Editors’ Note
Issue 13: Order
FEBRUARY 6, 2024
“Order” is a word that seems to always demand a modifier: much ink has been spilled over the current “world order,” “neoliberal order,” “global order,” “political order,” and the like. This month’s issue explores orders of power and politics, past and present, and chronicles their effects on the ground.
In South Sudan, Joshua Craze gets a rare audience with General Johnson Olonyi, a militia leader who fought to protect the Shilluk ethnic minority and now finds himself in a precarious position of political limbo. What’s next for the ousted leader? On the other side of the continent, Clair MacDougall reports on Liberia’s 2023 electoral season, in which warlords forever marked by their civil war-era crimes vied against one another for the people’s vote. “Today, a growing number of Liberians are calling for a war crimes court,” MacDougall writes. To date, no one in command has been prosecuted or acknowledged any wrongdoing. Instead, they have invoked their wartime records as part of their popular appeal.
From Ireland, the poet and essayist Jessica Traynor brings us a dispatch from the nation’s multiplying fields of data centers, which precariously store much of the European continent’s digital information, and are straining the Irish electric grid. “Rather than creating something permanent and inviolable,” Traynor writes, “we’ve made our memories more contingent than ever upon a fantasy of technological stability that, given the constant churn of history, seems inevitably fleeting.”
In the seaside town of Batumi, Georgia, Paul Starobin sits down with a Russian Orthodox Priest who fled Moscow after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “My knowledge is pessimistic. My faith is optimistic,” the priest tells him.
And from El Savador, Danielle Mackey reports on how environmental activists protesting against the government’s expansion of mining operations have found themselves the targets of arbitrary arrests and interrogations.
Finally, our contributors explore disorder in fictional worlds. From Bulgaria, Booker-prize- winning translator Angela Rodel brings us a tale of Ottoman intrigue and betrayal. The Case of Cem was originally published by Vera Mutafchieva in 1967; the novel unfolds over a series of depositions, weaving a complex story of fraternal deception, individual agency, and east-west competition. “We know as well as others that history plays no favorites,” the foreword warns. And Chinese writer Dong Li chronicles the broad sweep of his familial and national history in a moving prose poem, “The Orange Tree”: “Paternal Grandpa hid under the orange tree until he could walk again. / He was made hero of the party. / He protected Maternal Grandparents’ family from execution. / He never mentioned their affiliations. / Day by day, the orange tree grew taller.”
Thank you for reading.
– The Editors