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…read about how COVID-19 helps armed groups recruit kids.

One consequence of a pandemic that shuts down schools, puts huge numbers of people out of work and magnifies inequalities in society is that it produces a lot of youth with real grievances and a lot of time on their hands. A new report [[link removed]]from Colombia indicates that armed anti-state groups aren’t letting that opportunity pass them by. Youth recruitment by FARC dissidents and other insurgent and criminal organizations has spiked in Colombia in the first third of 2020, with one monitoring group counting 128 cases of children being induced to join up between January and April. There were fewer than half that many cases in all of 2019. COVID-19 has increased the allure of armed groups that promise youth a chance to provide for their families and also made it harder for the government to combat child recruitment, due to travel restrictions that limit the government’s ability to interact with rural civilians.

Getting shot sucks, it turns out

Kelsey Atherton ran down [[link removed]] the double talk that permeates discussions of the so-called “less lethal” weapons that police have deployed against people protesting police violence. Despite being marketed as harmless methods of crowd control, many of these weapons were designed for fighting wars and tested with those uses in mind.

Rubber bullets — one example of a class of projectiles known as “baton rounds” — are poorly named, as they are more metal than rubber. When fired directly at people, as they frequently have been during the last month’s protests, they pack enough force to fracture skulls.

Tear gas found its place in American security culture during the 1960s, when it was simultaneously used to fight North Vietnamese troops in Vietnam, and to quell peace protests at home. It was never designed for use on civilians, and claims that it is harmless assume that it is being deployed against healthy military-aged males. In reality, the gas can do lasting damage to people with respiratory diseases, to say nothing of the fact that a direct hit from one of the canisters used to deploy the gas can kill a person.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] The long tail of war

One of the core insights of people who work in peacebuilding is that the line between peace and war is much more fluid than law or convention would lead you to believe. Even as wars end, the violence they generated continues to reverberate in society, sometimes for generations. In a new paper [[link removed]], University of Leicester PhD candidate Barbara Boggiano makes the case that we can measure some of those reverberations even 130 years in the future. Boggiano tracks intimate partner violence in Paraguay, and measures it against the patterns of military recruitment from the Paraguayan War, which ran from 1864 to 1870, and finds significant correlations.

In areas closer to military camps during the war, where locals were more likely to be pressed into service, intimate partner violence is 5.54% more likely than in other areas, even in 2008, the latest year she has data for.

Boggiano tracks the enduring increase in intimate partner violence to increases in women’s status in areas where more men were killed in the war. Though the population shock has evened out over the past century and a half, increased education and labor force participation among women has endured, increasing opportunities for domestic strife in a patriarchal society.

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

This week on Midnight Oil, we speak to biosecurity expert Gigi Gonvall, who uses her background in immunology as a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and as an associate professor in the department of environmental health and engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her recent work has focused on developing national responses to COVID-19 and other pandemics, which is also the topic of her new article [[link removed]] in the journal Survival, "The Scientific Response to COVID-19 and Lessons for Security."

WHAT IS THE HARDEST PROBLEM YOU WORK ON?

I'm a biologist by training, but I've worked on security, biosecurity, health security, and pandemic preparedness and response issues. One of the biggest problems we face in building up government capacity to respond to biological threats, pandemics or otherwise, is that the community of biology experts who have access to the policy process is small compared to the scope of the issues they deal with. Instead, people in the security world who deal with biological issues get stovepiped pretty quickly, which leads to problems.

In the Defense Department, for example, most of the people who think about biology are trained to think of biology as a weapon. To them, biological research — much of which is dual-use and can be used to help people as much as to hurt them — is a festival of potentially mis-usable items. As a result, they miss the untapped potential for biological research to produce defensive, rather than offensive, uses. As biologist Drew Endy pointed out, [[link removed]] "biology is nanotechnology that works" — it has the potential to do amazing things, from making countermeasures against diseases and biological weapons to finding green ways of reducing our reliance on petroleum. But thinking about those uses isn't part of the training for people who go into traditional security.

That barrier between the security and biological communities also creates a translation problem in times when it is very important for those communities to work together. I spend a lot of my time in this COVID-19 era translating science into language that the policymaking community can understand, and that can be a fraught process. Because policymakers have so little background in biology, sometimes they don't understand that translations are, by necessity, simplifications. For example, there are a lot of questions right now about COVID-19 antibody testing. People want to know about the tests because they hear the word "antibodies" assume that if someone has COVID-19 antibodies, they're immune. The reality is much more complicated than that, but without greater experience in dealing with biological issues, it's hard for people to have the humility to accept the complexity of the situation.

HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT TRYING TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM?

The real solution here is to expand biology expertise in government from the silos it is currently in to much more prominent policymaking roles. It's important to have a holistic view of biological research at high levels of government, where planning happens. Biologists should be on the National Security Council and in similar bodies, where they can help set a strategic direction for how biology can be used as a tool and can impact our way of life.

We've long paid lip service to the importance of biology in the security community. There have been tabletop exercises, policy papers, and other efforts to prepare for biological threats, and even the Trump administration's National Security Strategy mentioned the need to combat biological threats and pandemics. Having the right words in place, however, was obviously no guarantee that we'd be able to deal effectively with a crisis. Biology is going to play a key role in the response to future crises, from other pandemics to climate change, so we need to have the personnel in place to turn words into action.

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

Durrie Bouscaren chronicled [[link removed]] how Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government has kept up its commitment to press repression during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nineteen members of the media had court hearings on charges stemming from their work last week. Among them were seven journalists and one of their alleged sources, accused of breaking state secrecy laws by covering a scandal so secret it was discussed openly in Turkey’s parliament. Turkey jails more journalists than almost any other country, neck and neck with China and Egypt.

Peter Charles wrote [[link removed]] about how the recent clashes between Chinese and Indian troops on the border between the two countries undercuts the popular idea of China’s strategic genius. American commentators are fond of describing China’s inexorable, brilliantly planned strategic rise, but, Charles argues, “Beijing has consistently been undermining its long-term strategic position around the world since 2008.” The unprovoked violence against fellow nuclear power India is just the latest example of China increasing tensions with its neighbors to little overall effect, creating a situation in which China is increasingly mistrusted around the world.

Rebecca Collard spoke [[link removed]] to Ethiopian migrant workers who have lost their jobs in Lebanon as a result of that country’s economic crisis. Roughly 100 Ethiopian women who had been employed as domestic workers in the homes of Beirut’s upper classes have been sent to the Ethiopian Embassy by their former employers, who can no longer afford to pay them. Many of the women are owed months of back wages and don’t have enough cash to get home, and in some cases, their former employers still have their passports. Even if they were to get passage back to Ethiopia, however, they would still be forced to quarantine for two weeks, usually in a hotel, an expense almost none of them can afford. So far, the women say, their embassy has been of little help.

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

As Vladimir Putin prepares for a national referendum [[link removed]] on a constitutional amendment that would effectively give him tenure, he’s turning to some unorthodox methods [[link removed]] for getting his citation count up.

Real patriots never say the name of the Scottish play, because they support the theatre troops [[link removed]].

It’s good that the index writer differentiated the type of pigeon [[link removed]] the book refers to — readers might have been confused otherwise.

The Maryland National Guard is in line for some new uniforms [[link removed]].

Nothing says “The American Century” like knowing how to nuke a city full of civilians but not how to recognize [[link removed]] a basic metric system unit.

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Great Power Competition is: “I think we should really look at it through the lens of uh… competition." — a real life security expert.

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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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Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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