When a pandemic hits, the nature of its disruption is universal. Governments responded to the spread of COVID-19 wherever it went, in many cases by adopting lockdowns, masking, and social distancing measures designed to first halt and then limit the spread of the disease. Armed groups, from insurgent forces to political rebellions through territory-contesting criminal enterprise, can all also be forms of governance.

Erica De Bruin and Michael Weintraub explore this new development in “Did Covid-19 Change Armed Group Governance? Evidence from a Survey of Local Security Authorities in Colombia.” Colombia is a good case study since it has multiple armed groups contesting space, political legitimacy, and, especially, illicit economic activity.

“In addition to its public health and economic consequences, the pandemic also impeded the state's capacity to respond to security threats. The national police were suddenly tasked not only with patrolling streets to prevent crime and carrying out criminal investigations: they also were charged with monitoring compliance with quarantine measures and, once the quarantine was lifted, with ensuring the use of face masks and preventing overcrowding in public and private spaces,” write the authors. Even though the police had an expanded mandate, it was also suffering officer shortages, as the disease spread through police ranks as easily as the civilian population.

To assess whether or not armed groups used these disruptions to expand their governance, in July and August 2021, De Bruin and Weintraub conducted a survey of local security officials from municipalities contested by multiple armed groups.

What the officials reported, instead, was the largely unchanged role of armed groups, or if anything, a retreat from areas in which they had previously operated. Complicating previous literature on this, though not the overall trend of the study, was that multiple different armed groups engaged in governance activities in the same area. These governance activities include settling disputes, imposing a tax, and creating rules of behavior, and rates of those activities were largely unchanged from before the pandemic to during the pandemic. One area in which governance expanded somewhat was the direct provision of financial aid, like access to jobs, which diminished compared to what armed groups had been able to provide before COVID-19.

“Moreover, the extent and forms of governance in which armed groups engaged remained quite similar before and after the onset of the pandemic. Those armed groups that provided public goods tended to continue to do so during the pandemic; those that had not done so beforehand did not capitalize on the pandemic to expand service provision or the regulation of civilian life,” write the authors.

Ultimately, the authors conclude, armed groups were either unwilling or unable to take advantage of the disruption caused by the pandemic. The reasons for why, exactly, they were unable to do so will have to be the subject of future study.

Daniel Ofman interviewed Crimean Tatar folk singer Susana Alimivna Jamaladinova, known as Jamala, about her new album titled simply “Qirim” or “Crimea.” Since 2014, Crimea has been occupied by Russia, an intrusion that continued to the production of the album. Jalama had almost finished recording when Russia launched its fuller invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and recording had to stop while Kyiv was under siege. “Russians can steal our territory nowadays, but they can’t steal our identity, our songs,” Jamala told Ofman. “I want to say to the whole world that we exist. And for me, it's important to give a voice to my homeland, Crimea.”

Charles Ray called on the US to stop sending cluster munitions to Ukraine. Ray acknowledged that cluster munitions have a specific utility against entrenched troops, like the Russian-held lines Ukraine is trying to break. Ray’s call is informed by his time as a soldier in Vietnam and a diplomat in Cambodia decades later, witnessing decades of explosive aftermath against civilians. “Cluster ammunition, because of its widespread coverage and devastating impact on people and vehicles, is considered by many to be an efficient way to shape the outcome of a battle. Should we, though, sacrifice the future of children not yet born on the altar of efficiency in a battle today?” he wrote.

Tibisay Zea listened to the women calling for an end to deadbeat child support debtors. “In a corrupt country where machismo is so strong, people are more afraid of shame than justice,” Diana Luz Vasquez told Zea. Vasquez’s partner left when she was two months pregnant and has refused to claim paternity for her now six-year-old daughter. So Vasquez, along with other women, orchestrated a protest where they hung pictures of the deadbeats not paying child support along a clothesline across the public plaza of Oaxaca. After such protests spread, Mexico’s government passed a bill preventing child support debtors in Mexico from running for public office, driving, or leaving the country.

A quick programming note on the well-played section. X, the site owned by Elon Musk and formerly known as Twitter, is increasingly managed in a way that is unsafe for users. Most recently, this came to light when Musk personally intervened to restore an account that had posted upsetting and illegal imagery. Safeguards against the upload of such imagery appear to be missing from the site. This is normally the part of the newsletter where I tell jokes, riffing on the news of the week as seen on Twitter, which is one of the joys of producing and sharing Critical State. However, given the refusal of the company to maintain basic and vital safeguards, I feel uncomfortable directing anyone to the site once and probably still known as Twitter.

A snack so bad, it can only be part of this world.

I’m at the canal. I’m at the train. I’m at the cccccccombination canal and train.

The fact that a commercial drone will be used for drug smuggling is known as the Heisenberg Certainty Principle.

I would simply try to keep “autonomy” and “nuclear submarines” as far apart as possible.

The first rule of Successful Coup Club is you have to commit to the act

Radio Flaw Flaw

We’ll never have a model of an AI major-general.