A global recession in formal markets is, at best, mixed news for illicit markets. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

...read about how drug traffickers respond to COVID-19.

A global recession in formal markets is, at best, mixed news for illicit markets. Drug traffickers have the benefit of a product with distinctly inelastic demand and can breathe easier with government attention more focused on the COVID-19 pandemic than the drug war, but they also have to manage economic and health concerns in their own communities and supply chains. In an interview [[link removed]], security researchers Vanda Felbab-Brown and Ariel Ávila detailed how traffickers in Latin America have responded to the threats and opportunities arising from COVID-19. Perhaps their most striking finding is how varied the effects of the pandemic are on different trafficking networks. In Central America, for example, violence associated with the drug trade has fallen precipitously, while just to the north in Mexico, killings continue apace.

Land discrimination in Israel

Coming less than a month after Israel’s unity government announced its intention to move forward with annexing Palestinian land in the West Bank, a new Human Rights Watch report [[link removed]]details systematic land discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel by the Israeli government.

Israeli law provides a range of opportunities for discrimination. Small towns are allowed to ban people from living there who are deemed “not suitable for the social life of the community.” Over 900 towns that use this authority have no Palestinians living there. In Palestinian communities, discriminatory zoning prevents Palestinians from building new housing stock, contributing to population density that, in some cases, is 30 times higher than in neighboring Jewish communities.

Of course, legal land discrimination is not a new problem in Israel. An estimated 350 of the 370 Jewish towns the state built between 1948 and 1953 were built on land confiscated from Palestinians.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] ISIS still haunts Iraq

ISIS is once again launching complex attacks in Iraq, like the one that killed ten Hashd militia fighters in Salahuddin in early May, leading to another round of “resurgence of ISIS” chatter among analysts. A new report [[link removed]]from Sam Heller at the International Crisis Group cautions against thinking of the recent attacks in a “resurgence” framework, as they do not indicate a return to the caliphate days of 2014 and 2015. Instead, Heller argues, present-day ISIS functions more like a typical insurgent group, but one that is growing stronger.

Crisis Group sources reported that ISIS fighters participated in more and lengthier firefights in April than they had in previous months, indicating greater strength and willingness to accept battlefield losses.

Tension between the US and Iran has strained efforts to counter ISIS in Iraq. The US airstrike that killed Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani also killed Hashd leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, despite Hashd militias playing a leading role in the fight against ISIS. Now, US drone reconnaissance units that would normally be used to hunt ISIS fighters are being retasked to prevent counterattacks on American forces in Iraq.

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

This week on Midnight Oil, we speak to Nikkie Wiegink, an assistant professor at Utrecht University who studies social reconstruction after war, armed group dynamics, disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of combatants, coal mining and the anthropology of infrastructure. Her new book [[link removed]], “Former Guerrillas in Mozambique,” is a groundbreaking ethnography of how relationships between combatants forged in wartime continue to shape political, economic and social relations even after those combatants have been “reintegrated.”

What is the hardest question you try to answer in your work?

Now that I study dispossession and resettlement issues associated with coal mining as well as civil war combatants and their lives after conflict, I’ve had occasion to think about what draws those interests together and makes me so curious about both of them. In a way, both are about understanding what underlies processes that are often framed as "bad" or "evil." What are the inner workings of war, but also what are the inner workings of dispossession?

My philosophy is that people generally think of what they do as good. Being part of problematic or evil constellations of dispossession or extraction, people frame it for themselves as something good, which can mean many things. I'm fundamentally curious to understand who these people are who work in these constellations and how they talk about their potentially morally dubious work. When I was researching former Renamo guerrillas in Mozambique, that meant digging into what war participation means in people’s life trajectories. Disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programs frame post-war reintegration as a rupture — people were in society, then left it to go to war, and are now returning to their pre-war relationship to society through reintegration — but that isn’t how many combatants experience it. Instead, former fighters tend to understand the workings of their lives as one continuum, a series of relationships that change over time.

HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT TRYING TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM?

Part of it is ethnography 101 — study the stories people tell about themselves and their lives. In hours-long interviews, I'd go through all the stages in peoples' lives. But it’s also important to be part of peoples' lives and see how their lived experiences compare with the stories they tell. For example, with these Renamo former combatants, they can tell you about how they found their wife in the war and how they connect to their fellow former combatants, but it's another thing to see how every week they would drink together, how they have economic relationships with each other in terms of trade and patronage dynamics. It's a process of talking to and watching, and getting the widest possible picture of peoples' experiences. On the one hand the narratives, and on the other what people do.

In Maringué, an area of central Mozambique where I did fieldwork and where many ex-combatants from the Mozambican civil war life, people would tend to say everything is good, the war is over, we are all brothers now. Both Frelimo and Renamo people would say this. But just by being there and going to church gatherings and masses, at a certain point I realized that, "Oh yeah, that church is a Renamo church, that church is a Frelimo church” and people would go out of their way not to cross political lines. Similarly, it took a long time for me to understand that when people would describe someone as being from a certain town, they meant it as a political identifier more than a geographical one — some towns meant they were Renamo, others Frelimo. The way people talk about things is different from the way things are — there are many layers of meaning behind what people say. I was in Maringué for 14 months, and I still maybe did not get half of it. That's the real value of doing participant observation next to the interviews.

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

Lydia Emmanouilidou reported [[link removed]] on a settlement agreement between Facebook and over 10,000 of the people it pays to look at the worst things on the internet. A large group of Facebook’s content moderators sued the company, saying that constant exposure to the most horrific things people tried to post on Facebook caused them to develop post-traumatic stress disorder. Last week, Facebook agreed to pay a $52 million settlement to current and former moderators in the US in order to make the suit go away, the first instance of a tech company acknowledging with dollars the mental toll their product takes on workers. Facebook also employs many moderators outside the US; it remains to be seen how the precedent created by the settlement will affect them.

Mandy Smithberger showcased [[link removed]] the role shareholder activism can play in bringing greater transparency to the defense industry. The Pentagon is sending a great deal of COVID-19 relief money to defense contractors, and the Trump administration is applying constant downward pressure on the transparency and accountability requirements that normally come with relief funds. Smithberger argued that it may be down to those contractors’ shareholders to ensure that money goes to preserve jobs and produce personal protective equipment, rather than line defense executives’ pockets.

Orla Berry checked in [[link removed]] on the world-changing geopolitical story that time forgot: Brexit. Great Britain left the European Union in January, but remains in a transition period — that is, a period for sorting out what things will be like in terms of trade deals, immigration, environmental standards, and a range of other areas once the divorce is finalized — until the end of the year. Talks between the UK and Europe are meant to be ongoing, but are currently paused due to COVID-19. Despite the delay, the pro-Brexit Johnson administration in London is adamant that there will be no extension of the transition period.

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

Painting [[link removed]] Napoleon as a Rod Stewart lookalike in 1796 was a truly awe-inspiring piece of predictive music criticism. How could artist Antoine-Jean Gros have known that Stewart, too, would take hold of the rock and roll revolution and use it to install himself as the head of a system that sounded suspiciously like the ancien regime of white crooners?

If you miss sports or like international solidarity, check out this short video [[link removed]] on how North Korean footballers became legends in the English town of Middlesbrough in 1966, a relationship that continues today despite significant diplomatic pressures to the contrary.

The latest round of COVID-19 culture wars revolves around conservative commentators bemoaning the supposed threat to masculinity posed by the need for responsible people to wear masks in public places. As one scholar of right-wing extremism notes, however, the relationship between masks and right-wing manly men has long been negotiable [[link removed]].

If anyone tries to tell you that millennials invented irony poisoning, you can show them this [[link removed]].

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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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