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 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.

Anita Elash spoke 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 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 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.

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

A story that brings new meaning to the term “dual use materials.”

Rare footage 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 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 in commodity markets. Plus, it could be worse: it could be plums.