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Ben Freeman at the Center for International Policy has a new report [[link removed]] out, tracking how governments from around the world fund major Washington think tanks as part of their efforts to influence American foreign policy. Think tanks like to present themselves as purveyors of unbiased expertise, but they have to make payroll like any other organization. The groups that pay the bills exert varying levels of power over think tank outputs. For example, a recent leak of emails from Emirati ambassador to the US, Yousef Otaiba, shows that the Atlantic Council let Otaiba edit parts of a Council report on US-Iran relations before it was published. The United Arab Emirates was the Council’s single largest foreign government funder between 2014 and 2018.

How opioids got sold

Last week saw a major new revelation [[link removed]] about how corruption within the health care industry contributed to the opioid epidemic. As detailed in a settlement in federal court last week, an opioid manufacturer believed by journalists to be Purdue Pharma paid a software company named Practice Fusion nearly $1 million to build what amounted to a pop-up ad within doctors’ electronic health records systems that automatically recommended prescribing opioids for patients reporting certain levels of pain.

The pop-up showed up around 230 million times between 2016 and 2019, and Practice Fusion estimated that it put nearly 3,000 more patients on opioids and increased drug sales by $11.3 million.

Practice Fusion’s electronic records software was popular, with a user base of around 30,000 practices, because it was free to use and ad-supported. The government alleges that Practice Fusion had similar schemes with 14 other companies, but the company has only admitted to the opioid deal at this point.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] American submarines can have low-yield nukes ... as a treat

The Pentagon recently decided to deploy low-yield nuclear weapons on submarines, a decision that has left many nuclear experts’ heads scratched, shaken, or banged against desks [[link removed]], depending on their level of resignation toward the Trump administration’s nuclear posturing. The bombs, while small by nuclear standards, still make America’s most powerful conventional explosive, the so-called “Mother of All Bombs,” look like a zygote by comparison.

One source of frustration from nuclear experts is that it’s unclear what the low-yield weapons are actually for. The Pentagon claims they need them to deter similar-yield weapons in the Russian arsenal, but it isn’t at all clear what the weapons are actually meant to target. The low-yield warheads are too unwieldy for battlefield use and too small to deliver the kind of mass damage upon which mutually assured destruction depends.

More concerningly, the low-yield weapons are dangerous in and of themselves. They are delivered in the same missiles as regular old world-ending nukes, so if American subs launched a low-yield weapon, Russian missileers would have to wait patiently for it to detonate to understand that they were only in a junior-varsity nuclear war and not witnessing the beginning of The Big One, which seems like perhaps too much to ask people on the receiving end of a nuclear launch.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] MIDNIGHT OIL

This week on Midnight Oil, we speak to Zachariah Mampilly, Marxe chair of international affairs at the City University of New York’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs. He studies issues of rebel governance and political violence and Critical State readers will remember his recent article [[link removed]]with Nimmi Gowrinathan on civilian political power under the rule of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka. He spoke with Critical State about his efforts as a researcher and educator to wrench the study of international relations away from its obsession with those atop the international politics and security food chain, and recenter discussions around how people and governments in the “global south” interact with the international order.

WHAT IS THE HARDEST PROBLEM YOU WORK ON?

As a scholar with roots in the global south,, I am drawn to questions of international order and how it affects communities in what we used to refer to as the “third world.” My research takes place in Africa and South Asia, where I’ve examined how states and non-state actors attempt to challenge their uneven incorporation into global capitalism and the Western liberal order. At the level of the state, I am interested in both historic and contemporary efforts by governments in the third world to develop alternatives to the existing world order. And at the level of non-states, I’m interested in how ordinary people try to challenge their incorporation into the international order through both violent and non-violent resistance.

So to come to your question, the hardest problem I focus on is what the shifting global order means for the countries of the global south. Postcolonial or decolonial theory has done wonders in exploring both how the existing world order has its roots in European colonial domination. And how the afterlives of colonial rule extend into the contemporary period. But as much as I’ve been influenced by those frames, I find them severely lacking in understanding the current disposition.

Undoubtedly, we are living through an era that is witnessing the decline of the Euro-American dominated global order. But what comes next? And what does it mean for ordinary people in Latin America, Africa and Asia? I don’t think we can simply adapt existing theories to contemporary dynamics and assume that will tell us something meaningful. We need to instead start by looking at how the lives of people across the global south are being transformed by political and economic forces that they have had little say in shaping.

To give two examples, climate change is a global phenomenon, but its impact is felt most among populations that have done the least to deserve it. Yet it is clear, any resolution will require the greatest sacrifices be made precisely by these populations, whether in terms of livelihoods, health or even the ability to remain in their own countries. Or consider the triumph of global capitalism, which has successfully coopted elites from across the global south in ways that complicate simple binaries of the West and the Rest. Africa alone has seven of the 10 most unequal countries in the world, yet the conversation around inequality is largely centered on its impact on the capitalist democracies of the West. So any talk of fundamental global challenges must start with Africa, Asia and Latin America, rather than the current approach that emphasizes Europe, North America and to a lesser degree, East Asia.

HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT TRYING TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM?

I’d like to think I contribute in two ways. First, as a scholar and educator, I try to reframe conversations around inequality, democracy and global order from the perspective of the global south. I work to center the voices of intellectuals and activists from the global south rather than pushing a Western perspective onto them. In my new position at the City University of New York, I am working to build a new Master’s in International Affairs program at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs that is breaking from legacy international affairs programs that almost solely focus on the work of Western scholars and theories. Instead, I am interested in bottom up approaches to global order that deemphasize governments, multinational corporations or institutions like the United Nations and International Monetary Fund to instead center the experiences of social movements, refugees and even rebel groups in constructing a new world order.

Second, I work directly with social movements to forge transnational connections and to provide them with material and intellectual support. This has proven remarkably challenging. Western foundations often speak of wanting to support social movements, but really they are more likely to support formalized nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). NGOs can play an important role, but are often limited politically by their structural position within the international order. Figuring out how to provide direct support to activists is incredibly difficult, but an essential task as they are often the only actors able to articulate truly independent solutions to our common challenges and who can mobilize the population from the bottom up to enact them.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Harith Hasan analyzed [[link removed]] the split between young Iraqis protesting against corruption in their government and leading Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who recently announced that he is no longer supporting the protests. Some analysts believed that Sadr abandoning the protesters would signal the end of marches, but instead, protests have carried on. Some members of Sadr’s organization have even denounced him and publicly remained in the streets, joining in anger against a government that ranks 162nd in Transparency International’s latest Corruption Perceptions Index.

Mana Mostatabai decried [[link removed]] attacks by Republican senators against her organization, the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). Senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Mike Braun sent a letter to the Justice Department last month accusing NIAC, which advocates for Iranian Americans in Washington, of working in secret for the Iranian government. Mostatabai rejected both the accusation and the wave of harassment that accompanied it, which has included death threats and calls from prominent think-tankers for NIAC staffers to be deported.

Elyse Weingarten reported [[link removed]] on the closure of The Bookworm, a bookstore, cafe and cultural landmark in Beijing. Since opening in 2005, it had become a key meeting place for writers and activists in the city. The store fell victim to Beijing’s new crackdown on land being used for anything other than its zoned purpose. The crackdown aims to increase transparency and decrease real estate corruption, but it is also hurting institutions like The Bookworm that exist outside the city’s planned uses for certain land.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL PLAYED

If the National Labor Relations Board succeeds in its quixotic effort [[link removed]] to ban Scabby The Rat from American picket lines, French lawyers have some ideas [[link removed]] for an alternative approach for artistically encouraging people to respect strikes.

Legendary social scientist James Scott built a career studying the ways people resist state control and the ways states find to control people anyway. Among his best-known arguments is the assertion that state efforts to learn about people are synonymous with efforts to control them, and that people’s attempts to keep information private from the state are a crucial form of resistance. Last week, DARPA cited that same idea to explain its search for ways to predict how local government in areas outside state control will react to state intervention. An anarchist, Scott has always been pretty clear which side of that state-individual divide he’s rooting for, and it isn’t the state, so he likely had mixed feelings about being name-dropped by the Pentagon. On one hand, the Pentagon trying to produce an algorithm to explain rural Afghanistan is great evidence for Scott’s argument. On the other hand, whoever read his book at DARPA clearly missed [[link removed]] the point.

The most boo-able pun [[link removed]] of the week.

Lots of people did the Dolly Parton challenge on Twitter last week, but one person clearly did it best [[link removed]].

The scourge [[link removed]] of international relations writers everywhere.

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Critical State is written by Sam Ratner and is a collaboration between The World and Inkstick Media.

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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.

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