#Border Imperialism

[justacynicalromantic]

In early 2014, Ukraine was a neutral country, with a pro-Russian president, and with 70% of Ukraine's population against NATO membership. Yet Russia bluntly violated Ukraine's neutrality and annexed Crimea, then launched a covert invasion of Ukraine in the east.

Petro Poroshenko won the presidential election later in 2014 having promised a settlement with Russia, keeping a special status of the Russian language in Ukraine. He was initially sceptical regarding NATO accession, underlined Ukraine must rely on its own strength to provide security.

Did Putin meet Poroshenko halfway? Not at all. The regular Russian army entered the Ukrainian territory in mid-2014 to fight the Ukrainian troops, which led to the Minsk-1 agreement signed in September 2014.

Further text - down under the cut, or you can follow the Twitter link to the original post:

Few weeks later, Ukraine's parliament adopted a law that would guarantee the then Russia-controlled part of Donetsk and Luhansk regions additional economic, financial and cultural powers.

How did Putin react? Russia staged sham local elections in the occupied Donbas, and then sent the regular army again to Ukraine in early 2015, which led to the Minsk-2 agreement signed in February 2015.

Zelensky was even more sceptical regarding NATO accession. Asked about NATO, he once famously said he never pays anyone a visit if he has not been invited. He won the presidential election promising to compromise with Russia - to stop shooting, sit down with Putin and talk.

Did Putin meet Zelensky halfway? Not at all. He actually raised the stakes by issuing the Russian passports on the occupied territories of Ukraine even before Zelensky assumed the office, putting him in a difficult political position since the start.

Zelensky was ready to drop Ukraine's NATO bid in an exchange for the Russian troops withdrawing from Ukraine. The talks were held already before 2022. What did Putin do? He launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In the first weeks of the invasion, Zelensky was yet again ready to drop Ukraine's NATO bid. But he wanted to obtain international security guarantees. What did Putin do? He demanded that Russia must be consulted before any aid would be given to Ukraine in the event of aggression.

To sum up, Ukraine has consistently tried to reach a deal with Russia over the last decade, and was open to giving up on its NATO bid in exchange for the withdrawal of the Russian troops from Ukraine. Russia never reciprocated, never showed a good will, kept raising the stakes.

Both Poroshenko and Zelensky were initially sceptical regarding Ukraine's accession to NATO. Both wanted to get a deal with Putin. And Putin himself pushed both of them to seek NATO membership out of no other viable alternatives.

Up till now, Putin has shown absolutely no willingness to compromise with Ukraine. His war aims remain maximalist - subjugating Ukraine and changing its regime. He seeks Ukraine's partition, and will turn what is left of Ukraine into Russian protectorate.

Russia's imperial self-conception is that of Russian elites at large, and not just Vladimir Putin. The Russian leadership simply cannot reconcile with the existence of a sovereign Ukrainian statehood.

Therefore any sustainable Ukrainian-Russian compromise is currently not possible unless the Russian cost-benefit calculus changes. Only credible risk to the stability of the Russian regime would impact this calculus. The easiest way goes through defeating Russia in Ukraine.

[metamatar]

With a budget nearing $1 billion, Frontex is the EU’s best-funded government agency. [...] including by helping Libya’s EU-funded coast guard send hundreds of thousands of migrants back to be detained in Libya under conditions that amounted to torture and sexual slavery. In 2022, the agency’s director, Fabrice Leggeri, was forced out over a mountain of scandals, including covering up similar ​“pushback” deportations, which force migrants back across the border before they can apply for asylum.

[...] EU hopes to extend Frontex’s reach far beyond its territory, into sovereign African nations Europe once colonized, with no oversight mechanisms to safeguard against abuse. Initially, the EU even proposed granting immunity from prosecution to Frontex staff in West Africa. [...] 26 African countries have received taxpayer euros aimed at curbing migration through more than 400 discrete projects. Between 2015 and 2021, the EU invested $5.5 billion in such projects, with more than 80% of the funds coming from developmental and humanitarian aid coffers.

[...] Besides the surveillance tech the DNLT branches receive, migration data analysis systems have also been installed at each post, along with biometric fingerprinting and facial recognition systems. The stated aim is to create what eurocrats call an African IBM system: Integrated Border Management. [...] no European countries maintain databases with this level of biometric information.

[...] In Niger, for instance, the EU helped draft a law that criminalized virtually all movement in the north of the country, effectively making regional mobility illegal.

[fatehbaz]

[D]ebt and indebtedness [...] produc[e] forms of spatial enclosure [imprisonment] that do not rely on the spectacular [singular moments of blatant literal physical violence] but are, rather, achieved through temporal openings and foreclosures. To be clear, this frame does not obscure the many forms of carceral enclosure [...]: the prison, the checkpoint, the security wall. Historically, enclosure is understood as the privatization of land. But Wang extends the concept of enclosure to encompass time. Wang demonstrates that [...] mobility is policed through [...] an apparatus of punishment that solicits time as the form of spatial enclosure. [...]

[D]ebilitating infrastructures turn able bodies into a range of disabled bodies. [...] [C]heckpoints [...]; administrative bureaucratic apparatuses that stall and foreclose travel, mobility for work, [...] the capacity to move and change residences - baroque processes to apply for permits to travel [...], absence of public services such as postal delivery [...]; and finally [...] denial of resolution, suspension in the space of the indefinite [...]. In fact, slow death itself is literalized as the slowing down of life [...]. [Land] itself becomes simultaneously bigger - because it takes so long to get anywhere - and smaller, as transit becomes arduous [...] where it is so difficult to travel between areas without permits and identifications. Movement is suffocated. Distance is stretched and manipulated to create an entire population with mobility impairments. And yet space is shrunken, as people are held in place, rarely able to move far. [...]

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Time itself is held hostage.

This is the slow aspect of slow death: slow death can entail a really slow life, too, a life that demands constant calibration of different speeds and the relation of speed to space. [...]

The suspended state of the indefinite, of waiting and waiting (it) out, wreaks multigenerational psychological and physical havoc. [...]

Time thus is the meter of power; it is one form that physical enclosure takes on. The cordoning of time through space contributes to an overall “lack of jurisdiction over the function of one’s own senses” (Schuller 2018: 74) endemic to the operation of colonial rule [...]. [T]his process entails several modes of temporal differentiation: withholding futurity, making impossible anything but a slowed (down) life, and immobilizing the body [...]. Julie Peteet (2008) calls the extraction of nonlabor time “stealing time” [...]. [T]he extraction of time attempts to produce a depleted and therefore compliant population so beholden to the logistics of the everyday that forms of connectivity, communing, and collective resistance are thwarted. The extraction of time functions as the transfer of “vital energy” [...], an extraction that recapitulates a long colonial history of mining bodies for their potentiality. [...]

Checkpoints ensure one is never sure of reaching work on time.

Fear of not getting to work then adds to the labor of getting to work; the checkpoints affectively expand labor time [...].

Bodies in line at checkpoints [...] [experience] the fractalizing of the emotive, cognitive, physiological capacities of bodies [...]. It’s not just that bodies are too tired to resist but that the experience of the ���constant state of uncertainty” becomes the condition of being. [...]

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All text above by: Jasbir K. Puar. "Spatial Debilities: Slow Life and Carceral Capitalism in Palestine". South Atlantic Quarterly (2021) 120 (2), pages 393-414. Published April 2021. At: doi dot org slash 10.1215/00382876-8916144 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for criticism, teaching, commentary purposes.]

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

By Scott Scheffer

Now, almost unbelievably, the U.S. machinery of state is trying to set up an opportunity for yet another U.S. war – this one against Venezuela using that country’s neighbor Guyana as a proxy, by reviving a centuries-old border dispute that lay dormant for decades. 

The exploitation of newly found oil reserves larger than those of the United Arab Emirates or Kuwait by U.S. oil giants triggered the escalating aggression by the White House. 

[hapalopus]

Do you think American leftists would be less weird about China if they knew how many non-English medias report on China and the US in the same way? The Danish TV2 reports on 2020's BLM protests and 2022's Urumqi protests are virtually identical. "Here's why they're protesting, here's an interview with protestors, here's where the international solidarity protests are happening, here's the local protest at the American/Chinese embassy in our country. Now, the weather."

Do you realize how much the US and China have in common? Capitalistic inequal empires with no option for new political parties to be formed, both of which are just a couple dozen smaller countries masquerading as one big mega-country.

[flower-tea-fairies]

PLEASE GO DONATE TO @shahednhall's GFM IT HAS ONLY RAISED $7,743/$50,000

Wafaa has asked I make a post about their gfm as they have helped her alot before

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[nando161mando]

[thedreadvampy]

I guess a question I actually have is what would it actually look like to build communism/radical leftism in the imperial core?

I do believe (when I can) that we're living through a transition away from the imperial age, and that necessarily requires loss for people in Northern Europe and North America.

To be clear, that isn't an argument against it. In the imperial core there are things we are very very used to having which a) we aren't entitled to and b) cost a disproportionate amount to the rest of the world. and in a post-colonial future we could see a flattening of social and economic inequality (if we made it happen).

but I increasingly think there's a difficult tension in building liberation movements within the borders of countries which built and are at the heart of the current hegemon. And then at the same time, NOT building liberation movements within our own countries isn't really an option, both because a) we have to live now and letting ourselves continue to get fucked over by power is just pointless self-harm and b) because the internal collapse of these systems is part of the external collapse of the imperial order.

buuuuuut a lot of the current leftist movements in the imperial core are very much based on improving the lot specifically of people within the country and idk when/if that starts to run counter to a global restructure of power?

[chicago-geniza]

Finishing Portrait of a Lady audiobook today. Next in the queue: The Finishing School by Muriel Spark. Once again soliciting (audio)book recommendations for my commute

[yudrein-aile]

I’d like to thank rofan manhwa and my history lectures for single handed oh fueling the plot of analepsis

[void-thegod]

I remember the uproar around 9/11

Approximately 2,000 people died that day, I think.

That justified

...

So much.

How many have we killed over there, since?

How many laws have we created to "protect" our freedom?

And now...

30,000 civilians -- probably more -- have been killed in Gaza since..

When has this begun?

I don't even know.

All I know is America and other countries have done a lot worse for a lot less.

I want to live in a world that is better than this

One where we don't justify the deaths of others for differences

I'm tired.

[stillunusual]

Who knew that it's totally anti-imperialist to want more Lebensraum….

[fatehbaz]

Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria, by Brock Cutler, begins with an account of food poisoning in nineteenth-century French Algeria. A deep rural crisis of drought and famine in the late 1860s had reduced the amount of fuelwood coming into the city of Algiers, leading one baker to use construction debris shipped to the colony from Paris to fire his bread oven in early 1869. The lead paint on that metropolitan rubble, product of Baron Haussmann’s transformation of the French capital, became a toxic element in the bread that sickened settlers in the colony. The author [...] treats this small episode as a microcosm of the divides, the unruly circulations, and the nonhuman actants and processes that characterized the early decades of colonial rule in Algeria, which the French invaded in 1830.

These divisions and circulations include those between metropole and colony, between modern and not modern, between person and environment, between human and nonhuman, and across the colonial frontier with Tunisia. [...]

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The first [of three major narrative veins in Cutler's study involves] [...] bread [...], the consumption of wheat grown on the Mediterranean plains of Algeria [...]. The toxic bread affair of 1869, however, was a reminder that the distance between metropole and colony was not so great. [...] The second vein examines the production of new ecosystem relations [...]. [T]he violence of decades of uneven conquest and the confiscation, appropriation, and enclosure of land and its reorientation toward regional and international [European] markets between 1830 and 1870 thoroughly destabilized rural Algerian life. This fragility turned lethal in the final years of the 1860s, when a series of environmental crises - locust plagues and drought - caused widespread famine and ultimately the deaths of up to eight hundred thousand Algerians. [...] The emptied land and cheap labor that were outcomes of the environmental crises enabled [France] to complete the capitalist transformation of rural Algeria [...]. Another outcome of the environmental crisis was an increase in the number of rural Algerians migrating to cities, where they were perceived as both a threat to public order and a reservoir of potential labor energy. [...]

[D]ivisionary logics, including the line between city and countryside and the modern gendered subject, were being performed, produced, and reproduced in the context of environmental crisis.

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[Another] major element [in Cutler's scholarship] [...] is an exploration of the complex politics of policing French Algeria’s eastern border with Tunisia, in the era before French colonial rule began in the latter polity in 1881. [...] [T]his border, officially demarcated in 1846, was only integrated into local ecosystem relations over the course of subsequent decades. Repeated performance of sovereignty through patrols and taxation of pastoral communities that lived and worked in the frontier commons instantiated the border, but the border region remained resistant to the forms of modern statecraft, such as standardization, bureaucratization, and written transactions, that French authorities preferred. [...] [Cutler] draws on intentionally “mundane” examples to show how they were critical to the steady reproduction of a modern imperial border (p. 47). [...] [A specific] episode of transborder [dispute] [...] in 1869 [...] became a referndum within the settler community on the virtues of military rule and a reminder for that [European] community of [supposed] indigenous incompatability with modernity. [...]

[T]he various divisions illuminated by the story - between modern and not, between inside and outside, and between European and Algerian - were performances staged at various times and places, not eternal features of the society or landscape. The repetition of “divisionary logics,” in the author’s telling, were at the heart of French colonial modernity (p. 149). [...]

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[T]horough reading of the French colonial archive, from official sources as well as memoirs, newspapers, and periodicals [...], [t]he first two narrative threads, on bread and disaster, demonstrate the significance of moments of crisis [...] in actually changing the course of history [...] [and] longer-term [...] ecological transformations. The other thread, however, examines how the mundane performance of modern sovereign power and its divisionary logics, over time, made real or even naturalized the new imperial frontier between Algeria and Tunisia. Both [...] society-wide crises or the steady performance of the mundane logics of power [...].

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All text above by: Jackson Perry. "Review of Cutler, Brock. Ecologies of Imperialism in Algeria". H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. April 2024. Published online at: h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=59842. [Text within brackets added by me for clarity. Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[xerserise]

The work we must do under a Donald Trump presidency is much the same work we would have had to do under a Kamala Harris presidency.

If you are able, find organizations in your area that are helping people, and join them. Search as if you were in need of the services, so you can see what your area has and what it is missing. Talk with friends, discuss your strengths, find things you can do in your everyday life that make a difference. There's a lot of work to do.

[saturngalore]

just seen the most infuriating post ever in a long time oh my fucking god

[flower-tea-fairies]

Hello dears ! I am asking you to support my campaign to help me to reach my goal. I am now in bad need to your support to help me stay alive and safe. Gaza is a very dangerous place either on the level of livelihood or on the level of souls. I need your monetary support to ensble me to get the basic needs for my family till Rafah crossing point reopens to move my family to safety and peace.Pleasd help a family be alive through your small donations or througn your shares to others.Thank you so much for your stand beside people in need .

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