Features

WHEN CITIZENSHIP BECOMES CASTE

Birthright citizenship in the United States was never a bureaucratic detail or an immigration loophole. It was a direct assault on white supremacy’s original theory of the nation—that Black presence was permissible only as labor, never as belonging. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment sought to end that theory for good. That amendment did not just welcome formerly enslaved Black people into the civic body; it attempted to inoculate the Constitution itself against the return of caste. Yet white supremacy, in every generation, finds new ways to renegotiate the boundaries of who counts as fully American. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the consolidated case challenging lower-court rulings that struck down Trump’s attempt to repeal birthright citizenship. This signals that the highest court in the land is willing to consider whether whiteness may once again serve as the gatekeeper of America’s future. Timothy Benston of The Black Eye Substack writes that if this administration and this Court seek to restore whiteness as the measure of full belonging, they must face resistance equal to the enormity of that threat.

THE PARADOX OF TRUMP’S DRUG WAR

This week, President Donald Trump pardoned a man federal prosecutors described as the architect of a “narco-state” who moved 400 tons of cocaine to United States shores. In September, the US military began killing people on Caribbean vessels based on unproven suspicions they were doing the same thing on a far smaller scale. The strikes have drawn allegations of war crimes; the contradiction has drawn bipartisan scrutiny. In an explainer for JURIST, Ingrid Burke Friedman examines the White House legal justifications for the air-strikes, and the response from international law experts. She also dissects the politics behind the divergent approaches to the pardoned Honduran ex-president Juan Orlando Hernández and the incumbent Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro—who faces trafficking charges in the US, and a destabilization campaign.

CHINA’S MEGA-HYDRO SCHEME SPARKS OUTCRY IN INDIA

The Chinese state’s hydro-electric activities on Tibet’s Yarlung Tsangpo River—known in India as the Brahmaputra—have long been a source of tension with the downstream countries of India and Bangladesh, which cite a risk of ecological disaster. Now Beijing has started building a colossal dam at the Tsangpo’s great bend in southeastern Tibet, close to the border with the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. Chinese Premier Li Qiang just attended the groundbreaking ceremony for the Medog Hydropower Station in Nyingchi, Tibet Autonomous Region, and hailed it as the “project of the century.” But the $168 billion hydro-dam, which will be the world’s largest when it is completed, is described by Arunachal Pradesh leaders as an “existential threat.” CounterVortex correspondent Nava Thakuria reports from Northeast India.

PKK DISSOLUTION: THE LONG FAREWELL TO VANGUARDISM

The formal dissolution of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which had waged an armed insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984, has implications beyond the borders of Turkey, as the ideology of imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan has won a following among militant Kurds in Syria, Iraq, Iran and the greater diaspora. In an analysis for Britain’s anarchist-oriented Freedom News, writer Blade Runner argues that the PKK dissolution does not necessarily represent a retreat, but is the culmination of a long rethinking of the precepts of vanguardism, ethno-nationalism and separatism in favor of a broader strategic vision emphasizing gender liberation, pluralism and local democracy.

FREE SYRIANS STAND UP FOR PALESTINE

In an unprecedented wave of demonstrations across government-held territory, the Syrian people have taken to the streets not to challenge their own leadership, but to protest Israel’s ongoing human rights atrocities in Gaza and its repeated military strikes on Syrian soil. An explainer by JURIST breaks down what’s fueling the anger, what it signals about a country emerging from decades of harsh internal rule, and why Syrians are rallying around a cause that reaches well beyond their own country’s borders.

LEONARD PELTIER HEADS HOME —AT LAST

Native American activist Leonard Peltier, one of the longest-serving federal prisoners in US history, has been released to home confinement after spending nearly five decades behind bars. His imprisonment stems from a controversial 1977 conviction in the shooting deaths of two FBI agents on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, a case that has been harshly contested between activists and law enforcement for generations. As Peltier returns to his birthplace on North Dakota’s Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, his case continues to raise questions about justice, reconciliation, and the relationship between the federal government and Native American nations. In an explainer for JURIST, Ingrid Burke Friedman looks back on his case and its legacy.

REVOLUTION 9

In a brief memoir written for Canada’s Skunk magazine, CounterVortex editor Bill Weinberg recalls his days as a young neo-Yippie in the 1980s. A remnant faction of the 1960s counterculture group adopted a punk aesthetic for the Reagan era, launched the US branch of the Rock Against Racism movement, brought chaos to the streets at Republican and Democratic political conventions, defied the police in open cannabis “smoke-ins” —and won a landmark Supreme Court ruling for free speech. The Yippie clubhouse at 9 Bleecker Street, the hub for all these activities, has long since succumbed to the gentrification of the East Village, but it survived long enough to provide inspiration to a new generation of radical youth during Occupy Wall Street.

CHIQUITA TO PAY FOR PARAMILITARY TERROR IN COLOMBIA

In 2007, Chiquita—one of the world’s largest banana producers—admitted that for years it had been knowingly paying a Colombian terrorist organization to protect its operations in the country. The consequence was predictably violent, resulting in thousands of murders, disappearances, and acts of torture. This week, nearly two decades later, a federal jury in South Florida ordered the company to pay upwards of $38 million in damages in the first of multiple waves of wrongful death and disappearance lawsuits. In an explainer for JURIST, Ingrid Burke Friedman explores the factors that drove the multinational to make these payments, the consequences, and the legal impact.

THE NEW ZAPATISTA AUTONOMY

Last week the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) released a declaration, setting out a new structure for the autonomous indigenous communities in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas. Uri Gordon of the British anarchist journal Freedom spoke to Bill Weinberg, a longtime radical journalist in New York City, for insight into this change and its significance. Weinberg’s book about the Zapatistas, Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico, was published by Verso in 2000. He spent much time in Chiapas and elsewhere in Mexico during the 1990s, covering the indigenous movements there, prominently including the Zapatistas. In recent decades he has reported widely from South America and is now completing a book about indigenous struggles in the Andes, particularly Peru. He continues to follow the Zapatistas and Chiapas closely, and covers world autonomy movements on his website CounterVortex. In this interview, he explores new pressures in the encroachment of narco-paramilitaries on their territories as a factor prompting the Zapatistas’ current re-organization, and how it actually represents a further localization and decentralization of the movement.

GAS INTRIGUES, ECOLOGY AND THE UKRAINE WAR

Over the past decades, Russia has sought to expand natural gas exports, necessitating construction of pipelines to Europe and China. In addition to profits for the Russian state, fossil fuel exports are a valuable tool for Moscow’s geopolitical ambitions. Since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2014 and the full-scale invasion in 2022, the economic and political stakes have skyrocketed. Russia”s green movements had previously been able to mobilize effective campaigns, winning concessions on pipeline routes through natural areas. Since 2014, however, they have come under increasingly harsh scrutiny from the Russian government, with organizations branded “undesirable” or declared “foreign agents.” Control of pipelines routes through Ukraine itself are also a goad of the Russian war effort. Eugene Simonov and Jennifer Castner of the Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group demonstrate how war fever and militarization threaten resources and ecology across the Russian Federation as well as in Ukraine.

UKRAINE’S DIFFICULT PATH TO JUSTICE

This August, Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv hosted a large international conference entitled “Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine: Justice to be Served.” The conference was aimed at reinvigorating global efforts to prosecute the crime of aggression against Ukraine—a crime which cannot be prosecuted under the current jurisdictional regime of the International Criminal Court. Many in Ukraine believe that justice can be served only when a fully-fledged international special tribunal for the crime of aggression is created. However, some of Ukraine’s most powerful allies endorse a “hybrid” tribunal, such as those created for Sierra Leone and Cambodia—which would rely in large part on Ukrainian national law and raise questions about the reach of jurisdiction. Despite optimistic expectations at the beginning of the year, disagreements between Ukraine and its allies have left some wondering: in the end, will justice indeed be served? International law scholars Mariia Lazareva of Ukraine’s Taras Shevchenko National University and Erik Kucherenko of Oxford provide an analysis for Jurist.

GAZA’S SHOCK ATTACK: UNVEILING THE CONTEXT

The shock attack from the Gaza Strip has terrified Israelis, and the government appears to be preparing a massive retaliation. But writing for Israel’s independent +972 Magazine, Haggai Matar insists that the current horror must bring home the overwhelming context. Contrary to what many Israelis are saying, this is not a “unilateral” or “unprovoked” attack. The dread Israelis feel now is a sliver of what Palestinians have experienced daily under the decades-long military regime in the West Bank, the siege and repeated assaults on Gaza. In recent months, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been marching for “democracy and equality” across the country, with many even saying they would refuse military service because of this government’s authoritarian turn. What those protestors and reserve soldiers need to understand—especially now, as many of them announce they will halt their protests to join the new war on Gaza—is that Palestinians have been struggling for those same demands for decades, facing an Israel that to them is already, and has always been, completely authoritarian.