India splits Kashmir from neighboring Jammu and revoke its special, semi-autonomous status. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

...read about the history of escalation in Kashmir.

If we measure the relevance of a news story by the number of nuclear powers alarmed by it, the most relevant story last week was the Indian government’s decision to split Kashmir from neighboring Jammu and revoke its special, semi-autonomous status within India. The decision was accompanied by a crackdown within Kashmir: The police arrested Kashmiri leaders, the government cut off cellular and internet access and the military deployed thousands of troops to the region. Alarmed by the move, Indian writer Siddhartha Deb wrote an explainer [[link removed]] of how we got here, and places Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s drive to exert further control over Muslim-majority Kashmir in the context of his party’s long history of violent Hindu nationalism.

When they publish, who perishes?

China has been outsourcing [[link removed]] its ethnic profiling technology production to academics from the US and Europe. For years, the Chinese government has sought facial recognition technology that could quickly and accurately sort Uighurs, a majority-Muslim ethnic group China has long sought to repress, from members of other ethnic groups. It turns out that some technology researchers have been more than willing to help the government in that pursuit, in exchange for grant funds and other research support.

One form of research support the Chinese government gave out was a database of photos of more than 800 Uighur and Kazakh “volunteers,” taken from various angles. The database served as a baseline to test how well different facial recognition algorithms identified ethnicity.

The Chinese university that made the face database is in Xinjiang, the province where most Uighurs live and where the Chinese government has set up “re-education camps” in which Uighurs are imprisoned. That didn’t stop leading US-based facial recognition researchers from speaking at a conference at the university last year.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Environmental assassinations

A new study [[link removed]] found that environmental activists are being murdered around the world at a shocking rate. Between 2002 and 2017, more than 1,500 people in 50 countries were killed for their participation in environmental and land-preservation activism. Those numbers are almost certainly an underestimate, as the researchers themselves acknowledge “blind spots” in their data, especially in Africa.

Some types of activism were more dangerous than others. People working to prevent mining and large-scale agriculture accounted for the largest portion of the deaths and countries that scored poorly on rule-of-law metrics produced more anti-environmental murders. Overall, police made arrests in only 10% environmentalist killings.

As Andrew Wight noted in his article [[link removed]], there was also a racial aspect to the killings: Indigenous activists were substantially overrepresented among the dead. That reflects both added vulnerability of Indigenous people in countries with racist justice systems and the fact that Indigenous people are overrepresented among environmental activists generally.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] MIDNIGHT OIL

This week’s Midnight Oil guest is Margarita Konaev, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, with an interest in urban warfare, military applications of artificial intelligence and Russian military innovation in emerging technologies. Among Konaev’s most recent work is a fascinating War On The Rocks article [[link removed]], co-authored with Samuel Bendett, on how Russia has incorporated artificial intelligence into its urban combat capabilities.

WHAT IS THE HARDEST PROBLEM YOU WORK ON?

I focus on studying the conduct of military operations in cities and the humanitarian consequences of urban warfare, which is a particularly brutal and costly type of fighting. Fighting in cities tends to endanger the civilian population more so than any other operational environment. Most basically, as we’ve seen from the fighting in cities across Syria and Yemen, the civilian death toll in urban warfare is often very high because the belligerents are failing to abide by the law of armed conflict and take precautionary measures to protect civilians and minimize collateral damage.

But civilians are also particularly vulnerable in urban conflict zones because of the intricacy and interconnectedness of urban services, and the fact that damage to infrastructure has a massive and immediate impact on large numbers of people. For example, a high-impact explosive weapon hitting a single pipe can deprive 100,000 people of water and may also destroy the neighborhood’s sewage system, which can cause thousands of people to become ill and exacerbate the already overwhelming burden on hospitals. What makes the situation even worse is the fact that some of these armed conflicts in urban areas last years — even decades — and in the process, humanitarian needs become even more acute, as public services effectively cease to function.

HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT TRYING TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM?

With requisite political will, it is possible to take meaningful steps to protect civilians and limit collateral destruction in modern urban warfare. For instance, since 2007, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan adopted policies that restricted the use of certain air-delivered weapons, refined its collateral damage estimation methodology and emphasized training to reduce civilian casualties. By the end of its mission in 2014, the number of civilian casualties attributed to ISAF operations decreased by almost 75%. The African Union Mission in Somalia was also able to reduce the impact of conflict on civilians by limiting the use of artillery and other indirect-fire munitions in populated areas, especially in Mogadishu.

Emerging technologies may also offer potential opportunities to reduce civilian harm in urban warfare; advances in methods of intelligence gathering and analysis and improvements in surveillance technology could help military planners better distinguish between enemy combatants and civilians, while more precise munitions could help protect civilians on the ground.

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

Andrew Wight reported [[link removed]] on the role of land tenure for Indigenous people in the fight against climate change. A special report from the UN’s top climate scientists lists protecting Indigenous land rights as one of the key steps in slowing the pace of climate change. Indigenous people manage a large portion of the most biologically important land left in the world, and they tend to be much more responsible managers than the timber and mining companies that often seek to displace them. Yet, Indigenous landholders and environmental activists have become targets for assassination in some of the most crucial areas: last year, 34 Indigenous leaders and 24 Afro-descendant leaders were murdered in Colombia.

Ryan Karr argued [[link removed]] that America’s nuclear attack on Nagasaki, at the end of the World War II, amounted to mass cruelty on autopilot. After the first nuclear weapon fell on Hiroshima, Karr pointed out, there was basically no discussion at the highest levels of the US government about whether to follow up with a second city-destroying attack. There was no strategy for how to measure Japan’s willingness to capitulate, nor any clear ultimatum offered to Japan’s leadership. Instead, the attack on Nagasaki went ahead, killing some 70,000 people, without even an explicit presidential order to go ahead with the bombing.

On the 20th anniversary of Vladimir Putin being named acting prime minister in Russia, his entrance onto the world stage, Lucy Martirosyan traced [[link removed]]the arc of his story since then. From the bloody Second Chechen War to the constitutional acrobatics of the Medvedev administration, the story is largely one of consolidating power and developing a public personality sharply at odds with the man of few words who took the reins of state from Boris Yeltsin in 1999.

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

Last week was horrific, even by the standards of 2019 news weeks, and as is so often the case, people chose to confront horror with absurdity. When one unfortunate tweeter tried to justify the necessity of civilians owning assault weapons by wondering, “How do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 mins while my small kids play?,” the internet turned the question into a field day. Responses ranged from insightful [[link removed]] to delightfully dumb [[link removed]], from punny [[link removed]] to guaranteed to get stuck in your head [[link removed]]. Some were full-on poetry. [[link removed]] And one was even a very informative discussion [[link removed]] of the history of feral hogs.

Much is made of the culture gap between civilians and the military in the US, but less well-appreciated is the gap between cultures of the American military services. Luckily, a Twitter thread came together last week gathering [[link removed]] some of the best stories of military cultural misunderstanding.

The Mozambican government signed a peace agreement with the opposition Renamo party at a ceremony in the capital, Maputo. The ceremony went off without a hitch, but one eagle-eared attendee did notice something strange [[link removed]] in the music selection.

The liberal international order debate is getting spicy [[link removed]].

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Follow The World: DONATE TO THE WORLD [[link removed]] Follow Inkstick: DONATE TO INKSTICK [[link removed]]

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

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRI/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.

Preferences [link removed] | Web Version [link removed] Unsubscribe [[link removed]]

This email was sent to [email protected].
If you are no longer interested you can unsubscribe instantly:
[link removed]