Critical State: Russian Mercenaries in Libya
If you read just one thing this week … read about Wagner's proxy war in North Africa.
Throughout the early stages of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the mercenary army Wagner became a regular feature in news about the grim realities of battle. Yet, as John Lechner wrote in The Baffler, Wagner’s waged a proxy war in Libya as well.
After longtime Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi was killed in 2011, the country descended into a complicated series of civil wars between competing factions. Enter Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner boss who once served as Vladimir Putin’s personal chef.
Prigozhin threw Wagner’s weight behind warlord and general Khalifa Haftar, who badly needed the backing of mercenaries. “By 2017, it was clear to many in both Russia’s private and public sectors that there was money to be made in Libya,” wrote Lechner, “particularly in the region under Haftar’s control.”
In a complex web of competing rivalries, which has drawn the interference of the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and others, Syrian fighters were also recruited to join the fight on Libyan frontlines.
Prigozhin died in 2023, but Libya remains in shambles. After an agreement to remove foreign mercenaries from the country in 2020 — some Wagner forces stuck around — much of the fighting subsided, though the country is still divided between an internationally recognized government in the west and Haftar’s control in the east.
“Ironically, it is also Russia and Turkey’s intervention that produced a military stalemate and prevented the eruption of another war after 2020,” Lechner observed. “Neither at war nor at peace, the real winners in Libya are those comfortably straddling the two, feeding belligerents’ demand for men and material.”
If You Read One More Thing: Unifying Syria
At New Lines Magazine, Rahaf Aldoughli broke down the new Syrian leadership’s drive to unify armed groups in the country after the fall of Bashar al-Assad.
The civil war that started in 2011 shattered Syria into a fragmented map of pro-government forces and anti-regime armed groups, some of which competed for power and control. Now, Aldoughli wrote, the country needs “something like a Marshall Plan” to bring together the “numerous and diverse armed factions into a single, disciplined post-revolutionary national army.”
That task won’t be easy for Syria’s new government, now under the control of former hardline Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham leader Ahmad al-Sharaa. As the country tries to transition from Assad’s rule, Aldoughli argued, “al-Sharaa’s ability to balance power consolidation, factional grievances, economic reforms and external pressures will determine whether the fragile peace holds — or if Syria is destined for another cycle of instability.”
USAID Fallout in the Balkans
In Balkan Insight, Milica Stojanovic reported on a wave of Serbian police raids that targeted nonprofits and human rights groups.
Citing US President Donald Trump’s criticism of USAID, Serbian authorities raided several NGOs that have received financing from the American agency. “All them have been dealing with human and civil rights, fair elections, the rule of law, regional cooperation and similar issues for many years,” Stojanovic noted.
The raids came as students in Serbia have led anti-government protests sparked by an incident that involved the collapse of a concrete canopy and killed 15. The crackdown, one nonprofit director told Balkan Insight, is “a form of pressure and a senseless showing off of the authoritarian regime’s muscles.”
Deep Dive: Christian Nationalism, or White Identity Politics?
As far as terms go, Christian nationalism may be a relatively new one, but it defines a political phenomenon that has deep historical roots. Though nationalism and religious identity often go hand-in-hand, Christian nationalism refers specifically to the ideological belief that the faith should play a central role in government policy.
In the United States, the phrase has gained traction in recent years, especially amid right-wing backlash to COVID-19 lockdown policies. In a new paper at the Social Forces journal, Joshua B. Grubbs and Samuel L. Perry argue that Christian nationalism is effectively “the religion of White identity politics.”
Citing previous work, the authors pointed out that white Americans who tend to view “their own racial group as ‘prototypical Americans’” are more likely than their nonwhite compatriots to back “anti-minority policies.”
Drawing on that, Grubbs and Perry expanded on existing literature that links white identity and Christian nationalist views among white Americans. White Christian nationalists, they wrote, often support political candidates and policies that “preserve the racial status quo,” along with all its inequities, or ones they feel protect the interests of white people.
When it comes to nonwhite Americans, on the other hand, recent research suggests that Christian nationalism, in fact, may tamp down “racial consciousness and solidarity,” Grubbs and Perry explained.
The pair utilized survey data based on a series of questions about religious identity, race, and the relationship between Christianity and the US system of governance. For instance, they asked respondents whether the US was part of “God’s plan,” and whether the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were “divinely inspired.”
In the end, the study found that its assumption was correct: Christian nationalism among white Americans is, in effect, a form of white identity politics. The authors explained that, when they feel under threat, white Americans who adhere to Christian nationalism “potentially evoke a sense of racial threat” and could also “support candidates and policies who will better serve” what they view as the interests of white people.
For nonwhite Americans, however, the authors concluded that “the association was either non-existent, or, in the case of Black Americans, Christian nationalism was negatively associated with their belief that it was important for Black Americans to work together to change laws unfair to Black Americans.”
Grubbs and Perry noted that some iterations of Christian nationalism view themselves as essentially “color blind,” while arguing that it is more accurate to view the ideology among white Americans as an implicit comment on to whom the nation belongs and “whose identity and values” deserve the most attention.
On top of that, Christian nationalism can also serve as a cloak white identity politics, allowing its white adherents to altogether deny that race is a factor in the political ideology.
Future research, they suggested, should probe whether a slump in individual religiosity coincides with “the racialized connotations of Christian nationalism … becom[ing] even more pronounced.”
Show Us the Receipts
In Beirut, Madeline Edwards reports on the Lebanese Ukrainians who, during Israel’s invasion of the country, found themselves stuck between two brutal wars. According to the Ukrainian embassy in Lebanon, there are around 5,000 in the country. “I feel Lebanese and I feel Ukrainian,” one man, whose father is Lebanese and mother Ukrainian, explained. “And I feel the pain of both.”
In the Damascus suburb of Darayya, locals know the costs of the more than 13-year civil war in Syria. In fact, they paid a high toll themselves. In 2012, Bashar al-Assad’s regime carried out a massacre in Darayya that killed some 700 people. Now, Omar Hamed Beato has traveled to Darayya to speak with the residents trying to rebuild their destroyed community.
At The World, Caroline Feraday speaks with immigrant families who are afraid that applying for financial aid at universities could land them in hot water. They fear that if they apply for FAFSA, their immigration status could be forwarded to the immigration authorities, which President Trump has emboldened as part of a far-reaching crackdown. When immigrant parents ask whether the application could put them on the government’s radar, one financial aid administrator explained: “We’re going to have to be really calm in our answers because even we’re uncertain about things right now, because everything is … in flux and changing.”
Behind the Scenes at Inkstick
Inkstick Media recently teamed up with the Incubator for Media Education and Development in Greece (iMEdD) on an analysis that examines the role of private military contractors in the Gaza Strip. Part of a broader project that iMEdD published in the Greek-language Ta Nea newspaper, that analysis will soon be available online at Inkstick.
Critical State is written by Inkstick Media in collaboration with The World.
The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news, and insights from PRX and GBH.
With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”
Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.