UPDATE: #Seborga did release a statement yesterday on man arrested in #India for alleged scams including fraudulent claims of diplomatic privileges in the name of it and other #micronations:
UN's #WorldCourt (#ICJ) rules that #Gabon has to give three tiny #islands it seized in 1972 back to #EquatorialGuinea. Having the islands implies rights to surrounding oil-rich seabed, though the actual sea #borders around them are unsettled.
George MacDonald Fraser (1925–2008) – author, historian, journalist, screenwriter – was born100 years ago #OTD, 2 April, 1925
“His dedication to strongly researched stories, built firmly on a bedrock of historical fact, but always with an eye to the humour of a situation, was the core of what appealed to me”
Historical novelist Michael Jecks discusses MacDonald Fraser’s writing for the Royal Literary Fund:
“At one moment when President Richard Nixon was taking part in his inauguration ceremony, he appeared flanked by Lyndon Johnson and Billy Graham […] it was one of those historical coincidences which send a little shudder through the mind…”
– George MacDonald Fraser, THE STEEL BONNETS (1971)
“The #shadow attorney general, Michaelia Cash, has been tasked with explaining more detail on what the #Coalition is announcing on #crime this morning.
Speaking to ABC RN Breakfast, she’s boiled the announcement to establish a national sex offenders disclosure scheme, and a commitment to bolster border resources as a crackdown on “drugs and thugs”.”
🧵Investigative journalism in #Somalia is welcome, and
@washingtonpost report from Feb made valuable contributions to story of #ISIS foreign recruitment in #Puntland state. But the story vastly exaggerates its own importance, among other issues...
Almost all media fall in this trap, but: It's wrong to call #Puntland a "semiautonomous region". Puntland is entirely autonomous (self-governed/controlled), now not even cooperating with #Somalia federal govt. It says it's part of Somalia in principle, but that's about it.
A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders by Jonn Elledge
From the Roman attempts to define the boundaries of civilization, to the secret British-French agreement to carve up the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, to the reason why landlocked Bolivia still maintains a navy, this is a fascinating, witty, and surprising look at the history of the world told through its borders.
A fascinating and surprising history of the world told through the lines people have drawn on maps
People have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on. Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, these lines might often have looked very different if a war or treaty or the decisions of a handful of tired Europeans had gone a different way. By telling the stories of these borders, we can learn a lot about how political identities are shaped, why the world looks the way it does—and about human folly.
So, I meant to share this one a couple of weeks ago, and then I got sick. Still sick, writing is difficult, but I didn't want to just close the window and forget about it. It's an excerpt from Sarah Jaffe's "From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire" about what borders in the modern imperial sense really are, and I think it's worth reading - enough so that I'm probably going to buy her book at some point even if she and I haven't always gotten along.
Borders Are Drawn to Protect Stolen Wealth. They Are a Process, Not a Place.
"Colonialism might have been formally dismantled, but it left its power structures behind. A new form of plunder would take the place of the old; capitalism reorganized but did not depart. “Structural adjustment” would once again bend the economies of the Global South to the will of the North, but this time ostensibly they submitted of their own volition, to receive as a “loan” some of the wealth they had created. Migrants would leave to support families back home; they would leave to flee destabilization and war; they would leave behind lovers, friends, cousins, parents, and send money back each month, a flow of remittances to keep the economy going.
Some 3.5 percent of the world’s population are migrants or refugees, displaced from their homes by violence or financial need or love or some other loss. They are demonized in the rich countries where they go, where there is little interest in their stories beyond checking to see whether the details add up, where they pick and pack and serve food, nurse the sick, drive taxis and trucks, clean and care for children, pack purchases in warehouses, start businesses, write books. They are split into binaries: refugee or migrant, legal or illegal, good or bad. Black and brown or white. “The mass production and social organization of difference,” Harsha Walia wrote, “is at the heart of border-craft.”
The key points to take away here are that border imperialism is not timeless, but rather a relatively recent invention designed to segregate the "haves" (typically white, western, capitalist nations) from the "have nots" who are in fact people and countries being ruthlessly plundered for the benefit of capital. Western imperialist nations didn't build the border regime to protect you or I from migrants, that's just the (false and racist) excuse they offer for the construct of a militarized protection scheme for their stolen wealth. The border is not actually a "place" so much as an ideology and that ideology revolves around the idea that some people (wealthy capitalists) can take whatever they want from folks marked out for extraction and the border itself is part of that marking out. We're spending billions upon billions of dollars and engaging in colonial violence to protect the profits of a wealthy capitalist class whose main business, and indeed only business, is imperial plunder - everything else is just public relations and selling you fear to justify this arrangement.