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… read about Putin’s failure to understand the Russian Revolution.

Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia has invaded Ukraine twice: in 2014, seizing Crimea and occupying part of the Donbas, and then in February 2022, in an attempt to collapse the whole country into Russia as an act of imperial domination. Putin, in outlining his motives for the 2022 invasion, blamed the Bolshevik revolutionaries of October 1917 for offering never-before-promised self-determination to the constituent nations of the Russian Empire. In this, writes [[link removed]] Andrew Movtxan, he has it exactly wrong: “Recognizing Ukraine’s agency and its right to self-determination, Lenin had only recognized the actual state of affairs, which had already become impossible to ignore. And for this, Putin cannot forgive the Bolshevik leader.” Lenin’s revolutionary project took place in Russia but was never intended to be confined as such. “Perhaps the only positive that Putin sees in the Soviet project — is that it just locked itself within the framework of the former Russian empire, and over time, moving away from its original ‘utopian’ principles, regained some of the empire’s features, becoming the heir to Russian statehood,” writes Movtxan. “In other words, he extols exactly the most reactionary features of the USSR, which it acquired during the extreme conditions of its formation.”

ice foretold

Antarctica, Earth’s most uniquely inhospitable continent, is also the only one where human occupation is exclusively dedicated to science. Writing at Long Now [[link removed]], Allegra Rosenberg walks readers through the history of humanity’s relationship to the southern ice.

“Despite Antarctica being ‘the continent of science,’ with all military operations being banned since the Antarctic Treaty of 01959 [ed note: 1959, in Long Now house style], the ongoing game of international geopolitics forms the underlying purpose of activity in the region. While military activity qua activity is verboten, it is the planes and personnel of various militaries which provide the structural capacity for people to live and work there,” writes Rosenberg.

The continent, formally shared, is accessible primarily as a second-order effect of the massive logistics infrastructure of the United States, and some other countries. Still, if an empire casts a shadow over the whole enterprise, it is better for that shadow to be in service of uncovering deeper truths. Rosenberg is equally fascinated by the role of science communicators in emphasizing the real and banal nature of the continent, as well as making discoveries about deep time.

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When burning fossil fuels, we must understand this: Fossil fuels are not simply warming the planet but are themselves solar energy from the past, buried and stored in forms humans can process. Since the Industrial Revolution, these fossil fuels have been seen as future power to excavate and exploit, but in the face of our warming world, they can be seen another way: as carbon already sequestered.

“When the livelihood of so many depends on squeezing out the last drops of the fossil fuel age to maintain their societies, what [science fiction author Kim Stanley] Robinson calls ‘eco-realpolitik’ dictates that we must find a way to compensate those who would lose out, or even become failed states, from a rapid renewable energy transition — or that transition will be resisted and fatally slowed,” writes Nathan Gardels at Noema [[link removed]].

Robinson’s scheme hinges on the creation of a new currency, marked to the dollar, that serves as a store of value greater than the already sequestered carbon. It’s a solution at least aimed in the right direction. Finding ways to pay people to keep coal in the ground [[link removed]], oil untapped, and natural gas entombed are all essential for preserving our climate.

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When the British Crown imposed rule on India by force (and through the East India Company [[link removed]]), it reordered the subcontinent in many profound ways that persist to this day. The very act of determining citizenship, where the state sets rules to decide who is and isn’t legally allowed to live where they are based on documented claims of residency, can be traced back to colonial rule.

In “ Deprivation of Citizenship as Colonial Violence: Deracination and Dispossession in Assam [[link removed]],” authors Rudabeh Shahid and Joe Turner turn to Assam, a northeastern province of India, as a case study for how the categories of citizenship are used to inflict material harm.

To ground their study in the present, the authors open by talking about the Citizenship Amendment Act [[link removed]] (CAA), passed in December 2019 by the Indian parliament, which amended the National Register of Citizenship (NRC) in Assam [[link removed].].

“The registry aims to catalog ‘genuine’ inhabitants of the state and effectively purge Assam of so-called illegal migrants,” the authors write. The CAA is a tool to grant citizenship to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian communities. “However, what the CAA effectively did was focus on the dispossession of rights on Muslim communities who were left off the list of protected religions and turned into ‘illegal migrants.’”

When encountered by the British, Assam was full of Indigenously-tended and maintained forests and fields, leading British settlers and colonists to determine that the land was mostly wasteland, and thus ripe for reorganization. “In order to make the land ‘productive,’ the colonial state introduced an extractive model of tea plantations in Assam and a system of forced and waged labor, networking the region into the imperial economy,” the authors write.

This forced and wage labor included locals pressed into service, as well as people from diverse communities brought together in competition by British-driven movements. These categories became enshrined in the laws of British rule and then, following the 1947 partition of British colonies into India and Pakistan, became national identities.

“What we argue is that in acts of deprivation that make ‘citizens’ into ‘migrants’ — or more often ‘illegal migrants’ and stateless subjects — this relies upon the racialized conditions under which it becomes possible and thinkable to deprive someone of their rights,” write the authors. “Attempts to categorize the demographic makeup of the state were focused on delineating those ‘original inhabitants’ from ‘outsiders’ while erasing the economic and historical conditions of colonization and imperialism that created population movements.”

Colonization, partition, war, and now exclusionary rules imposed by the national government all build toward the same purpose. Citizenship is seen not as a right of every person, but as a privilege that can be pulled away from those deemed outsiders or undesirable.

“Because of the colonial logic underpinning citizenship, altered rather than fully transformed by the postcolonial state, certain populations are never recognized within codes of citizenship in the first place. The recent NRC and CAA create hierarchies of belonging and illegality that are already partially rooted in Indian citizenship,” conclude the authors.

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Johanna Mendelson Forman stewed [[link removed]] over the role of cooking in wartime. Speaking with residents of Ukraine, she found that dining out in Kyiv became an act of solidarity and a promise of normalcy, compared to the brutal scarcity of spring 2022. “Shelling means that everyone in Ukraine is always in danger. It also means that the work schedules are unpredictable,” Mariya Ruban, a food writer and publicist, told Forman. The air raids, drone strikes, and missiles have all made life in the capital less safe, but with the front far from the city, people are still making do, sharing what joy and routine they can together between air raid warnings.

Halima Gikandi observed [[link removed]] Nigeria’s presidential election, where tens of millions of voters took to the polls. Before the election, Gikandi spoke with many young voters [[link removed]] who were politically activated by 2020’s #EndSARS protests [[link removed]] against police brutality, and who have flocked to support a strong third-party challenge from a labor candidate. New technologies, like biometrics, promised greater accountability in voting, but old forms of sabotage persist. “Voter Anthony Ogwo said that armed men had accosted voters at his polling station,” reported Gikandi. “He said the men took the presidential ballot box, and dumped their completed paper ballots into a nearby gutter. He pointed to a pile of dirty, torn ballots littering the ground.”

Kristina Jovanovski reported [[link removed]] from southeastern Turkey, where survivors of the 7.8 earthquake on Feb. 6, 2023, are struggling to find shelter and get their basic needs met. “We need everything in order to build a new life. I don’t have anything left. I don’t even have salt,” Zeynep Koca, a 49-year-old mother of two, told her. The disaster tore away shelter for millions in the affected area, staining existing resources and incoming aid, while threatening new disasters. Without the basics of sanitation provided by homes, diseases can spread in the quake’s wake. Looming behind the disaster is the memory of Turkey’s 1999 earthquake, and an open question of where specific tax funds to prepare for the next quake went.

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Simply in awe of the wordsmithing on display here [[link removed]].

International blockbusters created shared metaphors for heroism and new cross-cultural frontiers for cringe [[link removed]].

Spinning import barriers and a crashed economy as a return to local traditions [[link removed]] isn’t just ham-fisted, it’s sausage-fingered [[link removed]].

Once fired, explosive rounds can live a strange unlife [[link removed]], waiting decades or even centuries before striking again [[link removed]].

In the cold void of virtual space, everyone can see you meme [[link removed]].

The most haunting distance between two points is a straight line on a curved surface [[link removed]].

The grainier the photo, the more convinced I am that it is historical proof, or at least some kind of art I don’t get [[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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