Quartz: Why India has never seen a military dictatorship

Military dictatorships have been a common phenomenon in the post-colonial states of Asia and Africa, and in the 1950s and 1960s, a dictatorship in India was not an impossibility. In fact, while covering the 1967 general elections, The Times correspondent, Neville Maxwell, prophesied that these might well be the last elections ever in the country. And he was not the only one who believed that sooner or later, India would fall under military rule. [...]

The question why the Indian Army never attempted to seize power has sometimes been attributed to the fact that it is disciplined, highly professional, and steeped in proud 250-year-old traditions inherited from the British. But this theory doesn’t work, because the Pakistani army was born out of the same traditions and that didn’t seem to stop it from assuming power. [...]

In order to understand what didn’t happen in India, it is perhaps useful to first look at what did happen in Pakistan. The military dictatorship in Pakistan has had an interesting pre-history. It begins in undivided India, where the largest single component of the army was drawn from the undivided Punjab. Hence at the time of Partition, of all the institutions that Pakistan inherited, the most substantive was its army.

Moreover, while in India the Congress Party was a highly evolved, durable organisation, in Pakistan the Muslim League was not much more than “Jinnah and his Private Secretary.” Hence, there was a dangerous structural imbalance in Pakistan, especially after Jinnah’s death in 1948. [...]

Wilkinson explains how this ‘coup-proofing’ was implemented, through a package of carefully thought-out measures, ranging from diversifying the ethnic composition of the armed forces to setting up rugged command and control structures, re-casting the order of precedence between civil and military authorities, paying close attention to promotions, disallowing army officers from making public statements, creating a counter-balancing paramilitary force, and topping off this entire effort with little touches like ensuring that retired chiefs of staff are usually sent off as ambassadors to faraway countries.

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Politico: What’s It Like to See a Democracy Destroyed?

I found her account incredibly compelling—filled with the absurdities of life as a society unravels. At first, it seems almost comic, as when Dreier spends the day reporting at a plastic surgeon’s office and watches eager would-be beauty queens coming in with cut-rate Chinese bootleg breast implants once others became impossible to find. And Dreier tells me she spent her first year in Venezuela convinced the media narrative about the country falling apart was all wrong.

Then, Dreier recounts, her life changed. First, her friends—middle-class young professionals like herself—started losing weight. She lost power and water. Crime became so rampant her colleagues congratulated her on a “good robbery” when she was held up in broad daylight and all she lost were her belongings. By the time she was grabbed off the street after an interview one day earlier this year, she was overwhelmed with relief when she found out she’d been snatched by the secret police and not far more vicious kidnappers. [...]

But, basically, the U.S., with those sanctions, which are very important symbolically—but, they said that they were going to freeze all of Maduro’s assets, and all the headlines were: Maduro’s Assets Frozen. There’s no reason to think Maduro has any U.S. assets. This is a man who railed every day against the U.S. empire. Why would he put his money in Miami property, or anything here?

So, the sanctions will prevent him from buying things in the U.S. and from doing business with Americans, which he wasn’t trying to do anyway, and Trump gets to say that this is a big, strong step. And Maduro, in Caracas, is also making hay with these sanctions and spending lots of time talking about them, and saying that they prove that the U.S. is a bully and that the U.S. is trying to ruin the Venezuelan economy—so, kind of a gift. [...]

That’s oil sanctions. Ninety-five percent of Venezuela’s revenue comes from oil. It’s basically the only way the government is getting money right now. And the U.S. happens to be the biggest customer for that oil, and one of the very few governments still paying cash for oil. So, if the U.S. put an oil embargo in place, that would have a huge, dramatic effect, immediately, on Venezuela, and the government would probably default. There would be a reshuffling of alliances. But, it always seems to be that there are only bad options with Venezuela, because those oil sanctions would also probably lead to maybe famine-level hunger, to extreme suffering, and nobody really wants that either.

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The Guardian: Unlearning the myth of American innocence

For all their patriotism, Americans rarely think about how their national identities relate to their personal ones. This indifference is particular to the psychology of white Americans and has a history unique to the US. In recent years, however, this national identity has become more difficult to ignore. Americans can no longer travel in foreign countries without noticing the strange weight we carry with us. In these years after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the many wars that followed, it has become more difficult to gallivant across the world absorbing its wisdom and resources for one’s own personal use. Americans abroad now do not have the same swagger, the easy, enormous smiles. You no longer want to speak so loud. There is always the vague risk of breaking something. [...]

By the time I got to high school, I knew that communism had gone away, but never learned what communism had actually been (“bad” was enough). Religion, politics, race – they washed over me like troubled things that obviously meant something to someone somewhere, but that had no relationship to me, to Wall, to America. I certainly had no idea that most people in the world felt those connections deeply. History – America’s history, the world’s history – would slip in and out of my consciousness with no resonance whatsoever. [...]

When my best friend from Wall revealed one night that she hadn’t heard of John McEnroe or Jerry Garcia, some boys on the dormitory hall called us ignorant, and white trash, and chastised us for not reading magazines. We were hurt, and surprised; white trash was something we said about other people at the Jersey Shore. My boyfriend from Wall accused me of going to Penn solely to find a boyfriend who drove a Ferrari, and the boys at Penn made fun of the Camaros we drove in high school. Class in America was not something we understood in any structural or intellectual way; class was a constellation of a million little materialistic cultural signifiers, and the insult, loss or acquisition of any of them could transform one’s future entirely. [...]

But for me there was also an intervention – a chance experience in the basement of Penn’s library. I came across a line in a book in which a historian argued that, long ago, during the slavery era, black people and white people had defined their identities in opposition to each other. The revelation to me was not that black people had conceived of their identities in response to ours, but that our white identities had been composed in conscious objection to theirs. I’d had no idea that we had ever had to define our identities at all, because to me, white Americans were born fully formed, completely detached from any sort of complicated past. Even now, I can remember that shiver of recognition that only comes when you learn something that expands, just a tiny bit, your sense of reality. What made me angry was that this revelation was something about who I was. How much more did I not know about myself? [...]

My learning process abroad was threefold: I was learning about foreign countries; I was learning about America’s role in the world; and I was also slowly understanding my own psychology, temperament and prejudices. No matter how well I knew the predatory aspects of capitalism, I still perceived Turkey’s and Greece’s economic advances as progress, a kind of maturation. No matter how deeply I understood the US’s manipulation of Egypt for its own foreign-policy aims, I had never considered – and could not grasp – how American policies really affected the lives of individual Egyptians, beyond engendering resentment and anti-Americanism. No matter how much I believed that no American was well-equipped for nation-building, I thought I could see good intentions on the part of the Americans in Afghanistan. I would never have admitted it, or thought to say it, but looking back, I know that deep in my consciousness I thought that America was at the end of some evolutionary spectrum of civilisation, and everyone else was trying to catch up.

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Al Jazeera: Tensions build along Iraq-Iran border

The Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), which seeks Kurdish autonomy in the country and has been exiled to Iraq, has been intensifying its presence along the border area in recent days.

The separatist group helped to defend northern Iraq against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group (ISIL, also known as ISIS), and with the battle for Mosul now over, it is focusing on consolidating its control over parts of the Iraq-Iran border.

Last month, the KDPI and local villagers reported an Iranian shelling attack near the party's bases in Iraq, which they described as an escalation of military operations. The upcoming Iraqi Kurdish independence referendum in September could also change the game in this crucial border area.

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CityLab: The Sounds of Protest Are Getting Louder

Fowkes is the founder of a new project called Protest and Politics—a sound map that documents the sounds of protest, as they grow louder in cities around the world. Indeed, from Brexit to Trump’s election, the past year has known more protests than many before it. [...]

The majority of the sounds that comprise Protest and Politics are from the last decade, but some date back to as early as the first Gulf War, in 1991. Many come from the protests following Trump’s election in the US and Brexit in the U.K., but they also run as far afield as women’s rights protests in Istanbul, and support for Narendra Modi in New Delhi. [...]

The project is part of a larger program Fowkes founded called Cities and Memory—a world map that uses sound to document the lived experience of any given destination. Fowkes, who is a digital consultant and hobby musician based in Oxford, curates each of his projects in his spare time. The majority of his field recordings are volunteer submissions, and the rest he records himself. Since its founding in 2014, hundreds of volunteer collaborators have collected all types of sounds (One project, “The Next Station,” documents the sounds of the London Underground, while another called “Sacred Spaces” collects sounds from churches and temples all over the world. One contributor even mapped the sound of the internet.). [...]

Sound maps have certain strengths that visual maps lack, especially when it comes to documenting cities. Daily life moves quickly—the experience of a place is easily affected by current events, or even just the time of day. Think of the Tokyo fish market, which is alive with splashing and yelling at dawn but settles to a hum by noon. With a sound map, you’re capturing more than the noise of a place—you’re also documenting the way it sounds at a particular point in time.

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Business Insider: China has suddenly stopped buying foreign property

The Chinese pulled 84% of their overseas property investments globally in the first half of 2017 after the government began officially frowning on a "negative list" of foreign investments that were attracting Chinese cash, according to Morgan Stanley.

The Chinese were 25% of buyers of central London commercial property in 2016, a recent note to clients from Morgan Stanley's research team said. [...]

"Over half the investment in the City over the past year has come from Asian investors," Morgan Stanley said, and only 15% comes from the UK. ("The City" refers only to London's financial district.)

In total, Chinese investment in foreign property globally was estimated at $10.6 billion in 2016. Morgan Stanley said it has dropped to $1.7 billion this year, a decline of 84%, and expects it to stay low next year. [...]

In the last few weeks, the China Banking Regulatory Commission began cutting off funding for foreign property investments.

Instead, the government wants investors to pour money into projects associated with its One Belt, One Road project to link China with the West via land. It called investments in property, hotels, cinema, media, and sports clubs “irrational," the Morgan Stanley team reported.

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Quartz: Germany’s diesel scandal shines a light on how cozy the government is with carmakers

Bild newspaper reported on Sunday that Lower Saxony state premier Stephan Weil let Volkswagen edit his 2015 speech to the regional parliament addressing the diesel scandal. After vetting by VW, the speech, hailing VW as a “pearl of German industry,” made it sound like the carmaker didn’t manipulate emissions on purpose. Lower Saxony, Germany’s biggest state, has a 20% stake in VW—and Weil sits on its supervisory board.

No representatives from consumer protection or environmental groups were invited to the summit, provoking criticism that the government’s priority was shielding a lucrative industry, rather than holding it to account. “Maybe this relationship has gotten a little too close,” environment minister Barbara Hendricks said, following news last month that the country’s carmakers allegedly ran a price-fixing cartel for years.

Timo Lange of German non-profit organization LobbyControl notes that it is “embarrassing” that the VW scandal was uncovered by American authorities instead of German ones. Indeed, a glance at the number of auto execs who have made the transition to politics, and vice-versa, suggests a well-oiled revolving door. A few examples: Matthias Wissmann, the transport minister when Angela Merkel was environment minister, has been the president of the German Automotive Industry Association since 2007. Eckart von Klaeden was state secretary in the chancellery (part Angela Merkel’s inner circle after she won power) before becoming head of external relations for Daimler. Thomas Steg was deputy government spokesman for seven years, then joined Volkswagen as its chief lobbyist. Merkel’s campaign manager Joachim Koschnicke used to be Opel’s chief lobbyist.

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Political Geography Now: Map: Which Schengen Borders are Closed to Passport-Free Travel in August 2017?

With the spike in numbers of refugees and other immigrants arriving in Europe in the past two years, many Schengen countries have rushed to control the flow of people by using these special temporary exemptions. When we published our previous map of border controls within Schengen this past February, there were seven member countries reserving the right to perform border checks. Now there's one fewer, and the remaining six have renewed their declarations - perhaps for the last time.

It's important to note that the border controls shown on the map above are the maximum allowed under each country's declaration - actual enforcement may be extensive, limited, or even absent depending on the circumstances.

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MapPorn: High-income countries, World Bank 2015.

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