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...read about how gender roles made us less prepared for COVID-19.

Of all the analytical frameworks in international relations, none has seen its stock rise more in the Trump era than feminist international relations theory, which pioneered applying gender analyses to political structures. Andrew Blum’s essay [[link removed]] last week in The New Republic brings feminist theory’s explanatory power to bear on COVID-19, examining how the US ended up choosing to spend its money on military materiel instead of masks. Just as jobs coded as feminine — teaching and nursing, for example, — are systematically lower-paying than similarly skilled jobs thought of as masculine, Blum argues that aspects of security associated with caregiving, like public health, get short shrift in the budgeting process compared to more violent pursuits. Those differences persist even though many experts predicted the pandemic threat and the cost of preventive measures was low relative to, say, nuclear modernization. As a result, we end up with situations like this [[link removed]].

Viral food insecurity

Of the many second-order effects of COVID-19, one of the most potentially dire is the virus’s effect on global food supplies. According to the World Food Program, COVID-19 could lead to the number doubling among people facing food insecurity in low- and middle-income countries. A new report [[link removed]]offers some recommendations for how the US can limit the damage caused by the impending world food crunch.

In addition to a global recession making it harder for people to buy food, COVID-19 disrupts each step of the food supply chain. Most people rely on markets to purchase food, many of which have been bankrupted or nearly so by social distancing. Border closures prevent food and agriculture inputs like fertilizer from moving between countries, and also prevent many farm workers from traveling to where their labor is most needed to bring in a new crop.

The report recommends that the US fight food insecurity with a two-pronged approach. First, it proposes direct aid to the hardest hit countries in the form of both food aid and technical assistance to strengthen food systems. Second, it outlines the need for policy changes, including advocacy for loosening agricultural export controls.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Strategies of displacement

Forced displacement during war remains both a dominant feature in modern conflict and an understudied topic in political science. In a new article [[link removed]] in International Organization, Adam Lichtenheld proposes a new typology to make sense of when and why combatants force civilians from their homes en masse.

Lichtenheld built a new dataset tracking forced displacement in every civil war between 1945 and 2008, and then used that data to measure the circumstances that lead states to pursue displacement strategies.

He found that displacement actually results from two different strategies, each with their own logic. In cases where states think they know which civilians support insurgents, they pursue what Lichtenheld calls a “cleansing” strategy, violently evicting the insurgency’s civilian support base to gain the upper hand. In cases where the state is unclear about what side people are on, though, displacement is “assortative” — by forcing people to choose between moving to a government-controlled area or remaining among the insurgents, states believe that they can figure out which civilians are loyal and which are not.

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

Last week on Deep Dive, we looked at how ex-combatants respond to demobilization programs that try to separate them from their wartime comrades. This week, we’ll examine how those programs themselves sometimes exclude particular former fighters from participation, denying them even the formal status of ex-combatants. In an article [[link removed]] in the Journal of Global Security Studies, political scientist Alexis Henshaw digs into how and why states and rebel groups try to freeze women out of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programming.

Women’s participation in rebel movements is widespread, but when those movements make peace with the state and wartime becomes peacetime, women rebels are often lost in the shuffle. We don’t know the full extent of the problem because neither rebel groups nor, until recently, DDR programs, keep particularly close track of the gender split in their membership. Structurally, however, many DDR programs are set up to serve men and exclude women.

For example, states typically see the first D — disarmament — as being the most important part of any DDR program. Typically, in order to access the demobilization and reintegration benefits of a DDR program, an ex-combatant has to turn in a gun, both symbolically and practically limiting their capacity for future violence. We know, though, that many women rebels either don’t carry weapons, share guns, or fight with improvised weapons. Whether women are gunless because their movement’s patriarchal structure kept them off the front lines or because limited resources mean the rebellion has more people than firearms, disarmament as a prerequisite for DDR participation excludes women from the process.

DDR programs themselves are also prone to making assumptions about combatant status based on perceived gender roles. In Sierra Leone, where girls and boys were both forcibly recruited as child soldiers, the postwar DDR process often categorized girls as “camp followers” or “unaccompanied children” while marking boys down as child soldiers. Though those non-combatant designations were designed to absolve the girls of responsibility for their groups’ actions, they also made it impossible for the girls to access the post-conflict benefits available to people recognized by the program as former fighters.

In other cases, the discrimination is even more bald-faced. In Angola, women who held official ranks in the UNITA rebellion were initially explicitly banned from participating in DDR programming. Eventually, international pressure lifted the ban, but only 60 women received benefits out of 300,000 total beneficiaries. In Nepal, some estimates suggest that half of all women combatants who participated in the Marxist insurgency there couldn’t access the DDR program that followed the conflict due to an array of participation restrictions that disproportionately limited women ex-fighters.

These are solvable problems, Henshaw argues. By focusing on questions of gender, DDR programs can address rather than deepen problems of patriarchal oppression. In Colombia, where women had visible leadership roles in the FARC insurgency, some DDR programming has explicitly addressed the needs of women ex-combatants. Of course, these programs are not without their problems — as Henshaw points out, a jobs program is training women for civilian jobs that are less skilled and worse paid than a similar program directed at men. However small, though, it remains a step forward.

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Anita Elash spoke [[link removed]] to staff at long-term care facilities in Canada who are on the frontlines of COVID-19 response. Half of Canada’s COVID-19 deaths have come in long-term care facilities, and many are ill-equipped to handle the volume of death and disease brought by the virus. Chronic underinvestment in things like private rooms and sufficient staffing allowed the virus to spread quickly among elderly populations at high risk of suffering COVID-19’s worst effects. The situation has become so dire that the Canadian government has promised to send military personnel to help in some of the hardest-hit facilities, as well as offering financial support.

In her inaugural column for Inkstick, Kate Kizer argued [[link removed]] for an internationalist approach to thinking about security. During the pandemic, the expensive militaries that were supposed to protect people from the threat posed by other states have sat largely idle, while huge numbers of civilians have died in ways that could have been prevented by international collaboration and increased investment in public health infrastructure. Continuing to latch onto a conception of security rooted in competition between states, Kizer wrote, will prevent us from achieving the “unprecedented levels of equitable global cooperation this crisis and future human security crises demand.”

Rupa Shenoy highlighted [[link removed]] a problem in how we are tracking deaths from COVID-19: a lack of focus on the races of the victims. Lots of evidence suggests that black people in countries with histories of racist policies have been hit disproportionately hard by the virus, but a lack of data is making the extent of the problem hard to track. Experts pointed to Brazil, Canada, and the UK in particular as notably failing to maintain standardized records of COVID-19 victims’ racial identities.

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

It is with heavy hearts that we must inform you…the Boston Dynamics robots are at it again [[link removed]].

A story [[link removed]] that brings new meaning to the term “dual use materials.”

Rare footage [[link removed]] of the Secretary of Defense authorizing the Total Integrated Cooperative Kinetic Lethality Element Mission Execution program.

Futures prices on some forms of oil hit negative numbers last week, which had some people trying to figure out how they could get paid to store oil. It turns out someone already tried that, and it’s harder [[link removed]]than it looks. Also, some perspective on the oil crash is in order. Oil prices may be historically low, but this kind of volatility is hardly unprecedented [[link removed]] in commodity markets. Plus, it could be worse: it could be plums [[link removed]].

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

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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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