• 244: How to Vaccinate Behind Enemy Lines: To Stop the Pandemic, the World Will Need to Work With Bad Actors, submitted on 2022-05-16 22:59:09+08:00.
• 245: The Collateral Damage in China’s Covid War: Are Beijing’s Harsh Measures Undermining Its Hold On Power?, submitted on 2022-05-17 23:54:32+08:00.
• 246: The Right Way to Sanction Russian Energy: How to Slash Moscow’s Revenues Without Crippling the Global Economy, submitted on 2022-05-17 23:56:56+08:00.
• 247: The Russian Military’s People Problem: It’s Hard for Moscow to Win While Mistreating Its Soldiers, submitted on 2022-05-18 22:23:33+08:00.
• 248: Bosnia’s Dangerous Path: How U.S. Policy Is Making a Bad Situation Worse, submitted on 2022-05-18 22:24:50+08:00.
• 249: A Crime in Search of a Court: How to Hold Russia Accountable, submitted on 2022-05-19 22:41:23+08:00.
• 250: Out of Africa: The Real Roots of the Modern World, submitted on 2022-05-20 21:20:05+08:00.

244: How to Vaccinate Behind Enemy Lines: To Stop the Pandemic, the World Will Need to Work With Bad Actors, submitted on 2022-05-16 22:59:09+08:00.

—– 244.1 —–2022-05-16 22:59:43+08:00:

[SS from the article by Susanna Campbell, Jacob Kurtzer, and Hilary Matfess]

“By now, it is well known that the world is struggling with unequal access to vaccines. In high-income countries, roughly 75 percent of people are now fully vaccinated. But in low- and lower-middle-income countries, logistical troubles continue to plague the rollout of vaccines, and less than 35 percent of people have received a complete set of shots.

To try to close this gap, wealthy countries and international institutions have focused on partnering with less affluent states. They have funded and donated doses to the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access program, or COVAX, which allocates shots to poorer countries. Sometimes, they’ve given out vaccines and aid directly. But although such efforts are important, the current system’s focus on working with and through states overlooks some of the world’s most vulnerable people: the 60–80 million people who live in areas outside of formal governmental control.

To reach these people is a daunting task—and not just because it requires dealing with violent actors and moving vaccines through conflict zones. Current counterterrorism restrictions in the United States and many other leading donor countries bar international aid agencies from providing any group designated as a terrorist organization with “material support.” This broad definition means that aid organizations cannot easily get doses into areas governed by such groups. To truly vaccinate the world against COVID-19 and prevent the outbreak of deadly new variants, the United States and other governments will need to do more than just donate shots and finance efforts to distribute them. They will need to understand that their laws regarding terrorist groups are making it more difficult to end the pandemic.”

245: The Collateral Damage in China’s Covid War: Are Beijing’s Harsh Measures Undermining Its Hold On Power?, submitted on 2022-05-17 23:54:32+08:00.

—– 245.1 —–2022-05-17 23:55:41+08:00:

[SS from the article by Yanzhong Huang, Professor at Seton Hall University’s School of Diplomacy and International Relations, and Director of the school’s Center for Global Health Studies.]

“Two and a half years into the pandemic, China is rapidly losing its battle to maintain its “zero COVID” goal. The government’s total lockdown of Shanghai, its largest city and financial hub, has created economic chaos and engendered social backlash from tens of millions of residents who have been prevented from going outside, even to obtain food or to seek health care. Despite such protocols, the government was unable to prevent hundreds of thousands of new cases from emerging in the city during the lockdown, while causing much unnecessary hardship and suffering. Now a similar problem threatens the capital itself. Unwilling to acknowledge the changing nature of the virus, the Chinese government continues to claim that it can outrace the virus through extreme containment measures, even amid growing popular discontent.

For all countries, COVID-19 of course remains a public health problem. But for China, the chief risks of the virus have become less epidemiological than political and economic. As the experience of other countries has shown, with appropriate strategies in place the Omicron variant can be managed and contained. But the Chinese government insists on maintaining policies that are unsustainable and have little grounding in science. In doing so, it has shown an increasing willingness to put China’s economy, and even its social stability, at risk.

For Chinese President Xi Jinping, the stakes could not be higher. The all-important 20th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Congress is scheduled for later this year, and the purported success of Beijing’s COVID-fighting strategy has been a central part of state propaganda almost since the pandemic began. If Beijing loses the trust and support of the public on this core issue—at a time when the Chinese economy itself is suffering from continual lockdown shocks—a regime once known for its technocratic efficiency could soon face a growing legitimacy crisis.”

246: The Right Way to Sanction Russian Energy: How to Slash Moscow’s Revenues Without Crippling the Global Economy, submitted on 2022-05-17 23:56:56+08:00.

—– 246.1 —–2022-05-17 23:57:15+08:00:

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247: The Russian Military’s People Problem: It’s Hard for Moscow to Win While Mistreating Its Soldiers, submitted on 2022-05-18 22:23:33+08:00.

—– 247.1 —–2022-05-18 22:23:45+08:00:

Find Foreign Affairs on Telegram: https://t.me/Foreign_Affairs_Magazine

248: Bosnia’s Dangerous Path: How U.S. Policy Is Making a Bad Situation Worse, submitted on 2022-05-18 22:24:50+08:00.

—– 248.1 —–2022-05-18 22:26:06+08:00:

[SS from the article by Kurt Bassuener and Toby Vogel, Co-Founders of the Democratization Policy Council]

“In the Balkans, and especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina, images from Ukraine of besieged cities, massacres, and mass displacement are re-traumatizing a society that has never been allowed to heal after the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991. Along with the rest of the world, Bosnians have watched the razing of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol with horror. But having lived through the siege of Sarajevo and similar atrocities, Bosnians recognize the velocity and brutality of Russia’s war on Ukraine more viscerally than others­­—and it puts them on edge.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine comes at a time when the Western Balkans have reached a level of tension and uncertainty unseen in decades. Ethnic nationalism threatens to destabilize the region once again, with local political leaders manipulating the public’s worst fears. President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia has assumed close to complete control over his country’s media and is stoking unrest in Serb-inhabited parts of Kosovo. In Bosnia, his close ally Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of Bosnia’s tripartite state presidency, has advocated for secession of the Serb-controlled parts of the country. A similar alliance exists between the government of Croatia (an EU and NATO member) and Dragan Covic, the nationalist Bosnian Croat leader, who has called for what would amount to further ethnic partitioning of Bosnia. Many Bosnians have responded to growing corruption, the impunity enjoyed by political elites, and economic hardship by leaving the country altogether. The UN estimates that roughly 55,000 people leave Bosnia each year and has warned that if this pattern continues, Bosnia’s population could drop to 1.6 million in 2070 from today’s three million.

Russia has played a hand in these developments. Putin has encouraged separatism, with the aim of generating disruption on the West’s frontiers. For years, Russia has actively sought to impede and deter Bosnia’s pursuit of EU and NATO membership, asserting that such moves constituted a provocation. Russia’s ambassador to Bosnia recently pointed to the invasion of Ukraine as an example of what could happen to Bosnia should it pursue NATO membership.

But the Kremlin’s activities have depended heavily on local leaders pursuing their own agendas. What’s most troubling is that these leaders are often the same people the EU and the United States present as their partners in Bosnia’s democratic and economic development. By relying on a handful of “ethnocrats,” the EU and the United States have put the region on a dangerous path, one that could end with the dissolution of Bosnia and the redrawing of borders across the region—neither of which would happen peacefully.

It didn’t have to be this way. The 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement ended the war and gave the West the tools it needed to forestall instability and violence and help keep the country on a more unified and democratic path. But those tools have gone unused for years. Instead, Western powers have allowed Bosnia to backslide into instability as nationalism surges in Serbia and Croatia. Now, the war in Ukraine represents an opportunity for the United States and its allies to carry out a long-overdue recalibration of their approach to Bosnia. The West has united in response to Russian aggression. That same energy and attention should be applied to the Balkans so that local actors who benefit from instability and Russian interference can no longer keep their chokehold on the state.”

249: A Crime in Search of a Court: How to Hold Russia Accountable, submitted on 2022-05-19 22:41:23+08:00.

—– 249.1 —–2022-05-19 22:41:41+08:00:

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250: Out of Africa: The Real Roots of the Modern World, submitted on 2022-05-20 21:20:05+08:00.

—– 250.1 —–2022-05-20 21:21:11+08:00:

[SS from the article by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Professor of African Political Thought at and Chair of the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University]

“Africa remains poorly understood by the rest of the world and frequently distorted in global conversations, whether in the work of African and Africanist scholars, the reporting of journalists, or the missives of aid workers. They tend to see Africa as exceptional, defined by its difference. An asymmetry shapes the way people—Africans and non-Africans alike—describe the continent. For instance, Belgium (with its perennial tensions between French speakers and Flemish speakers), Canada (home to a sometimes rancorous Québécois separatism), and Russia (where many ethnic minorities are uneasily parceled into republics) are seen as multinational federations, but the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, and Nigeria are sites of so-called nation building, where motley tribes need to be forged into nations. What counts as federalism elsewhere becomes tribalism in Africa.

Africa even as a geographic concept remains fraught. The continent is often divided between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, a distinction that traces back to the nineteenth century and is rooted in racist beliefs about the differences between the groups in the predominantly Arab northern areas and those in what was then called “Black Africa.” The German philosopher Georg Hegel, for instance, dubbed the northern part of the continent “European Africa” to yoke the cultural legacy of Egypt to Europe while denying that Africa was ever a part of the movement of history. The continued use of this distinction maintains the unjustified bifurcation of the continent in the global imagination.

Africa also manages to exist outside of time. It is the only continent whose history intellectuals are content to reduce to just three periods: a long precolonial period, a relatively short colonial period, and the ongoing post-colonial period. As a result, the sweep of African history pivots around the late-nineteenth-century European conquest of much of the continent. Compare this understanding of the African past to its European equivalents. Scholars break up European history into a plethora of periods, from classical antiquity to the so-called Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and so on. No one deigns to periodize Europe’s history simply in terms of colonialism. Africa, on the other hand, is the land that time forgot, dragged into the march of history only through its encounter with Europe.

An undeniable consequence of this way of thinking is the near-total erasure of Africa; its social, political, and cultural life; its intellectual contributions; and the biographies of its thinkers from the annals of global history. The challenge of retrieving Africa from this mute presence motivates Born in Blackness, the latest book by the writer and journalist Howard French. He combines the investigative and descriptive tools of a seasoned, much-traveled reporter with the scholarly credentials of an academic working within archives. The book explores the complex relations between Africans and Europeans in the centuries before the imposition of formal colonialism at the end of the nineteenth century, rejecting much of the received wisdom about this period. In so doing, French aims for a bigger target than merely illuminating Africa’s past: he demonstrates in this magisterial synthesis that Africa was never marginal to global events; rather, it is the place where the modern world came into being.”