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CRITICAL STATE
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Your weekly foreign policy fix.
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If you read just one thing …
… read about the delicate ballet of national identity in wartime.
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A year into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the durability of a distinct Ukrainian culture has taken on special importance. One such work is “The Forest Song,” a 1911 ballet written by Ukrainian Marxist Lesya Ukrainka, which is currently being staged in Kyiv. The play was smuggled into Czarist Kyiv while it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Its metaphor-rich calls for Ukrainian independence have endured. “At the first intermission, a medic on temporary leave from Bakhmut, the bitterly embattled eastern front town where fighting has been concentrated since August [2022], checked his phone for news from the front,” writes Carol Schaeffer for The Nation. As the war grinds through its
second March, what was, in the beginning, an extraordinary effort to preserve the nation has become an enduring national struggle. Cities like Kyiv are removed from the front lines but not from airstrikes. “There were no air-raid sirens that night at the opera house nor the following day on the anniversary of the invasion. The ballet went on, uninterrupted, as the dancers presented a story of peace triumphing over destruction,” writes Schaeffer. “But two days after the opera, when the sirens screamed again, some residents filed slowly, calmly, and casually into the deep heart of the subway, prepared with snacks and collapsible stools to sit comfortably.”
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Vicuña Variations
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Cousin to llamas and alpacas, vicuña are Andean camelids, accustomed to high-altitude life. Unlike their domesticated cousins, vicuña remain wild, a trait even more surprising given that vicuña is finer than cashmere and can command luxury prices. Once protected by decree of Inca emperors, vicuña populations collapsed from a high of 2 million before Spanish colonization, though they’ve rebounded from a low of 6,000 in the 1960s to over 470,000 as of 2016. These numbers, though a great accomplishment, are threatened by poaching, disease, and climate change.
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“Communities now focus on protecting the vicuña’s habitat, hoping that their efforts to improve the vicuña’s food and water supply will compensate for the damages of climate change,” writes Heather Jasper at Long Now.
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Should Peru invest more effort in securing vicuña habitat, it may find the same act protects the headwaters of vital rivers needed to sustain life in the cities downstream.
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the persistence of history
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Viktor Orbán, reactionary populist and enduring president of Hungary, is hardly the first public leader to bend the historical memory of the state into a weapon. In his case, writes the author Gábor Schein as translated by Ottilie Mulzet, the story Orbán has built is one of Hungary as Europe’s perpetual victim. It is a story that has no place for the histories of people other than ethnic Hungarians living within the country’s borders, regardless of how many centuries they can trace that lineage.
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“This does not mean that this rudimentary narrative propagated by the regime has a stable structure. Unstable, it is best comprehended not from the perspective of memory but from the perspective of forgetting,” writes Schein.
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Place and people have a greater memory than the state can cover up, Schein continues, illustrated in a story with a young Austrian woman from the town of Mistelbach. Schein’s personal family history includes descendance from a grandmother and mother who survived the Holocaust by their fortunate deportation to the Mistelbach labor camp instead of an extermination camp. “I was surprised by her response: she had absolutely no idea that Jews had been held in a labor camp in her hometown, in Mistelbach. She had no idea that Jews had been working in the surrounding fields and factories. No one had ever told her.”
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founding fatherhood: part I
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Caring for an infant is a beyond full-time job, but it has only recently started to be treated by governments and labor laws as worthy of being a paid job. The provision of paid leave for new parents is a relatively new right in the countries that have it, one won only after acknowledgment of, respectively, mothers in the workforce and fathers as invested in the early raising of their children. While state perception and rights are largely binary, that’s a discussion for another time.
In “Making Parenting Leave Accessible to Fathers: Political Actors and New Social Rights, 1965–2016,” Cassandra Engeman specifically focuses on how different political currents pull towards and shape leave for new fathers.
“In 1974, Sweden became the first country to establish paid parental leave for fathers, and the incorporation of fathers as caregivers under family policy continues today,” notes Engeman, though her study first tracks the idea as having political salience and legislative action as early as 1965.
Crucial to Engeman’s study is tracking two related but distinct kinds of parental leave: transferable leave, which is extended to fathers but can be transferred to mothers, and nontransferable paid parental leave, which cannot be transferred to another parent and must be taken by the father.
According to Engeman, “Each type of leave sends different signals about fathers’ caregiving roles. While transferable paid parenting leave recognizes fathers’ need for time to care for new children, nontransferable paid parental leave entitlements emphasize fathers’ gender-equal responsibilities for their children.” She explains that while transferable leave entitlements allow more family “choice” around how to divide care, in practice, it is the mothers who end up taking a bulk of this leave. In contrast, individual entitlements have been shown to effectively increase fathers’ leave use.
To build her study, Engeman looked at the first adoption of parental leave for fathers in 22 affluent democracies between the years 1965 and 2016. One crucial part of the study was the cabinet composition for governments that adopted policies, showing which ideological coalitions were willing and able to move the parental leave from proposal to reality. This cabinet composition is most crucial in understanding the role of confessional (or religious) right parties in overseeing the adoption of leave, despite it coming as a more general push from the left.
“[W]omen lawmakers have a significant, positive relationship only to transferable, paid parenting leave, and leftist party actors — and in restricted models, trade union institutional strength — have significant, positive relationships only to nontransferable paid parental leave. Results, therefore, suggest that fathers’ access to transferable and nontransferable paid leave are possibly distinct political projects,” writes Engeman.
“While confessional [right and religious] parties may emphasize family policy issues, they are not expected to support caregiving leave for fathers because such provisions challenge traditional-gendered family roles,” Engeman continues. But an increased presence of confessional-right parties in government may mean the government is willing to act and move on family leave policies, even if they are pursued by the left, allowing the religious right parties to negotiate the form such leave ultimately takes.
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Justin Salhani interviewed Iraqi environmentalist Dr. Azzam Alwash, who now lives in Jordan. Water scarcity has hit the country hard, exacerbated by climate change, but also as a result of government policies meant to starve the once-vast marshes of southern Iraq. “While I am sure that climate change has an effect, I can also recognize that climate change has become an easy excuse as if this is an act of God that is beyond our people,” Alwash told Salhani. “The underlying problem in Iraq is the fact that all government policies are reactive, not proactive.”
Halima Gikandi caught up with African students who were studying abroad in Ukraine when Russia invaded last year. At the start of the invasion, Zimbabwean Korrine Sky had been enrolled in medical school in Dnipro, but fled to Romania, only to wait in a separate line to cross. “We were last. They were going to make sure that the Ukrainian people were safe, and then, they would allow us after days. It was so heartbreaking,” Sky told Gikandi. Today, Sky is campaigning for international universities to accept the non-Ukrainian students who had to flee the war, their lives similarly disrupted by invasion.
Zenaira Bakhsh told the story of trans women in Kashmir. The region, claimed by Pakistan and administered by India, is already a difficult place for official recognition. While a 2014 ruling by India’s Supreme Court recognized trans people as a third gender, getting the documents like birth certificates needed for a formal change in recognition means going through family. Education can be a path out, but “according to data collected by [Sonzal Welfare Trust], about 95% of trans people couldn’t
complete their high school education; they are either forced to drop out when their gender identity becomes apparent or succumb to relentless abuses,” wrote Bakhsh.
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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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