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CRITICAL STATE
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Your weekly foreign policy fix.
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If you read just one thing …
… read about Iron Dome as a tool permitting offensive warfare.
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Throughout the history of weapons, most are largely interchangeable, roughly equivalent means to the same grim ends. Iron Dome, a counter-rocket missile defense system developed by the United States and Israel, is rare in its singular perceived role, a high-tech solution to a low-tech threat. Unlike other missile defense systems, which can struggle against the sophistication of cruise missiles or the scale of the task against nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles, Iron Dome has a fixed target profile and low-cost rockets fired in barrages, which is part of the decades-long asymmetric conflict between the state of Israel and armed groups in the territory it occupies. Senator Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) distilled this plainly on the Senate floor in October 2021 as a “purely defensive system.” That framing, writes Dylan Saba in Jewish Currents, misses the ends to which such a defense system is employed. “By almost entirely negating the ability of militant groups in Gaza to respond to Israel’s incursions, the purportedly defensive Iron Dome allows Israel to strike without fear of repercussion,” says Saba. “And because the cost is so low when measured in Israeli casualties, Israel can wage perpetual war without suffering domestic political consequences, and is under negligible pressure to pursue diplomacy with the Palestinians.”
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Kings of Cups
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That prohibitions on alcohol exist in religious texts is a testament to the enduring power of both religion and drink, a tension that is often renegotiated anew with changed political context. At Asian Review of Books, David Chaffetz explores Rudi Matthee’s “Angels Tapping at the Wine-Shop’s Door: A History of Alcohol in the Islamic World” and comes away with a rich portrait of centuries of hangovers.
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“Despite the Ottomans, Timurids and Safavids belonging to a tradition of hard-riding and hard-drinking horsemen, as they grew in dignity and orthodoxy, several sultans and shahs tried to ban alcohol. More often they died of cirrhosis,” writes Chaffetz.
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Matthee’s work is a history that starts from the faith as a minority position in wine-producing lands, where drinking norms and habits were adapted through waves of ruling styles and influenced by new rulers — and was recently seized upon as an introspective explanation for vulnerability to colonialism.
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boss from the machine
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The history of computing runs through Charles Babbage, a British machine maker who spent his life trying to automate away the burdens of capital management. Writing at Logic(s), Meredith Whittaker places Babbage’s work in historical context, drawing the line between the Difference Engine and plantation management.
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Babbage developed his technologies contemporaneously with the British abolition of both the slave trade and then, decades later, slavery in the West Indies. These actions took place as free labor at home and enslaved labor in the colonies revolted against control and displacement, revolts that put a capitalist vision of British imperial power on precarious footing. It was to this task that Babbage bent his machines.
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“The architectures of Babbage’s engines are bound with his theories of labor control, and his engines served as one of the multiple mechanisms by which he sought to discipline workers. And at the root of his larger project of industrial labor discipline lie plantation logics and technologies,” writes Whittaker.
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Use The Force: Part II
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The notion that states have a monopoly on violence is more aspirational than actual. Violence occurs regularly below the level of states and can build to regular criminal capacity. While police forces nominally exist to prevent and thwart this type of violence, cops can be bribed to look the other way or can simply be ill-equipped to assert government control in the face of organized violence. To counter this, governments will sometimes turn to the military.
In the last Critical State, I wrote about what happens when countries “constabularize” their militaries or use them alongside police. The study, looking at past instances in Mexico, found an increase in complaints of human rights violations.
In “Little Evidence That Military Policing Reduces Crime or Improves Human Security,” authors Robert A. Blair and Michael Weintraub offer a deep look into what happened when Colombia’s military took on police work in Cali, the country’s third-largest city. The authors focus specifically on Plan Fortaleza, a program that had the military regularly patrol hot spots, targeting crime.
Studies on militaries doing the work of policing remain relatively young. Much of the speculative debate over military effectiveness in such work hinged on whether or not military training and accountability to a chain of command can overcome the limits of policing.
“Only a small handful of studies have tested the effects of ‘constabularizing’ the military for purposes of law enforcement, all using observational data,” note Blair and Weintraub. For their study, in a plan approved by the Ethics Committee at Universidad de los Andes, they “randomized only the specific city blocks where soldiers would and would not patrol.”
The military patrols and Plan Fortaleza preceded the intervention by the researchers, and the new change in routes continued an ongoing pattern of patrols changing regularly so as to not become targets.
“Our results suggest that military policing in Cali was at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive,” the authors write. “We find little to no evidence that Plan Fortaleza reduced crime in the administrative data while the intervention was ongoing, and if anything our results suggest that it exacerbated crime after the intervention was complete. We observe an increase in crime in the administrative data after the intervention alongside an increase in citizens’ accounts of witnessing and reporting crimes and an increase in the frequency of arrests.”
While both police and militaries are armed agents of the state, the ends to which they are bent and the context in which they operate are divergent enough that adapting soldiers to policing does not appear to have a meaningful effect on crime, with the researchers noting “we find little to no evidence that military policing improved perceptions of safety, except perhaps among business owners.”
Despite the lack of efficacy, sending in soldiers is one of the most visible kinds of “doing something” politicians can have. Conclude the authors, “If policymakers insist on adopting military policing strategies despite the small but growing body of evidence of their ineffectiveness, they should at least complement those strategies with robust systems for monitoring and prosecuting misconduct.”
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Manuel Rueda dived into the history of waste pickers in Colombia. In 1992, medical school security guards lured 11 waste pickers to their deaths so the guards could sell the corpses to the hospital, a horror revealed only when the 12th victim escaped. Since then, waste pickers, who collect recyclable materials from trash and turn them in for a fee, have organized. In 2011, they won a Constitutional Court victory, a ruling requiring municipal protection because pickers are a vulnerable group that provides an important service. “Our job has more recognition now,” Sandra Martinez, a waste picker in Usme, told Rueda. “We used to be perceived as junkies, or disposable people. But now, our role in
the city is respected.”
Brendan O’Connor chipped away at the international economic forces that make microchip economies possible. These chips power the fictional vehicles in “Top Gun: Maverick” and the real US naval vessels on which the film’s plot is anchored. The chips are also a crucial component of ongoing tension between the US and China, as Taiwan, a nation mainland China views as a province in revolt, is home to the lion’s share of chip manufacturing. Moore’s Law, the prediction about increased chip capacity at lower cost, shapes the whole tech field. Writes O’Connor: “Moore’s Law is not a natural law, but a prediction based on production capacities, capital flows, and the availability of highly exploitable
labor.”
Shirin Jaafari reported on the ongoing civil war in Sudan, where collateral damage now includes a factory that specifically made Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food, or RUTF, a rich nutrient-filled paste used to treat malnourishment in children. The Khartoum factory was used by UNICEF to meet the food needs of children in Sudan. “The factory that produces 60% of this ready-to-use therapeutic food for Sudanese children [was] burned down, the production line, the machinery and all the ability to keep producing. So, it was yet another blow to children that are under attack from so many directions,” UNICEF spokesperson James Elder told Jaafari.
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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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