rules: Part I

In 1999, northern states within Nigeria adopted “full sharia,” or Islamic religious law, an action possibly made to deliberately delineate the country’s Muslim north from its Christian south. Every law can be open to interpretation in ruling, execution, and standards for evidence, and the sharia adopted is not different. Where there is a dispute over interpretation, there is a discourse, and while dominant traditions and legal schools largely held sway, the debate created room for alternate expressions of religious reasoning.

In “ Northern Nigerian intellectuals, Sudan, and the ‘eclectic style’ in contemporary Islamic thought [[link removed]],” Alexander Thurston examines a pair of thinkers actively involved and engaged in this discourse.

“Eclecticists cross or blur boundaries between sectarian camps, even as they may have their own enemies and rivals,” writes Thurston. “Within politics, eclecticism carries advantages and disadvantages for its bearers, sometimes facilitating their access to non-Muslim institutions and forums, but simultaneously exposing eclecticists to charges of heterodoxy and inauthenticity.”

While doctrinaire intellectuals abound, firmly adhering to their respective schools of thought, the experience of intellectual debate, practice, and implementation can’t be contained in a single school. Thurston notes that, while the Sunni and Shi’a divisions in Islam persist, increasingly, Muslims across the world identify as “just Muslim,” a category that includes over one-fifth of Muslims in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The presence of this laity, of believers in faith broadly rather than expressly tied to a specific school of thought or doctrinal tradition, can create room for eclecticists. In his article, Thurston focuses on two specific eclectic thinkers: Aminu Ismaʿil Sagagi and Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, both from Kano, Nigeria, who attended Sudan's International University of Africa in the mid-1990s, and who have public writings on the role of sharia in northern Nigeria.

Like Islamists, with whose thoughts both men are deeply familiar, these eclecticists ask how to create a just Islamic society by using the tools of the state and the law. Yet, “eclecticists deconstruct, rather than objectify, notions such as ‘sharia,’” writes Thurston. “The eclecticists' emphasis on exploring political possibilities rather than championing established political programmes recalls the notion of ‘post-Islamism,’ (Bayat 2013),” which eludes to the frustration-driven search for an Islamic political framework beyond the horizons of the Muslim Brotherhood and its peers.

Some of this broader deconstruction can be attributed to the intellectual climate of the International University of Africa, which attracted students from a range of traditions and actively featured a curriculum drawing beyond just the set texts of any given school of Islamic jurisprudence. It meant an expansive engagement with Islamic intellectuals and writers like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and Antonio Gramsci.

When considering Sanusi’s thinking, Thurston writes, “A central component of this framework is the idea that Islamic movements and institutions are historically conditioned rather than universally replicable.” Sanusi noted that, while sharia interpretations were expansive and progressive at the time they were first implemented, returning to the original implementation of the laws misses what was so powerful about them in the first place.

While neither of the scholars featured set out a dominant path in Islamic thought within Nigeria, both demonstrate that intellectual debate over the nature and implementation of religious law is alive and well, and capable of accommodating more perspectives than just the narrow tenets of long-established schools.

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

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

Michael Fox panned [[link removed]] the limited vision of stopping only illegal mining in the Amazon. Brazil’s new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has called for an end to illegal mining in the country, a welcome break from the ravages encouraged by his predecessor. But by holding the promise to illegal mines, companies that work within the law can still threaten catastrophic disruptions and devastation. A proposed gold mine by Canadian Company Belo Sun is planned just outside of Indigenous land. Fox spoke with Cleyson Juruna, the young chief of the Indigenous Juruna people, who said, “If there were any type of tragedy, any leak of something toxic, it would contaminate the entire region, the communities, and Indigenous territories. Ours and others downstream."

Olatunji Olaigbe revisited [[link removed]] the colonial legacy still haunting African agriculture, focusing specifically on Nigeria’s Institute of Agricultural Research. In 1905, the British Cotton Growing Association founded a research station that would, in 1922, become the Institute of Agricultural Research, built on appropriated land and designed to bend the region toward better imperial extraction. “Industrialization was like a growing child in constant need of food, and colonies were where that food could be gotten for cheap,” writes Olaigbe. The patterns of growth driven by this era of colonizers not only shifted crops to foreign needs but changed the flow of goods, replacing regional economies with extractive flows toward ports.

Gemma Ware and Daniel Merino dug [[link removed]] into China’s state-directed promotion of potatoes. The hardy and hearty tubers, originally cultivated in the Andes, can grow well in arid soils and can cheaply supplement diets, especially when another staple crop supply is disrupted. “But while fresh potatoes are a traditional part of the Chinese national diet, they’re viewed as a vegetable rather than as a staple, and China’s per capita consumption of potato is below the global average,” write the authors. A 2015 initiative to push potatoes as a staple crop alongside rice, wheat, and maize has helped the nation better weather disruptions to the grain supply, like that caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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

Oscar Mike Golf [[link removed]], what a picture.

What is international trade if not furniture assembly by committee [[link removed]]?

If a high-cost policy doesn’t lead to obvious economic gain, we’re left with an unsettling conclusion [[link removed]].

When it comes to German coal dependency, sometimes a metaphor [[link removed]] is so obvious it’s impossible not to get stuck in it [[link removed]].

A berry good map [[link removed]] of North America.

Parliament pursuing a Trident true method [[link removed]] for losing access to Scotland’s nuclear harbors.

Happy belated tenth anniversary to the best tweet ever written [[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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