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It’s reestablishing Russian dominance of what Russia sees as the Russian “Imperium.” I’m saying this very specifically because the lands of the Soviet Union didn’t cover all of the territories that were once part of the Russian Empire. So that should give us pause.

Putin has articulated an idea of there being a “Russky Mir” or a “Russian World.” The recent essay he published about Ukraine and Russia states the Ukrainian and Russian people are “one people,” a “yedinyi narod.” He’s saying Ukrainians and Russians are one and the same. This idea of a Russian World means re-gathering all the Russian-speakers in different places that belonged at some point to the Russian tsardom.

just a couple of days before the invasion of Ukraine in a little-noticed act, Azerbaijan signed a bilateral military agreement with Russia. This is significant because Azerbaijan’s leader has been resisting this for decades. And we can also see that Russia has made itself the final arbiter of the future relationship between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Georgia has also been marginalized after being a thorn in Russia’s side for decades. And Belarus is now completely subjugated by Moscow.

what Putin is saying now is that Ukraine doesn’t belong to Ukrainians. It belongs to him and the past. He is going to wipe Ukraine off the map, literally, because it doesn’t belong on his map of the “Russian world.” He’s basically told us that.

The last time that his brand got stale, it was before the annexation of Crimea. That put him back on the top of the charts in terms of his ratings.

what Putin wants isn’t necessarily to occupy the whole country, but really to divide it up. He’s looked at Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and other places where there’s a division of the country between the officially sanctioned forces on the one hand, and the rebel forces on the other. That’s something that Putin could definitely live with — a fractured, shattered Ukraine with different bits being in different statuses.

In 2020, Putin had the Russian Constitution amended so that he could stay on until 2036, another set of two six-year terms. He’s going to be 84 then. But in 2024, he has to re-legitimate himself by standing for election. The only real contender might have been Alexei Navalny, and they’ve put him in a penal colony. Putin has rolled up all the potential opposition and resistance, so one would think it would be a cakewalk for him in 2024. But the way it works with Russian elections, he actually has to put on a convincing show that demonstrates that he’s immensely popular and he’s got the affirmation of all the population.

similar to Hitler, he’s using a sense of massive historical grievance combined with a veneer of protecting Russians and a dismissal of the rights of minorities and other nations to have independent countries in order to fuel territorial ambitions?

Putin’s not looking so great, he’s been rather puffy-faced. We know that he has complained about having back issues. Even if it’s not something worse than that, it could be that he’s taking high doses of steroids, or there may be something else. There seems to be an urgency for this that may be also driven by personal factors.

Putin came to power after a series of operations that many have seen as a kind of false flag — bombings of buildings around Russia that killed Russian citizens, hundreds of them, followed by a war in Chechnya. That led to Putin coming to power as a wartime president. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 also came at a difficult time for Putin. Now we’re seeing another big military operation less than two years before he needs to stand for election again

If all was peaceful and quiet, why would you need Vladimir Putin?

We have had a long-term policy failure going back to the end of the Cold War in terms of thinking about how to manage NATO’s relations with Russia to minimize risk. NATO is a like a massive insurer, a protector of national security for Europe and the United States. After the end of the Cold War, we still thought that we had the best insurance for the hazards we could face — flood, fire etc. — but for a discounted premium. We didn’t take adequate steps to address and reduce the various risks. We can now see that that we didn’t do our due diligence and fully consider all the possible contingencies, including how we would mitigate Russia’s negative response to successive expansions.

Putin tried to warn Trump about this, but I don’t think Trump figured out what he was saying. In one of the last meetings between Putin and Trump when I was there, Putin was making the point that: “Well you know, Donald, we have these hypersonic missiles.” And Trump was saying, “Well, we will get them too.” Putin was saying, “Well, yes, you will get them eventually, but we’ve got them first.” There was a menace in this exchange. Putin was putting us on notice that if push came to shove in some confrontational environment that the nuclear option would be on the table.

If there is serious resistance, he may not have sufficient force to take the country for a protracted period. It also may be that he doesn’t want to occupy the whole country, that he wants to break it up, maybe annex some parts of it, maybe leave some of it as rump statelets or a larger rump Ukraine somewhere, maybe around Lviv. I’m not saying that I know exactly what’s going on in his head. And he may even suggest other parts of Ukraine get absorbed by adjacent countries.

The Russians have already used a weapons-grade nerve agent, Novichok. They’ve used it possibly several times, but for certain twice. Once in Salisbury, England, where it was rubbed all over the doorknob of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who actually didn’t die; but the nerve agent contaminated the city of Salisbury, and anybody else who came into contact with it got sickened. Novichok killed a British citizen, Dawn Sturgess, because the assassins stored it in a perfume bottle which was discarded into a charity donation box where it was found by Sturgess and her partner. There was enough nerve agent in that bottle to kill several thousand people. The second time was in Alexander Navalny’s underpants.

if anybody thinks that Putin wouldn’t use something that he’s got that is unusual and cruel, think again. Every time you think, “No, he wouldn’t, would he?” Well, yes, he would. And he wants us to know that, of course.

The thing about Putin is, if he has an instrument, he wants to use it. Why have it if you can’t? He’s already used a nuclear weapon in some respects. Russian operatives poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium and turned him into a human dirty bomb and polonium was spread all around London at every spot that poor man visited. He died a horrible death as a result.

there were an awful lot of people around Europe who became Nazi German sympathizers before the invasion of Poland. In the United Kingdom, there was a whole host of British politicians who admired Hitler’s strength and his power, for doing what Great Powers do, before the horrors of the Blitz and the Holocaust finally penetrated.

Unfortunately, we have politicians and public figures in the United States and around Europe who have embraced the idea that Russia was wronged by NATO and that Putin is a strong, powerful man and has the right to do what he’s doing

we are treading back through old historical patterns that we said that we would never permit to happen again

Our investments are not just boosting business profits, or Russia’s sovereign wealth funds and its longer-term development. They now are literally the fuel for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

If Western companies, their pension plans or mutual funds, are invested in Russia they should pull out. Any people who are sitting on the boards of major Russian companies should resign immediately. Not every Russian company is tied to the Kremlin, but many major Russian companies absolutely are, and everyone knows it.

our international allies, like Saudi Arabia, should be increasing oil production right now as a temporary offset. Right now, they are also indirectly funding war in Ukraine by keeping oil prices high.

India abstained in the United Nations, and you can see that other countries are feeling discomforted and hoping this might go away. This is not going to go away, and it could be “you next” — because Putin is setting a precedent for countries to return to the type of behavior that sparked the two great wars which were a free-for-all over territory. Putin is saying, “Throughout history borders have changed. Who cares?”

Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just for which countries can or cannot be in NATO, or between democracies and autocracies, but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force. Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this. Yes, there may be countries like China and others who might think that this is permissible, but overall, most countries have benefited from the current international system in terms of trade and economic growth, from investment and an interdependent globalized world. This is pretty much the end of this. That’s what Russia has done.

What stops a lot of people from pulling out of Russia even temporarily is, they will say, “Well, the Chinese will just step in.” This is what every investor always tells me. “If I get out, someone else will move in.” I’m not sure that Russian businesspeople want to wake up one morning and find out the only investors in the Russian economy are Chinese, because then Russia becomes the periphery of China, the Chinese hinterlands, and not another great power that’s operating in tandem with China.

We keep thinking of World War I, World War II as these huge great big set pieces, but World War II was a consequence of World War I. And we had an interwar period between them. And in a way, we had that again after the Cold War. Many of the things that we’re talking about here have their roots in the carving up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire at the end of World War I. At the end of World War II, we had another reconfiguration and some of the issues that we have been dealing with recently go back to that immediate post-war period. We’ve had war in Syria, which is in part the consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, same with Iraq and Kuwait.

All of the conflicts that we’re seeing have roots in those earlier conflicts. We are already in a hot war over Ukraine, which started in 2014. People shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that we’re just on the brink of something. We’ve been well and truly in it for quite a long period of time.

this is also a full-spectrum information war, and what happens in a Russian “all-of-society” war, you soften up the enemy. You get the Tucker Carlsons and Donald Trumps doing your job for you. The fact that Putin managed to persuade Trump that Ukraine belongs to Russia, and that Trump would be willing to give up Ukraine without any kind of fight, that’s a major success for Putin’s information war. I mean he has got swathes of the Republican Party — and not just them, some on the left, as well as on the right — masses of the U.S. public saying, “Good on you, Vladimir Putin,” or blaming NATO, or blaming the U.S. for this outcome. This is exactly what a Russian information war and psychological operation is geared towards. He’s been carefully seeding this terrain as well. We’ve been at war, for a very long time.

What Russia is doing is asserting that “might makes right.” Of course, yes, we’ve also made terrible mistakes. But no one ever has the right to completely destroy another country — Putin’s opened up a door in Europe that we thought we’d closed after World War II.

government officials said, they face the same problem as before. Facebook wields enormous influence over their society, but they have little over Facebook.

Facebook had turned him into a national villain. It helped destroy his business, sending his family deeply into debt. And it had nearly gotten him killed.But he refused to abandon the platform. With long, empty days in hiding, he said, “I have more time and I look at Facebook much more.”“It’s not that I have more faith that social media is accurate, but you have to spend time and money to go to the market to get a newspaper,” he said. “I can just open my phone and get the news instead.”“Whether it’s wrong or right, it’s what I read.”

The state has 1,300 miles of shoreline, 600 clear-water springs, 1,700 ravines and streams, and over 8,000 lakes. More than 3,000 native trees, shrubs, and flowering plants are native to Florida, many unique to our peninsula and also endangered due to development. Our 100 species of orchid (compared to Hawai’i’s three native orchids) and 150 fern species speak to the moist and subtropical climate across many parts of the state.3 Florida has more wetlands than any other conterminous state—11 million acres—including seepage wetlands, interior marshes, and interior swamp land. Prior to the 1800s, Florida had over 20 million acres of wetlands.

“the worst I’ve ever seen,” the head of one major Florida-based conservation group told me, referring to the predatory and anti-science environmental actions of our Republican-dominated state legislature.

Shown on maps as a slow curve up through South Florida, Central Florida, and into the North Florida Panhandle, the wildlife corridor offers a quixotic hope for the future. The ultimate goal is 17.7 million acres, with 9.6 million acres existing conservation land (some of it compromised by other uses, like ranching and silviculture) and 8.1 million “opportunity areas” for future conservation, including through the underfunded Florida Forever land acquisition program and the Rural & Family Lands Protection Program. The creation of the corridor also gives an overriding purpose, or story, to other environmental projects that feed into the corridor goal while emphasizing the importance of the 75 state parks, 32 state forests, and 171 springs that form part of the corridor.

If the idea behind the Wildlife Corridor represents a profound expression of a sustainable, biodiverse future, then the toll roads are the purest distillation of capitalist evil. Governor Ron DeSantis, the Florida legislature, and the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) seem determined to ram these roads through rural Florida—even as the people who live there, regardless of political affiliation, are united in fighting the roads and the destruction they will bring with them.

Most sensible urban planners will tell you that adding more highways to solve congestion just leads to more congestion. Environmental organizations and residents are quick to point out that existing roads are underused, meaning the toll roads represent a classic case of induced demand. Politicians who support them often have received substantial campaign contributions from the entities that stand to profit. 

lawmakers who “do not understand how they fit into nature or how nature works. Perhaps they just don’t care. Many hold the belief that there is no ‘value’ to nature. … If it isn’t ‘improved,’ it’s worthless. There is a lack of recognition of the ecosystem services that conserved lands can provide, therefore it is easy to claim that more conservation lands are not needed, or that they are too expensive.”

developers even bulldozed over critical migratory bird nesting areas, resulting in Sandhill Cranes dying on the nearby highways as they tried to protect their (flightless) young

The sense of bearing witness to the first, vigorous days of the creation of Mordor hung heavy in the air.

Just ramming such roads through farms, forest, and swamp destroys many hundreds of acres. But, worldwide, roads are often just a pretext for developers and others to come in and transform an area forever. This is why, for example, environmentalists and indigenous groups in Bolivia recently opposed a road through sensitive territory that would forever change the region.

the initial road construction creates potential flooding, erosion, and water quality issues. In addition, road builders don’t always follow proper environmental guidelines, resulting in pollution to the surrounding areas. If runoff containment is insufficient, heavy metals and other contaminants enter the soil.

The fencing of verges and median strips made of concrete barriers accelerates ecosystem fragmentation via isolation of populations.

Nationally, roadkill deaths add up to more than one million vertebrate animals per day.

An oligarchy, with its system of favoritism toward certain elites and special interests, deliberately fosters corruption as a function of its existence. It is often stacked against environmental causes in ways different from a decaying representative democracy. Combine the worst attributes of capitalism with oligarchy and in the future, Florida’s leaders may actually give developers and other special interests even more tools of suppression.

Street lights immediately create additional light pollution in formerly dark-sky rural areas. The now-favored white LEDs, while more energy friendly, are actually worse for nocturnal wildlife and insects because their glow disrupts life cycles, decreases reproduction, and thus further degrades ecosystems. According to a 2016 study, every year, the world loses another two percent of the Earth’s dark skies to light pollution.

larger-scale developments appear, often extending from the existing urban areas, but sometimes plunked down in the middle of nowhere, with the expectation of further infrastructure and services accreting around them. Creating these subdivisions and planned communities is the main goal for developers. This kind of development involves wholesale clearcutting similar to what’s done by ranchers in the Amazon for agriculture, up to 5,000 acres at a time wiped clean, including the topsoil: the complete slaughter and dismantling of a complex system. In its place will come thousands of overpriced, often poorly made houses

mining operations that follow the law have to protect the environment to a far greater extent than development projects

Any wildlife that manages to flee often perishes in new, unfamiliar environments. In place of the native organisms come lawns of useless sod propped up with chemical fertilizer and herbicide

Echoes of these same dysfunctional processes even infiltrate supposed “green” energy in the form of Southeastern forests destroyed to send fuel to biomass plants and efforts by utility companies to nix personal solar in favor of industrial solar farms that, not properly regulated, destroy habitat in a way similar to the worst kinds of development.

The damning thing is how invisible this ecocide feels to those of us who live here and care. The nature of clearcutting with soil removal leaves no evidence of the crime behind—just a void. The way in which much of the ultimate green-lighting for ecocide occurs at the local government level also makes much of it invisible, doomed to reside at best in regional news cycles, but often not even reported on there.

Gopher tortoises often suffer a horrific fate. If you have bought a house of a certain age, in the dry sand scrub that was once prime tortoise territory, chances are you live on top of the dead bodies of gopher tortoises—slaughtered outright or sealed alive in their burrows to suffocate or starve to death. Reports estimate more than 100,000 gopher tortoises have died this way. The true number may be twice that.

Just as with the palmettos, a keystone species, gopher tortoises support all sorts of other organisms, which use their burrows. What this means is that development wipes out entire ecosystems and kills a host of other animals when either of these species is extirpated.

legacy licenses to outright kill gopher tortoises have no end date, meaning some companies still can legally chop up live tortoises to build their subdivisions

It is widely accepted now that cutting down mangroves is foolhardy, however many decades it took for that lesson to be learned. But what we’re doing in other parts of Florida is exactly the same as cutting down mangroves. Combatting increasing heat, flooding, and erosion can be matters of life and death. When you remove mature live oak trees and pine trees that help mitigate these issues, you are creating a future disaster that was partially avoidable, even factoring in the climate crisis.

The story of how we got here includes concerted, planned actions by elites—including developers and parasitic politicians—but gross incompetence and stupidity as well

Under former governor Rick Scott and now DeSantis—who pays lip service to the wildlife corridor while undermining it with most of his policies—the stacking of regional water quality boards and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission with political appointees emboldened to make terrible decisions has become almost laughable. Last year, for example, Florida’s top wildlife official wanted to fill in a South Florida lagoon full of manatees to make a profit in real estate. 

it is not too extreme to recognize that DeSantis’ approach in Florida, including the enemies list, begins to at least feel like something approaching oligarchy, not representative democracy. A corresponding lack of government transparency, despite our Sunshine Law, protects developers and pro-development politicians while making it harder to report on environmental issues.

This initial phase kills and displaces wildlife, liquidates the important mature pines and live oaks,5destroys rare plants and trees, and allows extremely harmful invasive plant species a foothold

warning signs of intense ecocide

Create propaganda to support the idea that reckless development and new weakened environmental rules are actually progress and those who oppose it are extremists

despite so much that is good in our community, Tallahassee has become a cautionary tale of how even Florida cities that have managed to retain biodiversity and climate crisis resiliency can begin to squander it quickly. Elites and special interests similar to those that push the toll roads now enthusiastically push destructive development here. DeSantis’ oligarchy is expressed in the city’s government: a city manager less and less accountable to the public; a smug mayor who silences dissent; and the good ol’ boy nature of the local Chamber of Commerce leadership, which sees itself as a thought-leader while having done little or nothing to fight poverty in traditionally underserved Tallahassee communities —which are often the ones to suffer from lack of a healthy urban canopy

The mindset of an alien occupation is apparent in so many ways, especially through Blueprint, the run-away intergovernmental agency that spends our tax dollars on large-scale projects and infrastructure. Every plan that includes parks or landscaping tends to emerge from a sanitized view of the outdoors from the 1950s. (For example, a Market District park plan that was to emphasize shade trees and wilderness now features a giant tree-less lawn instead.)

The paper of record, the Tallahassee Democrat, has unfortunately become part of the problem. The Democrat, under the current Executive Editor William Hatfield, lacks a dedicated environmental reporter and rarely makes the link between quality of life and the quality of our environment. Stories about developers and new development are more or less press releases from the developers themselves, letting us know vital information such as the fact that one developer, Hadi Boulos, “cries” when he clearcuts properties, mourning the trees. The paper ran no story when the same developer tried to hike the price of new houses by thousands of dollars after homeowners had already signed contracts. 

The very Tallahassee-Leon County economic development agency the newspaper reports on spends thousands of dollars on advertisements in that publication. When confronted about sponsored articles by developers, the paper’s news director, Jim Rosica, had the audacity to write, in a Facebook comment, that these puff pieces “help support the vital journalism we provide every day.”

Our tourist brochure touts Tallahassee’s importance to migratory birds—boasting that “Here you can spot 372 of the 497 species of birds residing in or visiting Florida”—yet we have almost certainly doomed some migratory birds to localized die-offs because when they reach our area there isn’t enough food (seeds, berries, insects) because of habitat destruction. 

Systematic destruction and death came to the Fallschase property in April of 2021. The box turtles hibernating in their burrows would likely have been smothered or killed outright, along with the skinks and ring-necked snakes in the leaf debris. The frogs and the toads would also have had little chance to escape, nor would the flying squirrels, hibernating bats, or anything other than foxes, deer, coyotes, or bobcats. Migrating bird species known to frequent the site, some already nesting, would have had to leave rapidly, including the Hermit Thrush, Blue-headed Vireo, Yellow-billed Cuckoo, and Swallow-tailed Kite.The salamanders would not have had this luxury. Native plants and trees did not have that luxury.

all of these lives existed and had meaning. Box turtles, some as old as 50 years, would have had their own nuanced understanding of the world they moved through.  Did we have a right to kill them? Do we always have a right to kill them?

We have an urgent need for affordable housing that no amount of urban sprawl can provide and every day in my house on the edge of a ravine, I see the wasted opportunity. Instead of half-acre lots with houses built along the top of this ravine, we could have had the vision and imagination for high-density, affordable housing, while still leaving the trough of woodlands below intact. This is perhaps the most terrible truth about all of this maximized destruction: It wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t necessary, given even moderately good and sane urban planning.

the sloppy “wacky Florida Man” narrative invested in by so many journalists and pundits stings because it makes a joke out of what is deadly serious and becoming more so: A state that had been among the wildest outside of Alaska or Montana asks its citizens to passively watch as the nonhuman world is liquidated while we go on about our daily lives and others look on and say we deserve it as a “red” state. 

Worse, foundational ideas buried in a settler colonialism mindset, which previously brought us the slaughter of indigenous people amid “Manifest Destiny,” are still hardwired into our society and these ideas help support the destruction. Trump wanted to “drain the swamp,” Disney literally did, and Elon Musk now wants to do it again to build more of his Space X near Cape Canaveral, in a biodiversity and carbon sink hotspot.8

Florida’s leaders are engaged in acts many societies and cultures would deem evil. They have been given the green light to exploit the state in an extractive way similar to events unfolding in Brazil, Indonesia, and other places we think of undergoing deforestation while not always realizing our complicity and our own perilous condition.

The moral and ethical considerations of entire species being exterminated for the cause of untenable, unplanned, unaffordable development, or even just another Wal-Mart or a parking lot, are absent from most public narrative

When I was born, in 1968, the world had 50 percent more terrestrial wildlife than now. I was born into a world still alive and I will die in a world near death, brought to that condition by our own hand.

In fact, the Peace of Westphalia strengthened a system of relations that was precisely not based on the concept of the sovereign state but instead on a reassertion of the Holy Roman Empire’s complex jurisdictional arrangements (landeshoheit), which allowed autonomous political units to form a broader conglomerate (the “empire”) without a central government.  

What we have come to call the Peace of Westphalia actually designates two treaties: signed between May and October 1648, they were agreements between the Holy Roman Empire and its two main opponents, France (the Treaty of Münster) and Sweden (the Treaty of Osnabrück). Each treaty mostly addressed the internal affairs of the Holy Roman Empire and smaller bilateral exchanges of territory with France and with Sweden.

The treaties were only properly mythologized in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when European historians turned to the early modern period in order to craft stories that served their own worldview.

Looking for a story of states fighting for their sovereignty against imperial domination, nineteenth-century historians found exactly what they needed in the anti-Habsburg fabrications that had been disseminated by the French and Swedish crowns during the Thirty Years’ War

Leo Gross’s essay “The Peace of Westphalia: 1648–1948,” published in 1948 in the American Journal of International Law. Canonized as “timeless” and “seminal” at the time, the article gave meaning to the emerging postwar order. By comparing the 1945 UN Charter to the Peace of Westphalia, Gross rehashed a story about treaties for freedom, equality, non-intervention, and all the rest of the alleged virtues for reinventing national sovereignty

The solution to the Westphalia debacle, then, would seem to lie in putting forward an alternative narrative grounded in greater historical accuracy, one that reflects the much more complicated process through which the modern international order came about.

Until the nineteenth century, the international order was made up of a patchwork of polities. Although a distinction is often made between the European continent and the rest of the world, recent research has reminded us that European polities also remained remarkably heterogeneous until the nineteenth century. While some of these were sovereign states, others included composite formations such as the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, within which sovereignty was divided in very complex ways.

Sovereign statehood only became the default within Europe in the nineteenth century, with entities like the Holy Roman Empire gradually giving way to sovereign states like Germany. While often overlooked in this regard, Latin America also transitioned into a system of sovereign states during that period as a result of its successive anti-colonial revolutions.

an international system in which power is shared among different kinds of actors might in fact be relatively stable

As late as 1800, Europe east of the French border looked nothing like its contemporary iteration. As historian Peter H. Wilson describes in his recent book Heart of Europe (2020), the Holy Roman Empire, long snubbed by historians of the nation-state, had been in existence for a thousand years at that point; at its peak it had occupied a third of continental Europe. It would hold on for six more years, until its dissolution under the strain of Napoleonic invasions and its temporary replacement with the French-dominated Confederation of the Rhine (1806–1813) and then the German Confederation (1815–1866).

what we think of as modern-day Italy was still a patchwork of kingdoms (Sardinia, the Two Siciles, Lombardy-Venetia under the Austrian Crown), Duchies (including Parma, Modena, and Tuscany), and Papal States, while territory further east was ruled by the Ottoman Empire.

We are accustomed to thinking of Europe as the first historical instance of a full-blown system of sovereign states, but Latin America actually moved toward that form of political organization at just about the same time. After three centuries of imperial domination, the region saw a complete redrawing of its political geography in the wake of the Atlantic Revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Following in the footsteps of the United States (1776) and Haiti (1804), it witnessed a series of wars of independence which, by 1826 and with only a few exceptions, had essentially booted out the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Of course, Britain promptly gained control of trade in the region through an aggressive combination of diplomatic and economic measures often referred to as “informal empire,” but its interactions were now with formally sovereign states.

Over the last two decades, scholars working on the history of the global order have painstakingly shown the complete mismatch between the story of Westphalia and the historical evidence. The nation-state is not so old as we are often told, nor has it come to be quite so naturally. Getting this history right means telling a different story about where our international political order has come from—which in turn points the way to an alternative future.

Until World War II the world was still dominated by empires and the heterogeneous structures of political authority they had created. Once decolonization took off after 1945, the nation-state was not the only option on the table. In Worldmaking after Empire (2019), Adom Getachew describes anglophone Africa’s “federal moment,” when the leaders of various independence movements on the continent discussed the possibility of organizing a regional Union of African States and, in the Caribbean, a West Indian Federation.

“antinationalist anticolonialism” eventually ran afoul of the French government’s unwillingness to distribute the metropole’s resources amongst a widened network of citizens. Yet the fact that it was seriously considered should give us pause. Of course, in the context of decolonization, the triumph of the nation-state represented a final victory for colonized peoples against their long-time oppressors. But it also disconnected regions with a shared history, and it created its own patterns of oppression, particularly for those who were denied a state of their own: indigenous peoples, stateless nations, minorities

what is clear is that a mere seventy years ago, what we now consider to be the self-evident way of organizing political communities was still just one of the options available to our collective imagination

The conventional narrative associates international order with the existence of a system of sovereign states, but the alternative story suggests that the post-1648 period was characterized by the resilience of a diversity of polities

The comparative stability of the post-1648 period may therefore have had more to do with the continued diversity of polities on the continent than with the putative emergence of a homogenous system of sovereign states

much as with Western Europe, the region did not stabilize into a system of nation-states that looks like its contemporary iteration until the end of the nineteenth century. It now seems possible to tell a relatively similar story about North America, as in historian Rachel St John’s ongoing project, The Imagined States of America: The Unmanifest History of Nineteenth-century North America.

even the most powerful contemporary multinational corporations—Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and the rest—are drastically more limited in their formal powers than were the famous mercantile companies who were central actors in the international order until the mid-nineteenth century. The two largest, the British and the Dutch East India Companies, founded in 1600 and 1602 respectively, amassed spectacular amounts of power over their two-hundred-year existence, becoming the primary engine of European imperial expansion. While these companies started off as merchant enterprises seeking to get in on Asia’s lucrative trading network, they gradually turned into much more ambitious endeavors and grew from their original outposts in India and Indonesia into full-on polities of their own. They were, as various scholars now argue, “company-states”—hybrid public-private actors that were legally entitled to rule over subjects, mint money, and wage wars. From this perspective, contemporary non-state actors are still relatively weak compared to states, who still monopolize far more formal power than all other actors in the international system

we should be careful not to suggest that the culprit is an unprecedented weakening of the state and thus that the solution is to expand state power

States certainly were important after 1648, but so were a host of other actors, from mercantile companies to semi-sovereign polities and all sorts of empires more or less formally structured. This system only truly began to unravel in the nineteenth century, with many of its features persisting well into the twentieth. Viewed through this lens, the so-called “Westphalian order” begins to look much more like an anomaly than the status quo

Engaging with this history makes the current centrality of the states-system as a basis for organizing the globe look recent and in fairly good shape, not centuries-old and on the verge of collapse

What is truly new, from a longue durée perspective, is the triumph of the state worldwide, and our inability to think of ways of organizing the world that do not involve either nation-states or organizations of nation-states.

Even thinkers in tune with limitations of the nation-state cannot seem to free themselves from the statist straitjacket of the contemporary political imagination. Debates about state-based supranational institutions likewise fall along a remarkably narrow spectrum: more power to states, or more power to state-based international organizations?

Misrepresenting the history of the states-system plays into the hands of nationalist strongmen, who depict themselves as saving the world from a descent into stateless anarchy, controlled by globalist corporations who couldn’t care less about national allegiance. More broadly, getting this history right means having the right conversations. Giving power to actors other than states is not always a good idea, but we must resist the false choice between resurgent nationalism on the one hand and the triumph of undemocratic entities on the other.

Today the norm is that states enjoy far more rights than any other collectivity—ranging from indigenous peoples to transnational social movements—simply because they are states. But it is not at all clear why this should be the only framework available to our collective imagination, particularly if its legitimacy rests on a history of the states-system that has long been debunked.

“The Middle East is in the throes of an historical crisis, a prolonged period of instability. American policy can exacerbate or ameliorate the major conflicts, but . . . in the Middle East, it is prudent to assume that the solution to every problem will inevitably generate new problems. Like Sisyphus, the United States has no choice but to push the boulder up a hill whose pinnacle remains forever out of reach.”

the deepest drivers of the Arab and Muslim states, namely their rivalries with each other for power and authority

Eisenhower’s humiliation of Britain and France in the Suez crisis of November 1956 weakened two allies — without gaining an iota of good will from Arab nationalists. Rather than cooperate with the United States against the Soviet Union, the Arab world’s new nationalist strongmen were transfixed by their rivalries with one another

The grand conspiracy was doomed to fail. The canal was blocked for months, causing a crippling oil shortage in Europe. The Arab-Israeli conflict worsened, and the Muslim world was inflamed against its old overlords in the West with lasting consequences. The botched invasion occurred just as the Soviet Union was crushing a rebellion in Hungary, its Eastern bloc satellite. When the Kremlin, seeing the opportunity to divert international attention from its own outrages, issued a letter widely interpreted as a threat to attack London and Paris with nuclear weapons, the great powers seemed for an instant to be lurching toward World War III.The turmoil and danger created by the Suez crisis and the Hungarian rebellion have largely faded from popular memory.

he was not well. “His flashes of temper and fragile nerves led some to wonder about his genetic inheritance,” von Tunzelmann writes. “His baronet father had been such an extreme eccentric — complete with episodes of ‘uncontrolled rages,’ falling to the floor, biting carpets and hurling flowerpots through plate-glass windows — that even the Wodehousian society of early-20th-century upper-class England had noticed something was up.”As prime minister, Sir Anthony took to calling ministers in the middle of the night to ask if they had read a particular newspaper article. “My nerves are already at breaking point,” he told his civil servants. In October 1956, he collapsed physically for a few days. According to one of his closest aides, he used amphetamines as well as heavy painkillers, and a Whitehall official said he was “practically living on Benzedrine.”

About two-thirds of Europe’s oil was transported through the canal; Nasser had his “thumb on our windpipe,” Eden fumed. Eden made Nasser “a scapegoat for all his problems: the sinking empire, the sluggish economy, the collapse of his reputation within his party and his dwindling popularity in the country at large,”

Eisenhower was not always well served by the rhetoric of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles or the machinations of his brother, Allen Dulles, the director of central intelligence. And Eisenhower had a temper. “Bombs, by God,” he shouted when the British began striking Egyptian air fields. “What does Anthony think he’s doing? Why is he doing this to me?” But Eisenhower was shrewd and he could be coldly calculating. Understanding that the British would need to buy American oil, he quietly put Britain into a financial squeeze, forcing Eden to back off the invasion.

the take-away from von Tunzelmann’s book is obvious: When it comes to national leadership in chaotic times, temperament matters.

The great Victorian novelists, who were very much engaged with these developments, sensed that something was not quite right in the story. They noticed that capitalism was producing not just abundance and stability, but inequality, alienation and misery. Yet in criticizing the new system, they tended to accept and even buttress the separation of categories of experience insisted upon by social scientists. Thomas Carlyle’s famous condemnation of the “cash-payment” as “the sole nexus” of capitalism, for example, posited an economic realm as one in which ethical and religious values hold no sway.

in order for capitalism to work harmoniously in London, something of the religious sphere had to be added to the sauce. Dickens casts a woman, Lucie, as the person who takes the stink away from all the selfish business conducted by the men — a Victorian “angel in the house,” an emblem of all the non-utilitarian values that homo economicus supposedly had no use for. Lucie, like many other female characters in Victorian novels, is supremely compassionate and sacrifices for the greater good: she is homo communis

Dickens makes this female homo communis the servant of homo economicus, keeping his house and guiding his better nature. Like Mary’s role in the Catholic Church, she makes the official story of capitalism more palatable and helps conceal its failures

ideas of sacrifice and sacred values also come to play in theories of labor. Adam Smith described labor as “the most sacred and inviolable” form of property a person owned, positing it as a sacred source of the nation’s wealth, the pious foundation of the economic system itself: “We sacrifice ourselves in our labor in order to have the gift of ourselves in return,” he wrote in The Wealth of Nations. Labor is sacrificed, sacralized, and regenerated. British political economist David Ricardo, Mill, and Jevons followed him in describing a circular, gift-sacrifice economy embedded within the labor theory of value.

Anthropologists held that the relegation of the “irrational” to the margins was what distinguished advanced societies from the backward places where such activities remained central to life.

Market and non-market values always operate right alongside one another.

Clearly, the official story and what happens on the ground don’t match: Lots of people work hard but get little benefit, while plenty who do not work at all get rich.

if you can show the ethical ideas and the sacred, communal values baked into capitalism’s own paradigms and premises, you can begin to hold it accountable for those ideals in the globalized world economy

The slogan “We are the 99%” was a respite from the oppressive “I” — the painful anomie of individualism that the official story insists upon.

the financial crisis of 2007-8 was not just a failure of markets, but a failure of morality — for what else can you honestly call it when predatory banks escape justice as ordinary people suffer? We can question who is doing the sacrificing, and for whose good the system is working.

In Silicon Valley, executives instill eastern values like mindfulness and meditation into workplaces in a way that covers up the exploitation of employees and consumers that many companies are built around. A firm may spy on people to turn a profit, but the espousal of sacred values (recall Google’s former “Don’t be evil” motto) helps hide the exploitative mission.

The ruling was predictable, said Germany's legal representative Ruprecht Polenz, a jurist, veteran Christian Democratic Union (CDU) politician and former Bundestag foreign affairs committee chairman, who since 2015 has led negotiations with Namibia's government over the colonial past. .column.main div.ad-container.center-ad { width: auto; height: auto; } #div-gpt-async-ad-center-b-label { display: none; } "That's why we've always said that it's not a legal but a political-moral issue," Polenz told the German news agency dpa.

During World War One, then-imperial Germany lost colonial territories in what is now Namibia as well as in what are now Tanzania, Samoa and Papua New Guinea. In South West Africa -- held since 1884 -- German colonial troops surrendered to British forces in July 1915. At the time the colony had 14,000 European settlers of which 12,000 were German.

In early January, Hermann Parzinger, a leading German museum curator, said a memorial space for crimes committed by Germany in colonial times should be included in Berlin's new Humboldt Forum complex.

Accurate information about the 1918 flu is difficult enough to come by in most countries, but in colonies like Kenya, the archival record is especially complicated. Much of what exists is the perspective of colonial officers constructing a racist political state. So the archives talk about how black people resisted many of the efforts at quarantine, portraying them as irrational when in fact barring movement was one way the British created pools of forced labor.

Al Jazeera English has carved a global niche for deepening reporting from places outside centers of power, and Africa Is a Country publishes critical takes on key issues. But digital archives are notoriously transient and even the most visible websites can disappear with the flick of a switch.

When the official record of a community’s history tells them that their ancestors did nothing when faced with near certain death, they tend to believe it and act like its true

A 2019 article estimated that at the Kenyan Coast—the most urbanized and settled region of the fledgling country—the Spanish flu killed 25.3 of every 1,000 people, less than the international average but one of the most deadly recorded outbreaks in the territory.

The relative weakness of African media outlets means that the complexities and nuances of what is happening away from power is rarely described, let alone analyzed

Ethnic cantonment was the cornerstone of colonial oppression in Kenya, and severe punishments for leaving designated ethnic areas were a crucial part of turning free black men and women into prison labor.

European colonizers brought with them rinderpest, commonly known as cattle plague, which destroyed much of the indigenous cattle population, and jiggers, a small flea-like pest that burrows into feet, crippling the infected person and sometimes leading to gangrene. Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, two historians specializing in Kenya’s colonial era, estimate that the Maasai community, one of the most militant groups resisting the British in East Africa, may have lost up to 40 percent of its population. The pandemics and outbreaks in that first decade of the 20th century decimated populations and made it impossible to mount any coordinated military resistance.

the record describes ignorant Africans disregarding the interventions of noble Europeans. Resistance to quarantine and enforced cantonment is framed as a rejection of public health initiatives, not part of a broader resistance to the restrictions on freedom of movement placed on the African population

The consequences of these incomplete archives still reverberate anywhere governments are drawing lessons from colonial public health practices. The violence in countries like India, Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, and other settler colonies echoes the violence of the colonial state in part because the successor independence governments read the violent colonial interventions as logical and necessary. The archive presents violent policing response as a natural and necessary part of a public health crisis response, and the successor governments don’t question that.

The illusion that some violence is necessary to achieve public health goals because the “native” is inherently resistant to logic is inherited from colonizers and sustained because the archive is rarely critically interrogated.

variolation, a precursor to modern-day vaccination in which healthy people were exposed to the blood of infected people to develop resistance to it, was recorded in Kenya, South Sudan, Nigeria, and other parts of the continent. Community health systems existed and were often strong, but the colonizing forces had no interest in them, as they were keen to promote the idea of superior European health systems

This is the task for journalists covering Africa and Covid-19: Hold space for communities that those in power would rather not hear. It is a tremendous challenge. Very few African countries have media markets that can pay for quality, independent investigative and documentary journalism. Many are dependent on Western donor governments to sustain their public health coverage, and this tips the scale in favor of stories that make those organizations look good. Other outlets operate as PR vehicles for their home governments and by extension for the countries that are their strong allies. Few foreign outlets are interested in true partnership with African journalists, and for the few critical journalists the erosion of press freedom across the continent is devouring whatever space they have to work.

There was no other reason for having such a referendum; it was purely an internal Tory party affair

The circumstances of the 2016 referendum, its nature, and its consequences, have multiple causes that jointly led to the stupefying mess in the country and its political and constitutional order that we are now in. The Eurosceptics made good use of these other factors

the policy from 2010 of austerity and the resulting large and rapid increase in inequality, which affected some areas of the country and economy much more drastically than others

a series of bad mistakes and misjudgements by David Cameron and Ed Miliband, the leaders of the two main parties

the quality of MPs after decades in the EU. Membership of the EU brought a degree of general consistency and equilibrium to the economies and states of the member nations, even taking into account the misguided austerity policies after 2010 in the UK itself. This has lessened the temperature of political debate in the UK, premised as it is (unlike most other EU countries) on a deeply adversarial style of politics. Before joining the EEC the UK was a theatre of intense struggles between left and right, socialism and capitalism, managements and unions, a pervasive 'us and them' mentality infecting every major decision.That moderated, with a more temperate tone entering politics in the period between the end of Thatcher and the post-2010 coalition. But as a result, politics became somewhat less attractive to energetic, clever and ambitious people, with the result that - with some extremely honourable exceptions - the general quality of MPs is not nearly what it was.

Banal careerism, the unchallenged sway of the party whips, unthinking sound-bite ideas as the staple of political discourse, the fact that literally hundreds of MPs in the Tory party can support a profoundly unfit person such as Boris Johnson in the office of prime minister - this is a mark of serious decline in quality of those elected to the legislature.

British self-congratulation in the first decade of the 21st century had given a group of people in our political order - a fifth column from the past - the feeling that now was the time to reassert what they mythologised as the spirit of Britain in Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee

no separation of powers between the legislature (parliament) and executive (the government - meaning, the cabinet and prime minister)

Instead of holding the government to account, therefore, parliament is in effect the creature of the government, and does what the government wants.

"elective tyranny"

The clique controls the executive, the executive controls parliament, parliament is absolute in its powers: The clique is the tail that wags the entire dog.

when people of lower quality, less integrity, less intelligence and less honour populate these offices of state, danger looms. And that danger has burst upon us in the form of Brexit.

One of the major scandals of the 2016 referendum is that its outcome has never been debated in parliament. The question, 'Shall we take the advice of 37% of the electorate to take an enormous, uncosted, unplanned and unpredictable step?' has never been debated and voted upon in our sovereign state body.

our hopelessly undemocratic first past the post electoral system lies at the rotten core of these arrangements. It disenfranchises the majority of voters, turning them off politics. It puts majorities into the House of Commons on minorities of the popular vote. It entrenches two-party politics, in which elections produce one-party government by turns - with the foregoing 'elective tyranny' resulting. It is a mess, and reform is urgently needed.

there is a huge clean-up operation required in our political and constitutional order, in addition to addressing the serious inequalities and injustices in our economy and society

We in the UK have skated on very thin political and constitutional ice for a long time; the wealth and prestige of empire, the nostalgic dream it left behind, the self-deceptions and illusions of those who could not see how good a future was developing for us as a leading nation in Europe, made us unaware of the danger. We have fallen through that ice, and the bitterly cold waters we now flounder in must at last wake us up.

in some ways what’s frustrating to me is that this story isn’t new, and it shouldn’t feel to anyone like it’s new. It’s not like no one knew how devastating World War II was to the Philippines — Filipinos knew and have been saying it very loudly, and if you go to Manila, the city is still marked by it. But folks on the mainland don’t always get to see that. So I see this work not just as doing deep dives into dusty boxes and archives in remote places, but also drawing on knowledge that has been produced around all these sites of empire and trying to bring it into a coherent history of the United States.

The more you look at the history of westward expansion, the more you see really enticing resemblances between the kind of political strategy used by the United States during those experiments and practices and what happens overseas, such as the creation of a division between parts of the country that are states and others parts that are territories, or in the 1830s an attempt to create a massive all Native American territory called Indian Country that would be run as a colony. It’s not an accident that the same word we used to describe Kansas and Nebraska before they became states is also the appropriate word to talk about the Philippines, to talk about Guam, to talk about American Samoa

any information about the overseas parts of the United States doesn’t really count because it doesn’t really seem to be about the United States

Female sterilization, war crimes during World War II, internment — things that happened on the mainland or overseas are remembered with immense specificity and often tied to place, but when it comes to these colonies and territories, few people even know they happened

when Congress is debating whether or not the US should have a blanket law saying that anyone who sees an uninhabited guano island can annex it for the country, the key issue in that debate is that this can only happen for uninhabited islands. So it’s a way for the US to ease itself into the logic of empire. But legally those guano islands laid the foundation for a much larger empire, and an empire that is populated not just with some people but with tens of millions of people.

before even the US starts interning Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans on the West coast, they were interning Japanese and Japanese-American nationals in the Philippines. It was right after Pearl Harbor, and it was enormous — it encompassed about 30,000 people. it was absolutely brutal. It was accompanied by extrajudicial killings, by rapes, by terroristic racial violence, and then by violent retribution once these internees were released as the Japanese invaded the Philippines

the declaration of martial law in Hawai’i and the maintenance of that state of martial law far beyond when it was militarily necessary. It wasn’t individual people being interned — the whole island was turned into a military prison with barbed wire around the perimeter. People were prohibited from moving at night, not showing up at work, changing jobs, using US currency — doing all kinds of things they might have done if they were free. If they violated these things, they were almost always convicted in courts presided over not by judges, but by military officers. There was something like a 99 percent conviction rate in the courts we know about. Another example is the internment in Alaska during World War II. A lot of people don’t remember that Japan didn’t just attack Alaska, but invaded and conquered the western tip of the Aleutian Island chain, and as a result the United States evacuated that entire island chain, including some other islands, and removed the native residents to southern Alaska where they were put in horrific camps where a great number of them died. The death rate was about ten percent

There are moments of frankness about the full geographical extent of the United States, and 1898 is one of them. It’s a moment when the United States is forthrightly an empire, according to a lot of maps and political discourse. That doesn’t last very long, and those who fought in World War II didn’t live through that moment and didn’t think about the United States in that way. Then many of them discovered the territorial extent of the country, especially if they went through the Pacific. They get a quick lesson in the true geography of the United States. But those moments of openness and frankness tend to close pretty quickly

We have long known and are very aware of the fact that race and racism has shaped the lives people have led in this country. Nevertheless, it’s also important to recognize that race and racism have shaped the actual country itself

The idea that you can have this guy who on the mainland is such a hero, but in Puerto Rico is known as an unconscionable villain. The idea that you can have that informational segregation persist for decades — that is extraordinary. That is how you hide an empire

climate change is posing serious threats to the US territories, as well as some of the islands where the US stations its military bases. If you think about it geographically, these territories are at the outer periphery of the United States, and that puts them on the front lines of history. The fact that four of the five inhabited territories have endured existential threats in the last two years is a preview of what’s to come, so I think this is going to be a time of reckoning for the United States. Can it still maintain this peripheral zone where there are US nationals and citizens who are deprived of the full rights of US citizens on the mainland?

Something like Brexit is only possible because the UK, the powers that be, and the media have propagated myths for so long regarding the idea of the “other,” the foreigner, and the so-called independence and strength of the United Kingdom or the West, without recognizing the resources and contributions [of colonized and oppressed people]—voluntary and otherwise—that make these nations so apparently great.

I have my own terminology for my work: “Sanko-Time.” It brings together two words. “Sankofa” is a Twi word from Ghana, meaning to go back and retrieve something that may have been lost or forgotten, or something that is known but needs to be revisited in order to make sense of the present or pave the way for the future. The future does not become possible without the past. The word “time” represents my interest in ideas of science fiction and time travel.

For the Relic Traveller films, I was thinking about creating heroes who looked like myself—our heroes, who are African and Black, are exploring these mostly Western environments, where the West becomes exotic.

I’ve created a film that connects with the main quadrilogy, called Reliquary 2, which was commissioned by John Hansard Gallery and released online last year. It utilizes film footage from my own archive as well as new animation, and illustrations by Wumi “Wumzum” Olaosebikan, who has worked with me on creating the vectors on the Pan-African flags. What’s different this time is that the voice-over—the vocal testimony—is my own. It’s set during the pandemic, and it’s something of a letter to my children, talking about my hopes, my concerns and fears about the future and their place in it, and how the world—in particular the Western world—has viewed and may continue to treat them. It’s in a similar vein as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, which he wrote for and to his son.

a project of modern coexistence that not only had to be imagined and designed, but also built

to trace how an extraordinary idea of Muslim and Christian and Jewish civic and political community rooted in secular equality went from unimaginability to ubiquity in the course of a single century, and nowhere more so than in the Arab East after 1860

subject to conflicting interpretations that valorized “real” religion and demonized sectarianism, often in contradictory and conservative modes, but also in more liberal and even radical ways

Tribalism, communalism and sectarianism all refer to parallel formations in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East respectively that assume an unchanging essence that separates members of a single sovereignty or putative sovereignty. They are all static ideological interpretations of pluralism, and have all, to a greater or lesser degree, been massively influenced and even in many ways formally classified and invented by Western colonial powers

the Orientalists idealize the West in order to Orientalize the East. Second, as you suggest, this view transforms religious pluralism in the Middle East into a structure of age-old monolithic antagonistic communities so that one can speak of medieval and modern Maronites, Jews, Muslims and so on as if these have been unchanging communities and as if all ideological diversity in the Middle East ultimately is reducible to religion and religious community

The religious sect is conflated with the political sect; the secular is understood to be a thin veneer that conceals the allegedly “real” and unchanging religious essence of the Middle East. This view is dangerous, misleading and tendentious.

both race and sect urgently need to be historicized and contextualized—race belongs to US (and Western) political vocabulary; sect to Arab political vocabulary. Both the notion of age-old sects and that of immutable races are ideological fictions that have been manipulated to serve power

US scholars Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields have suggested we think of “racecraft” rather than “race relations” to underscore the ideological fundament of racist thinking that appears totally natural to its proponents. As I allude to in my book, so too might we think of “sectcraft” rather than sectarian or communal relations, both to underscore the ideological aspect of sectarianism and to emphasize the amount of work that goes into making sectarianism appear to be inherent, inevitable and unchangeable

The Orientalist view of sectarianism frequently analogizes sect as “like race” and, furthermore, it assumes that sectarian differences are inherent cultural and political differences similar to race. What do you think is the relationship of sect to race?  How should race figure in the story of coexistence you relate?

many scholars gravitate toward using categories and experiences that emerge in the US context and apply them, sometimes indiscriminately and often very problematically, to other parts of the world. I think it is important at some level to respect the fact that in the modern Middle East, progressive scholars and laypeople, men and women belonging to different religious communities, have throughout the twentieth century typically described and conceptualized their struggles against injustice and tyranny as struggles against sectarianism and colonialism, but not necessarily as a struggle against racism.

the national polities of the post-Ottoman period in the Arab East were established by European colonial powers. These European powers massively distorted the ecumenical trajectory evident in the late Ottoman Arab East. First, they broke up the region into dependent and weak states, and second, they divided the region along explicitly sectarian lines

the colonial dimension is crucial, and it clearly separates the US and the European period of nationalization from that of the colonized Middle East

why the investment in and privileging of certain epistemic categories of domination as opposed to others? The question of migrant labor illustrates how race and class and geography and history are intertwined in very specific ways—the Middle Eastern cases (whether the Gulf or in Lebanon) are indeed different from that of the history of migrant labor in the United States, which has always been implicated in settler colonialism.

One key difference, of course, between modern Western colonialism and early modern Islamic empires is that the latter, like their early modern Christian counterparts, did not pretend to uphold liberal representation, political equality or self-determination. So, temporality is one essential difference: ethnic, racist or sectarian discrimination in the Islamic empires was not justified or imagined as a benevolent burden to uplift others into an ostensibly equal level of civilization. There was no pretense of a colonial tutelage to help natives achieve independence in the fullness of time

In the Ottoman Islamic empire, there were indeed professions of Islamic superiority, notions of ethnic, tribal and religious discrimination, forms of bondage and slavery, and myriad chauvinisms and prejudices tied to kinship, geography, language, culture and ethnicity and so on, but not a notion of biological racism or the obsession with racial segregation and miscegenation that has been the hallmark of modern Western colonialism

a new and distinctive defensiveness among leading Muslim Arab intellectuals—that is, their need to defend Islam and Islamic society from missionary and colonial assault whilst also embracing or reconciling themselves to compatriotship with Arab Christians and Jews. This defensiveness persists

the great problem of scholars and governments in the West who have long instrumentalized and Orientalized discrimination against non-Muslims to suggest that there is some peculiar problem with Islam and Muslims

I think that scholars of gender and women’s history have a lot to teach us in this regard: that is Arab, Turkish, Iranian and other scholars who have explored the long history of gender discrimination—who have defied the fundamentalists—without succumbing to racist Orientalism or self-loathing

really historicize! It really is an effective antidote in the face of those who peddle in chauvinism, racism, sectarianism, tribalism and communalism

Salahi and countless non-Western others have long known and written about torture at Guantánamo or Bagram or any of the many places where it occurred. But it only becomes a literary, notable, and prize-worthy truth when it flows from the pen of a foreign correspondent at a prestige publication like The New Yorker.

“If you say that you are angry,” Salahi tells the two white men, “it is understood as an emotion. If I say that I am angry, it is seen as a threat to national security.”

Salahi’s words underscore the truth Taub has not told: that writing an article about torture that does nothing to disrupt a worldview that has left brown men forever suspect is not getting anywhere at all.

In the 1920s, people in the Belgian Congo could receive the death penalty for reading the Negro World

Garvey preached to Black Americans that their history did not begin with enslavement and that they came from a great civilization. “I am the equal of every White man,” Garvey said. “Always think of yourself as a perfect being.”

Garvey caught the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, a lawyer in the Department of Justice, who would quickly rise to director of the FBI, a role in which he became known for his racist pursuit of Black civil rights leaders. The first Black undercover agent hired by the FBI was assigned to spy on Garvey.“Mr. Hoover, in his role as director of investigations on ‘Negro Activities,’ became obsessed with extinguishing the flames of the man who had become known as the ‘Negro Moses,’ ”

As Garvey preached about the importance of Black economic independence, he opened several businesses, including the Black Star Line shipping and passenger company, which he said would help facilitate the travel of Black people to Africa. It was one of the first Black-owned shipping companies in the world.

“It was the audacity of founding the Black Star Line that drew the attention of federal investigators. And ultimately, the company’s financial downfall led to Garvey’s prosecution for mail fraud in a trial replete with reversible errors and questionable evidence.”

“Marcus Garvey was targeted because of political and social efforts, not because of anything to do with the Black Star line.”Garvey was convicted of defrauding one investor out of $25, Pierce said, and “for that, he got five years in prison.”

on Nov. 18, 1927, Coolidge commuted Garvey’s sentence. Nine of the 12 White jurors who voted to convict Garvey said they supported the commutation of his sentence. Garvey was released from the penitentiary and deported to Jamaica. He later traveled to London, where he died in 1940.

On Feb. 23, 2021, Rep. Yvette D. Clarke (D-N.Y.) introduced a resolution expressing “the sense of the House of Representatives that Marcus Garvey should be recognized as a leader in the struggle for human rights and that the President should take measures to exonerate him of charges brought against him.”

Clarke said in an interview that she believes Garvey should be exonerated — a legal process that would clear him of wrongdoing. “A pardon implies guilt,” Clarke said. “The real transparency comes from looking at the records of J. Edgar Hoover and looking at his history and past with respect to the Black community.”

“When it comes to Marcus Garvey, not just an individual was harmed, not just a family was harmed, but millions of people around the world are harmed by the destruction of the social justice movement. The U.S. government played a role in the false conviction of Marcus Garvey.”

Today, the asylum’s graveyard sits on a city-owned golf course between the fourth and fifth holes’ fairways. It’s sectioned off with a split-rail fence, and maintained by the city and the Keepers of the Canton Native Asylum Story group. 

At least 53 different tribal nations are represented in the cemetery. 

there were 27 investigations of the asylum over its 31-year operation.  But it would take another nearly three decades for those complaints--some from staff themselves, alleging patient mistreatment in the form of insufficient clothing, bedding, and improper medical treatment—-to shut down the facility.

In 1929, psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Silk of St. Elizabeths Hospital, the federal mental hospital in Washington, described the Canton asylum as “a place of padlocks and chamber pots,” where reservations sent patients they weren’t able to care for. He noted a lack of real medical facilities, and that “several patients exhibited no symptoms of mental illness,”

City officials in Canton, which technically owns the cemetery, told Native News Online that they would “respect and honor the decision of each tribal nation” regarding their ancestors buried there. "Whether those decisions be repatriation or leaving them where they were laid to rest, we will honor and remember their lives through continued care and upkeep of the grounds and cemetery,” representatives from Canton, the Hiawatha Golf Club, Sanford Canton-Inwood Medical Center, and Keepers of the Canton Native Asylum Story wrote in a joint statement.

In June, the Department of the Interior announced a Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, prompted by the discovery of 215 Indigenous childrens’ remains at the site of a former Indian residential school, to examine its own dark history. The initiative directs the department to identify boarding-school facilities and examine potential burial sites near them, as well as the identities and tribal affiliations of the students who were taken to those schools. 

The Department of the Interior had not responded by press time to Native News Online’s request for comment on whether the asylum would be included in the scope of the federal investigation, or whether they’d pay for repatriations.

“There’s this conceit,” he says, “that archaeologists - gung-ho western, bearded, white, elite, cis-gendered, ostensibly heterosexual - go to Egypt and ‘discover’ Ancient Egypt because the people, ordinary Egyptians, are too stupid.” He adds: “Ancient Egypt was never ‘lost’.”

The “standard colonial narrative”, he says, portrays Egypt as “brilliant - a proto-British empire”. Egyptologists used terms like ‘empire’ and ‘viceroy’ to describe the government of the Pharaohs. Students were taught that “the Ancient Egyptians had a ‘Viceroy of Nubia’ - where the hell is the term ‘viceroy’ coming from?” Price asks. “It’s from the British experience of empire”. This explains why many British academics put Egypt on a pedestal as the greatest of all ancient civilisations.

in the imperial age when Britons were travelling to India they would go through the Suez Canal. “You might take a few days and go and visit Egypt. So it’s colonial high noon,”

British archaeologist Howard Carter led the dig that opened Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 - an event which turbo-charged interest in Egyptology and had a huge cultural impact on world, even leading to the creation of movies like The Mummy starring Boris Karloff in 1932. “Some early exhibitions quite literally feel like the spoils of empire,” says Price. “In some cases, it’s literally the spoils - like the Rosetta Stone which was seized from the French.”

Price has little time for the use of the word ‘woke’ as an insult, as to him it simply means trying to do the right thing professionally. He adds that he feels “fortunate” that Manchester Museum, where he works, is also having the same “conversations” about confronting the legacy of the past.

“the British and French cooked up a system” called ‘finds-division’ or ‘partage’. “Notionally,” he says, “the best 50% of things that come out of the ground go to the National Collection in Cairo, but then up to 50% of what is thought to be ‘surplus to requirements’ or duplicate can leave with archaeologists. So that’s how Manchester has 18,000 objects from Egypt and Sudan - mostly through finds-division.

It was legal between the 1880s and 1970s, but it was at a time when mostly the Egyptian government was controlled by the British and French, and the Egyptian government had to repay the massive debt of building the Suez Canal.

“some people will tell you, some well known Egyptologists, that you should burn copies of ‘A Thousand Miles Up the Nile’ because it contains racist material. But the society is actually working on a critical re-edition, where there’s a new introduction to put the book in context. I firmly believe, and the trustees firmly believe, you can’t just bury the past. You’ve got to try and face it and constructively critique it. I’m not arguing for cancelling anyone. I’m not arguing for trying to ignore it. I’m saying ‘let’s have a conversation’.”

Unlike many nations which had art looted by western powers, Egypt “isn’t particularly interested” in the repatriation debate except when it comes to “a few very exceptional objects like Nefertiti’s Bust and the Rosetta Stone”. Price adds: “Repatriation can sometimes be a bit of an echo chamber for western [people]. It doesn’t necessarily relate always to the concerns of indigenous groups, or people who live in places like Egypt.”

There’s a funny attitude, where Scots kind of distance themselves and say, ‘oh well, you know, we were colonised first. The English came in, and we’re the victims’. Based on my work on the history of colonialism in Egypt, Scottish people are more than well-represented. They are disproportionately represented in the cogs of the imperial project with Scottish diplomats, engineers and soldiers … There’s a sense that empire was ‘done to’ Scotland, when in fact Scotland ‘did’ empire to other people … We put this stuff on the English and say it was the English … Scots appear surprisingly commonly in the imperial machinery in Egypt.

Price is chair of the board of trustees with the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) - an organisation, he says, which is “doing a lot of work of self-criticism, self-reflection and self-critique”. The EES, which was established in 1882 at the height of empire and just prior to the British invasion, is now “attempting to unpack colonialism in Egypt”.

British egyptology is “more open” to change, Price says than most other western nations with a history of the discipline. “We’re on the winning side of the argument. The tide has turned. You cannot pretend you can enjoy your secluded cocktail terrace in the middle of Cairo and not expect to hear critical evaluation of colonial experiences.”

Most of the workers who built the pyramids weren’t slaves - they were paid for their efforts, he points out. The slave stories of the Bible, though, lead to “another form of colonialism - Orientalism”, which depicts the rulers of the east as either exotic and mysterious or brutal and cruel. The notion of “the Oriental despot comes from the Bible: Pharaoh as a despot … The way in the Bible, that the pharaoh is cast as a baddie, reverberates”.

Price is also incensed by the current pseudo-science trend for conspiracy theories claiming that aliens built the pyramids - the type of unfounded material aired on over-the-top documentaries like ‘Ancient Aliens’. “It’s racist,” he says, “very racist.” He notes that there’s a hashtag on Twitter called ‘CancelAncientAliens’. The wild alien theory is “based on the assumption that ancient people were too stupid to have [built the pyramids] themselves and so it had to be some outside force. So to be clear in the interests of global parity and justice: the ancient Egyptians were an African people who built absolutely stunning monuments. Get over it.”

There is no simple answer, or history - and I think we insult museum audiences if we assume they want an overly simplified story. ‘Ancient Egypt’ is undoubtedly one of the most popular parts of a museum. By asking questions about how colonialism formed our idea of what ‘Ancient Egypt’ was, not just how it got to be in cities like Glasgow and Manchester, I think we can begin to address questions of global inequality.

“Egypt more than Greece, Rome or other parts of the world, has existed as both ‘Oriental other’ and ‘western ancestor’ - that is why the colonial dialogue is so intense - and Egyptology is, in a sense, the exemplary ‘colonial discipline’, just as the British Consul Lord Cromer [consul-general in Egypt from 1883] said Egypt should be the exemplary colony.