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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 multisensory mapping in Indonesia
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Take a walk enough times, and the soundscape of the path will become familiar. Not constant, as the intensity of a stream might change day to day, but familiar enough that one could describe the path to fellow travelers by the sounds they’ll encounter, markers as intrinsic to a place as loose rocks or fallen trees. In New Guinea, the Marind people have worked to build a map of their world that incorporates the sounds of the environment. Writing at Container Magazine, Madhuri Karak observes that “Maps created by Marind community members are a multi-sensory patchwork. Geospatial coordinates jostle with sound clips of mappers’ laughter, parrots’ squawks, and often, silence. This bioacoustic
mapping experiment was meant to assert community rights against the threat of losing forests to oil palm plantations.” In Karak’s work, she examines the mapping done by the Marind in New Guinea, as well as the mapping done in Kinipan, Borneo, as a way for local communities to verify their worlds, and challenge constraints placed on them by intruding forces, like the multinationals speculating for palm oil plantations. Of a drone mapping a forest, Karak writes, “From above, it looked like a monster had chewed off chunks of flesh, gaping wounds in the body of the forest. The deforested earth looked vulnerable, alien even.”
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Thieving Motorcycle
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When the bulldozers came to Suryadi’s home on Lombok Island, they did so with a timeline for construction and armed escort, ensuring that the evictions would proceed as planned. What was once a local village was cleared to make way for a motorcycle race track, under a push for development advanced by China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which funded 78.5% of the Mandalika resort zone and race track.
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“Like Suryadi, many ordinary people in Mandalika risk being forgotten. Since October 2019, the area’s indigenous Sasak communities have endured a relentless series of aggressive land grabs and forced evictions tied to construction on the MotoGP circuit,” reports Wawa Wang in The Diplomat.
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The speed and flexible financing of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank “clashes with the principles of electoral democracies, which intend for infrastructure to serve citizens’ needs rather than trample on their rights, while creating greater vulnerabilities for political capture and corruption,” writes Wang.
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My World’s On Fire, How About Yours?
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Canada’s on fire, and the world is noticing. When waves from the northeast blew toward the United States, they blanketed cities in thick smoke, and local governments advised people to stay inside to avoid health harm. While Canada’s fires are the most prominent, they are hardly alone, as similarly massive destructive fires have occurred in Australia, Greece, Chile, Turkey, and elsewhere, writes Kelly Kimball at Heatmap.
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“Some people like to say this is the new normal. I really do not like that term. Normal suggests a steady state. We’re not in a steady state. We’re in a downward spiral in Dante’s circle of hell,” Michael Flannigan, a lead fire researcher at Thompson Rivers University, told Kimball.
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In the meantime, as fires ravage in an unpredictable and unstable manner, governments are slow to reverse decades of declines in spending on fire management.
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War Games: Part I
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If war is hell, what is the hope of laws to constrain it? For observers of war, it can be easy to assume that war itself is unbound by law, that the directed execution of violence is a brutal race to use force first and best. The experience of actual combatants with war and its rules is complex and varied and can find expression across centuries of warfare. The experience of non-combatants, especially in Western countries, is changing, in ways that may inform how publics understand their militaries at war.
In “Modern Lawfare: Exploring the Relationship between Military First-Person Shooter Video Games and the ‘War is Hell’ Myth” authors Neil C. Renic and Sebastian Kaempf specifically look at the way video games, as immersive media, change the popular perception of war.
“War is a rule-governed enterprise, not to the degree that most would prefer but to a degree that confers some measure of protection upon those impacted. Much of the public lacks sufficient recognition of this fact. Too often, battlefield misconduct, particularly when undertaken by ‘our side,’ is viewed by Western audiences as the inevitable by-product of war's immutable status as an ungoverned and ungovernable domain,” write the authors.
First-person shooters, or FPSs, are video games that primarily place players in the role of armed combatant. Often, the games give players a lot of latitude about how they can move and fight in a space, but bind the players to follow a fairly structured plot.
“When FPSs do feature civilian populations, sufficient emphasis is rarely given to their inviolable status on the battlefield. These games typically either downplay, or disregard entirely, key elements of the laws of war. Players may directly target civilians, the neutrality of humanitarian actors may be violated, and prisoners of war can be killed and occasionally tortured — all without penalty,” write the authors. “This distortive realism impacts upon the cultural framing of actual warfare, given the wide dissemination of these games to audiences who are themselves increasingly disconnected from the physical experience of armed conflict.”
The authors specifically discuss 2019’s “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare,” a game that explicitly addresses the use of chemical weapons as a war crime in its text. While Modern Warfare engages with the existence of laws of warfare, it also allows players to use certain internationally prohibited weapons used by the player, like white phosphorus and exploding bullets. In addition, the player protagonist is told by superiors that rules of engagement are hindering combat effectiveness, and the player witnesses a colleague make threats against civilians used to force confessions.
“The situational pressures that incentivize battlefield criminality can be, and typically are, resisted,” write the authors. “Military FPSs can better reflect this, by giving players the opportunity to endure and overcome battlefield hardship and discharge their legal responsibilities — to discriminate between the targetable and non-targetable, to protect rather than prey upon the vulnerable, and to implement tactics that best limit the risks of incidental civilian harm.”
In other words, by showcasing war crimes but refusing to allow players to avoid partaking in them, games like Modern Warfare make virtual war a hellscape grimmer than the reality we live in, where the laws of war help better soldiers to protect civilians from their most bloodthirsty colleagues.
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Manuel Rueda tripped through the multi-faceted approach Colombia’s military and Indigenous volunteers took to find four children who had been lost in the jungle for 40 days, following a plane crash that killed the three adults with whom the children were traveling. The military searched for 37 days, with 150 troops, 5 sniffer dogs, and over 70 Indigenous volunteers. “With our own eyes, we were unable to find the children,” Henry Guerrero told Rueda. “So, we turned to ayahuasca to guide us. It was our last resort.” The next day, following elder Jose Angel Rubio, who consumed ayahuasca, they found the children.
Pramila Shakya called for greater support for female reconstructive surgeons across the globe. The need for such care is worldwide, especially in places where low income and limited access are barriers to treatment for solvable conditions, like lingering injuries from burns. “To fully address the need for reconstructive surgical care, we must change the landscape for women surgeons worldwide. I am very proud to be part of a small but growing group working to do just that,” wrote Shakya, emphasizing the work of Pioneering Women in Reconstructive Surgery. “The program helps to advance our careers and increase our ability to provide lifesaving care in our communities.”
Gustavo Solis reported on the safety precautions taken by Tijuana mayor Monserrat Caballero, which now include moving herself, her son, and their three pets into a military barracks following multiple death threats and an attack on one of her bodyguards. “The mayor has publicly criticized Baja California Gov. Marina del Pilar Avila and State Attorney General Ivan Carpio for not doing enough to combat organized crime,” reports Solis, and Caballero cites her anti-crime stance as why she has been targeted. The move to a barracks highlights the tension of what violence the state can administer, and what violence it fails to prevent.
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Hello readers! We interrupt this regularly formatted Critical State to invite you to apply for the Creative Capsule Residency. This virtual residency, supported by Inkstick Media and Bombshelltoe Policy x Arts Collective, is looking for journalists, artists, and international security experts, at all
skill levels, interested in working on a project about global security issues. The deadline for applications is July 21, 2023. Apply here!
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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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