It’s not often that the New England Journal of Medicine publishes a detailed, firsthand tick-tock of a smuggling operation... Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

...read about mask smuggling.

It’s not often that the New England Journal of Medicine publishes a detailed, firsthand tick-tock [[link removed]]of a smuggling operation, but in the COVID-19 era, hospital administrators need a crash course in illicit logistics. Andrew Artenstein, chief physician executive at Baystate Health in Massachusetts, recounted his efforts to acquire personal protective equipment for his staff while avoiding federal efforts to hijack the shipments in a letter to the journal. Among the precautions Artenstein took to get a shipment of masks and N95 respirators across state lines were to load the cargo into trucks marked as carrying food and to send the trucks on separate routes in the hope that at least one would make it back to Baystate hospitals. Even still, it took congressional intervention to keep the Department of Homeland Security from seizing the equipment.

Oil and water do mix

British Petroleum’s official position about how geography and ecology work is that the Mexican Gulf Coast remains unaffected by massive pollution introduced into the Gulf of Mexico by British Petroleum. Scientists — and Mexican fishermen who have seen their catch disappear after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill — find that contention less than convincing. [[link removed]]

At the time of the spill, a decade ago, BP used aerial photography to claim that the oil from the spill was contained to US waters and that therefore no Mexicans could claim damages against BP. A recent study shows that aerial photographs miss a great deal of oil below the surface, and that oil from the spill spread throughout the Gulf.

Despite the study, and the fact that some Mexican fishing communities have seen catch reductions of over 90% since the spill, BP has not paid out a cent to the many Mexicans who filed complaints against the company. Instead, BP settled with the Mexican government in 2018 for a paltry $25.5 million.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Inside protest movements

Protest movements are often presented as clearly falling into categories of “violent” or “non-violent,” but the truth is that they often walk a tight line between the two. Movements that start out peaceful but exist under the threat of state or extra-state violence have complicated choices to make about how they will prepare and respond. Students protesting in India against the country’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which threatens to strip millions of refugees of their Indian citizenship, exist in that precarious space, and recorded [[link removed]] some of their discussions and experiences.

After students at Jamia Millia and Aligarh Muslim University in Uttar Pradesh began peaceful protests against the CAA, police raided the schools, firing tear gas in libraries and injuring over 100 students.

As violence against the protesters increased, so did discussions within protest groups about the legitimate right to self-defense and the logistics of protection.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Not fade away: Part I

The late US General Douglas MacArthur famously claimed that “old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” As with so many things Douglas MacArthur said, that’s nonsense — check out the robust museum [[link removed]] built around MacArthur’s grave in Norfolk, Virginia. There is, however, a growing academic literature on what happens when MacArthur’s aphorism is half-correct when old soldiers don’t die but also refuse to fade away. In the next two editions of Deep Dive, we’ll look at new research on how conflict shapes future political participation by ex-combatants.

In a new article [[link removed]] in Security Studies, Anders Themnér and Niklas Karlén examine why ex-combatants in civil wars often don’t act the way policymakers assume they will once conflicts end. Many peace deals in civil wars involve disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) programs, that are meant to help fighters transition from being professional soldiers to being professional literally anything else. The goal is to break up military units and end their capacity for further organized violence after a peace deal has been signed. To that end, the programs often provide money, job training and other resources to help launch ex-combatants into civilian careers that will take them far away from their former comrades.

It turns out, however, that even after they’ve gone through these programs, many ex-combatants in civil wars end up living together, in tight-knit groups that closely resemble their wartime units. That’s a source of great consternation to policymakers, both because it makes DDR programs seem like a waste of money and, more importantly, because if military units are just continuing to exist as social networks, it probably isn’t hard to reconstitute them as military units. Those social networks, in other words, can be seen as threats to the durability of a peace deal.

Themnér and Karlén argue that a leading cause of this suboptimal DDR outcome is the connection of ex-commanders to post-conflict patronage networks. In instances where ex-commanders are easily able to distribute patronage to their former soldiers, there is little reason for the soldiers to maintain horizontal ties between them — all they need to survive is the vertical tie to their former commander. Conversely, if ex-commanders aren’t a steady source of resources and ex-combatants have a hard time becoming self-sufficient in a post-conflict economy, dense horizontal ties with old comrades make a lot of sense. By living close by and sharing resources, a demobilized military unit can create its own safety net, protecting its members from the vicissitudes of civilian life by maintaining its cohesion.

To test their theory, Themnér and Karlén looked at two ex-combatant networks in Liberia to see how they came to assume their current structures. By focusing on two ex-commanders and the social networks that have formed around them, Themnér and Karlén found that there were significant variances between the two in the way their networks functioned. Both ex-commanders were in frequent contact with their former fighters, but one — the authors gave him the pseudonym Paul — was the main source of resources for his network, while the other — Edwin — was not.

As Themnér and Karlén predicted, the ex-fighters in Edwin’s network interacted nearly three times as often with each other as the ex-fighters in Paul’s network. Even more strikingly, Paul’s network was much more politically cohesive than Edwin’s. When Paul gained entry into (and patronage from) a new political party, the vast majority of his former soldiers moved with him to the party. For Edwin, however, most of his former soldiers are political free agents relative to their old commander, with few of them following his post-conflict political moves.

As Themnér and Karlén note, these results suggest that some of the fundamental assumptions of DDR programs may be incorrect. It may actually be better for stability to keep some military units intact after disarmament, so long as commanders can be integrated into political patronage systems, because they provide ex-combatants the resources they need to continue living as civilians and avoid relying on their skills as violence specialists. By denying the power of ex-combatant mutual aid networks, peace pacts may be creating new risks.

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

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

Halima Gikandi reported [[link removed]] on the economic threat COVID-19 poses in Africa. The World Bank now estimates that the continent, home until recently to many of the fastest-growing economies in the world, will enter a recession this year for the first time in a quarter century. The African Development Bank has pledged $10 billion to help African countries fight the virus, but many experts argue that those countries will need far greater international support — including debt relief — in order to have the liquidity necessary to fund public health and social programs.

Andrea Little Limbago argued [[link removed]] for US policymakers to take the COVID-19 crisis as an opportunity to strengthen digital privacy protections. With social distancing forcing so many interactions online, concerns about privacy on common utilities like Google and Zoom are growing more widespread. At the same time, countries around the world are using COVID-19 as an excuse to increase digital surveillance and roll back data privacy. Given US prominence in the tech industry, a move toward legal data privacy protections in the US could have a major effect worldwide.

Rupa Shenoy spoke [[link removed]] to refugees and humanitarian aid workers about the potential for COVID-19 to reorder gender roles among Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. The virus has not yet reached Bangladeshi refugee camps, where some 900,000 Rohingya live in close quarters after fleeing genocide in Myanmar, but there is widespread fear that it will be devastating if it arrives. Rohingya society is largely patriarchal, but women are typically the primary caregivers, a role that will take on increasing importance as the pandemic nears. Pandemic preparation and response could end up propelling the Rohingya women leading those efforts into longer-term leadership roles.

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

A year before Xzibit was even born, the Air Force scooped his most famous meme [[link removed]] with a proposal [[link removed]] to put fighter jets on 747s so you could (just about) fly while you fly.

On one hand, the COVID-19 crisis in American prisons and jails is effectively a mass negligent homicide perpetrated by the state as it chooses to ignore evidence of widespread infection in detention facilities. On the other hand, we’ve increased our vocabulary [[link removed]] for describing crises brought on by willful ignorance.

Economist memes, like these [[link removed]] ones dedicated to scholar of economics, states and security Daron Acemoglu, are a very particular kind of nerdy.

If you’re trying to add new skills during quarantine, be aware: there are consequences [[link removed]]for not following through.

The clerks said they’d prefer not to, but Thomas de Weston and Philip Port just kept asking [[link removed]].

What a metaphor [[link removed]] from the father of the modern American defense intellectual.

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

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX, BBC, and WGBH.

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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