Hello comrades,
It’s currently reading week for me, meaning I don’t have classes until early March, like a miniature spring break. I’m spending my time working on my own personal creative projects, playing D&D with my friends, cleaning up my notes from my classes, and studying for my statistics midterm.
For my Political Science class we have to write a research paper about one of five topics our professor laid out for us in the syllabus. It isn’t due until mid March but I figured during my break I could compile some sources for the topic I chose:
Using two cases, indicate the main tasks to be included in the rebuilding of failed and collapsed states? Do you agree with the argument that attempts to universalize human rights in such states are imperialistic?
The other topics were not as interesting nor would I be able to talk about Marxism unless I got incredibly creative. This was the only topic that was vague enough that I could talk about whatever compared to the rest focused on very specific scenarios with very specific countries.
I’m writing here because I figured some of you would be willing to point me in the direction of sources to help me with my research paper, or even give me advice on going about writing it.
I figured one of the ‘failed’ states I could talk about is the USSR, and maybe Yugoslavia being the second since I can’t really think of any other collapsed states (Czechoslovakia? A unified Korea?).
I’m sure with this topic I could really dive into why certain states have fallen, how they could’ve survived, and how they can be revived once more. I could also potentially shoehorn information about western influence and plotting leading to collapse of rival states and the continued turmoil the global south continues to face today, imperialism disguised as spreading ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’.
If I should cross post this in another sub please let me know!
If you want to focus on Yugoslavia you can start by reading Michael Parenti’s “To Kill a Nation”. But i would personally choose Libya as a case study and point to the fact that the very same people who now pretend to be all concerned about human rights there were a) the ones who bombed and destroyed it to begin with, and b) are actively keeping out and even in some cases outright murdering refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean to escape those conditions by sinking their boats. Whenever the topic of “failed states” comes up they like to pretend like that is just something that happens inexplicably like an act of nature or due to their own fault, but really it is almost always to do with external aggression, interference, destabilization and economic strangulation, and the imperialists responsible for this are also the ones shouting the loudest about human rights after the fact, and often even at the same time as they are actively doing everything they can to sabotage and try and collapse a country with sanctions and other means. The utter shamelessness and hypocrisy of the liberal “human rights” rhetoric knows no bounds.
My first thought was Libya too, I’m wondering if Afghanistan would work, or if the success of the taliban was too recent to be used as a case study.
Oh Libya is a great one! I realize with this post that there are many states I could talk about that I haven’t thought of before. One of the things that I do want to write about is how outside aggression leads to the collapse of certain states rather than it being “human nature” as many like to point to.