Wrestling with Protocol

Wrestling with Protocol Read about the climate migrants of Zimbabwe. Received this from a friend? [SUBSCRIBE]( CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. [The World]( [INKSTICK]( If you read just one thing … … read about the climate migrants of Zimbabwe. Farming, as a survival strategy, is remarkably durable. The modern world is built on it, and the techniques remain unchanged: manage land while you can and move to greener pastures when the land gives out. In Zimbabwe, where lowland farms have faced drought after drought, farmers are moving to the wetter highlands, and eking out a living there as they can. However, this migration threatens ecosystems already imperiled by the warming planet, and it risks habitats for animals that may be hunted or driven from their homes. Andrew Mambondiyani, [writing at The Long Now](, spoke with Lloyd Gweshengwe, a climate migrant who moved to the highlands a decade ago after drought forced him to move from his previous home. “Now I can harvest enough food to feed my family and sell the surplus,” a visibly cheerful Gweshengwe told Mambondiyani. “I don’t regret migrating to this place." The climate migrants, after all, are people adapting as they can, and will do in the absence of a proactive government response to the conditions that drove them to leave. For now, Mambondiyani reports that those interventions are focused on making lowland farming more viable, through harder crops or reallocated water. Preserving the people and highlands is, at best, a good start. Ancient Lands, Storied Pomp To whom does antiquity belong? The laws of modern government on ancient lands are quite clear about this: if an ancient artifact is unearthed within the bounds of Turkey, for example, it is the property of the Turkish state, and illegal to export. Such laws exist to deter smugglers, but they cannot alone prevent them. The Bubon bronzes, almost certainly excavated from Turkey before being illicitly sold as a collection to a Boston art collector, now circulate in US museums. At [Hyperallergic](, Elizabeth Marlowe traces the Bubon bronzes from excavation to display, mostly in the United States but one in Turkey, where winking nods at origin become obscured to avoid legal scrutiny. “The only ethical path forward now is for the museums to collaborate — both with each other and with partner institutions in Turkey — to reconstruct the splintered and suppressed history of Bubon, both in antiquity and in the 20th century; to share the results with the public; and to accept whatever consequences may result,” concludes Marlowe. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( Tired, Poor, Yearning To Breathe Free [• • •] Bucolic island retreat and summer home of the super-rich Martha’s Vineyard blazed into public consciousness last week, an event usually reserved for the personal foibles of discoursing elites. The arrival of a chartered plane of migrants, originally from Venezuela but collected in Texas and then shipped out in a spectacle of enforcement by Florida governor Ron DeSantis, was a nakedly political stunt. While border enforcement is a spectacle, asylum is a clear and direct right, and over at Border/Lines, [Felipe De La Hoz and Gaby Del Valle]( highlighted how authoritarians are using cruelty to spin international norms as a partisan attack. “Expulsions have more to do with who Mexico will accept than who the United States wants to let in. The migrants currently being processed at the border and bussed across the country are largely from Venezuela, whose government is not currently accepting expulsion flights and who the US has a hard time returning to Mexico under Title 42,” says Border/Lines. Animating the whole process of the Biden administration’s immigration policy are the tools left in place by Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, some of which have had the cruelty toggled back but all of which persist to allow such stunts. If, as initial reporting suggests, Customs and Border Protection or Border Patrol played a role in falsifying documents used for such a nakedly partisan end, it shows that the existence of such forces undermines the power and capacity of civilian government. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( DEEP DIVE Political Theatre: Part II All of world politics is a stage, and all the world leaders are merely players, with their exits and entrance music. This theatricality of international diplomacy is ever-present, though it was perhaps rarely as visible as under the Trump administration. The former entertainer brought an intuitive understanding of the dynamics of professional wrestling to meetings more typically defined by intricate details of nuclear arsenals. Yet, even that official and prescribed seriousness hinges on diplomacy as a kind of performance, even if it is usually one so polite as to not acknowledge the stagecraft involved. In “[Wrestlemania! Summit Diplomacy and Foreign Policy Performance after Trump](,” authors Benjamin S. Day and Alister Wedderburn focus on the particular stage of international summits. In particular, they examine how the actions, mannerisms, and choices made by former US President Donald Trump obliterated the false line between “performance” and “substance.” This is a lesson valuable for understanding the recent past, the actions of other right-wing populists, and the theatricality of international diplomacy in general. “[W]e argue that wrestling is a pertinent lens through which to read international summits,” the authors write, “which also cordon off a masculinized arena in which expansive, complex issues can be distilled into a comestible narrative, arranged into a series of symbolic set pieces, and presented to a global audience.” Diplomats are performers in multiple senses. As agents of a distant state they stand in for the state, and in turn, represent it through their own personal actions. At summits, world leaders take this on, even if they are just heads of government and not heads of state, but especially when they are both. At the center of Day and Wedderburn’s analysis are the events leading up to, and then following from, the 2018 Singapore Summit between Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. The authors map the preceding diplomacy like a season of wrestling. This approach allowed Trump to initiate diplomacy while simultaneously threatening North Korea with nuclear oblivion, an arc that ultimately culminated in a face-to-face meeting but no lasting achievement beyond the routine de-escalation of time. “Our argument is predicated on the belief that even the naturalized norms of decorum that conventionally govern foreign policy actors depend for their acceptance and reproduction on theatrical modes of presentation and staging. It is important to ask how these norms might help to constitute certain actors as ‘sensible,’ ‘serious,’ and ‘statesmanlike,’ even as these actors tolerate and often authorize violence, death, and environmental degradation,” the authors write. It is unlikely that another world leader will come to power as in sync with the rules and arcs of professional wrestling as Trump, but the theatricality of diplomacy, especially summit diplomacy, will persist. Only now, instead of real adults acting on roles they’ve unconsciously rehearsed since they were children in Model United Nations, the theatrical nature is clear to see. “The question of whether and how to regenerate or renaturalize these norms must, therefore, be accompanied by a reckoning with performance's role in their construction, maintenance, and reproduction,” conclude the authors. [LEARN MORE]( [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [• • •] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS Halima Gikandi [reported]( on the ongoing drought and hardship in Somalia. A lack of rain has kept crops from growing, making it that much harder for people to get food without international aid. This precarity is compounded by the ongoing war in Somalia between the government and the insurgent group al-Shabab, whose strict rule and territorial control impose an extra burden on the farmers they can independently tax. Drought-resistant seeds are one kind of aid the international community can provide, adding some durability and resilience back into agriculture. But drought-resistant seeds will still [need water to grow at all](, and it appears the new rainy season will be the fifth too-short one in a row. Olatunji Olaigbe [pondered]( the death of Elizabeth Windsor, the late monarch of an empire that once claimed his grandparent’s native Nigeria. Describing a group chat with friends the morning before the death, Olaigbe writes, “A friend posted “Operation London Bridge to commence. Shelve your pitches or schedule it for October ending (skull face emoji).” All of this took place more than an hour before the Queen’s death was officially announced on Twitter.” Ultimately, her legacy for him is felt materially, in commissioned works postponed, and as history, as an object of Western media fascination became past tense. Durrie Bouscaren [breezed]( through the history and practicality of wind catchers, a passive cooling design that can be seen since at least the 12th century in cities like Yazd, Iran. A wind-catcher is a tower that opens to the wind, catching hot air and guiding it underground, where it cools off and in turn forces already-cooled air out. “Attempts to re-create wind catchers occurred during the oil crisis of the 1970s and 1980s in cities like Doha, where the Qatar University campus incorporates several equally distributed wind towers,” wrote Bouscaren. “But these projects became less common when oil prices returned to normal.” [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( WELL PLAYED No quarter, no [quarter 3 reports](. This [fish cray](. Not quite ready for [Prime Time](. Gotta [mourn fast](. If your political and musical tastes run from Architecture in Helsinki to Bloc Party, [this tweet is for you](. Hey [MBS](, no cutting [in line](, not even with a bone saw. Oh I was kidding when I was plotting a coup, [haha unless](? [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( Follow The World: [fb]( [tw]( [ig]( [www]( [DONATE TO THE WORLD]( Follow Inkstick: [fb]( [tw]( [ig]( [www]( [DONATE TO INKSTICK]( 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. [Preferences]( | [Web Version]( [Unsubscribe](