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… read about the camouflage pattern blurring distinctions between friend and foe.

Distinctive camouflage feels like it should be oxymoronic. At its best, camouflage renders its wearer imperceptible, the absence of distinction being what gives the clothing power. At New Lines [[link removed]], Wesley Morgan walks readers through the history of Multicam, the Brooklyn-designed camouflage pattern that has gone from specialized equipment for special operators to the status symbol of choice for any military claiming full professionalism. “Nowhere is this more striking than in Afghanistan, where the Taliban’s Interior Ministry has filmed a series of propaganda videos of its fighters training in MultiCam uniforms seized from the stocks of the defeated government,” writes Morgan. In Ukraine, after 2014, notes Morgan, Multicam knockoffs became the uniform of choice for select units, “with members of the controversial Azov Brigade — whose ranks include neo-Nazis and other far-right ultranationalists — even celebrating it with a band called My Skin Is MultiCam.” After the February 2022 invasion, Multicam spread to regular soldiers in Ukraine’s military while also being the uniform of choice for the Russian mercenary outfit Wagner Group, which is fighting extensively in the country. The widespread use not only causes confusion on the battlefield, but its use by security agencies like the US Department of Homeland Security makes it hard to see domestic security forces as distinct from military ones.

Aftershock Jockeying

A travelogue is a time capsule, its author’s journey fixing in writing the feeling and sense of a space. Such a text can also serve as a map to heartbreak when disaster falls on the exact area visited. Julian Sayarer, writing in Noema [[link removed]], documents his long centennial-anticipating journey across Turkey, now in the wake of the massively devastating earthquakes in February this year.

“I think often of the good-natured but unmistakable swindler who ran that Osmaniye hotel, offering me a crummy price for a crummy room but immediately reducing it by a third when the call to prayer rang from a minaret nearby, as if Allah had tugged his conscience. All I can do is hope that he made it,” writes Sayarer.

In his expansive text, Sayarer details how gecekondu, an Ottoman custom protecting informal housing, led to a longstanding tradition of building community by building residences on the edge of the law. These informal structures set a pattern for larger gambits like skyscrapers built skirting rules and funded in part on the promise of amnesty for failure. Reckoning with the limits of the past, as well as promising to ensure a future lacking in similar disasters of construction, is a question that hangs before the Turkish electorate in their presidential elections.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Ousts and Jousts

Sudan’s civil war between armed factions of its military takes place against a broader revolutionary backdrop, write Horace Campbell and Mahder Serekberhan [[link removed]]. The authors trace the careers of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the main military, and his deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who leads the Rapid Support Forces.

“It is these two factions from the Darfur mess that are at war with each other to decide which faction will prevail to crush the Sudanese people,” the authors write, noting how both figures built a name for themselves in the violent campaigns of murder and expulsion that characterized action in Darfur.

The military commanders have moved against civilian leadership, elected and bureaucratic, as attempts to unravel the vast entanglement between personal financing and military control of enterprises exposed corruption and threatened the military’s bottom line. Should the generals prevail in receiving foreign backing for repression, the authors suggest, it doesn’t matter which one wins, the revolutionary moment will be lost. But if the generals don’t receive that foreign support, the resistance committees formed in the streets may offer a path out of the civil war and out of military rule.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Use The Force: Part I

Faced with limited public trust in policing, and especially with the limits of police capacity to tackle such real threats as armed crime, cartel warfare, and major trafficking in illicit contraband, it is unsurprising that some governments will turn the military inwards. This process, by which soldiers take on the role of police, is “constabularization,” and it poses a thorny policy problem: Can soldiers do police work, and can they do it while protecting the rights of the public they are there to serve?

In “ The Consequences of Militarized Policing for Human Rights: Evidence from Mexico [[link removed]],” authors Gustavo Flores-Macías and Jessica Zarkin conclude that introducing soldiers to the work of policing leads to a 150% increase in federal complaints against federal security forces. This same increase does not happen when soldiers are deployed to help with disaster relief.

Mexico is fertile ground for this study, in part because it has such a direct onset of constabularization of the military in 2006 and because Mexico's National Human Rights Commission [[link removed]] has a fairly seamless process for receiving and processing complaints. Thanks to dogged right-to-information requests, the researchers were able to build baseline levels of complaints about federal security forces and police before constabularization. Then, over the duration of 2000-2016, they were able to track this individually by province, as the deployment of soldiers in policing happened at different times in different places.

Looking at that data, the researchers “find that the rate (per 100,000) of serious human rights abuse complaints against federal security agencies in constabularized municipalities is .42 higher in the first year and between .43 and .61 in three subsequent years of military involvement in domestic policing, compared to non-constabularized municipalities. These effects represent yearly increases of between 150% and 218%.”

This increase is at odds with the favorable public opinion of the military and the relative professionalization of military forces compared to local police. But it does indicate how military and police training differs; while the military uses maximum force to diffuse situations, the police are supposed to use the minimum amount.

Note the researchers, “It is not that civilian police are always respectful of human rights (police forces in countries as diverse as Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico have been criticized for using excessive force against civilians), but that constabularized soldiers’ greater disruptive capacity, lack of training for policing missions, and greater impunity together likely result in a comparatively higher prevalence of abuses in the context of domestic policing.”

This illustrates the tension faced by political leaders throughout Latin America. Soldiers can be a capable tool for police work that most resembles a war, such as tackling cartels like an armed insurgency. But it poses a risk to civilian populations to deploy soldiers as police this way, as their impunity, tactics, and weapons have a demonstrable increase in abuses.

“Therefore,” conclude the authors, “the military’s participation in security operations should be limited both geographically and temporally, and always while simultaneously strengthening local police forces and the judiciary.”

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Anna Kusmer transcribed [[link removed]] an interview between The World and Daniel Lee, a historian “of the Jews of France and North Africa at Queen Mary University of London.” The occasion for the interview was somber: on May 9, 2023, a gunman opened fire on the Ghriba synagogue in Tunisia, possibly the oldest synagogue in Africa. Two Jewish pilgrims were killed, as well as at least two local police officers and the shooter himself, who worked as a guard elsewhere. “Unlike most countries in North Africa and the Middle East, there still is a vibrant Jewish population in the country. A lot of them are wondering what the future holds,” Lee told The World.

James Maxcy called [[link removed]] for an expansion of the Outer Space Treaty, one that would amend the long-standing international agreement about extra-terrestrial rulemaking to include provisions for cleaning up orbital debris. Maxcy envisions a system centered around “deorbit bonds,” where anyone launching a satellite or other object into orbit pays into a pool for safely deorbiting debris, the funds of which could be recovered by successfully deorbiting the original satellite, with credit earned for clearing other debris. Held in the loose pull of gravity and tight grip of orbital finance, these bonds would bind participants together in the peaceful use of space.

Rebecca Rosman dished [[link removed]] on the viral flan sensation of Toranomon. Shizuo Mori works at and runs a corner cafe, putting in 15-hour days as he has for the past 50 years. “After the war, there were food shortages across Japan,” Mori told Rosman. “So, puddings like this one became a real luxury treat.” He makes about 50 puddings a day, which he serves in his cafe, along with coffee, tea, eggs, and ham sandwiches. He serves the flan with a distinctive fling, removing the pudding from its dish, the kind of flair that won his restaurant viral acclaim.

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

Your due process [[link removed]] is in another castle [[link removed]].

The present is merely gaudy cosplay [[link removed]] of the past.

Flying objects [[link removed]]? Identifiable [[link removed]].

All the newts [[link removed]] that’s fit to print.

Great question. We now turn to the diaspora for an answer [[link removed]].

Born too early to roleplay [[link removed]], born just in time to get government funding for geopolitical fan fiction [[link removed]].

Go go gadget atomic arms race [[link removed]].

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Critical State is written by Kelsey D. Atherton with Inkstick Media.

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.

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