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CRITICAL STATE
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Your weekly foreign policy fix.
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If you read just one thing…
...read about the world’s greatest policy failure.
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Last week was the worst week of climate news in quite some time. The Amazon rainforest, one of the most important global mechanisms for removing carbon dioxide from the air, is burning at a record rate. The fires are being set on purpose, as part of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s plan to open the rainforest for farming and development, which has turned the government response to the crisis into a farce. When asked about the fires, Bolsonaro suggested they were set by environmental groups. On the effects side of the climate change coin, the tendency for governments to stick their heads in the sand is just as strong. A recent study of American cities found that the cities most likely to be adversely affected by climate change are also the least likely to have taken any action to mitigate the dangers of rising sea levels or long term drought.
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Missile defense bean counting
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A lot of security policy plays out in the budgeting process, but we rarely get insight into how that process works on a granular level — not least because most of the time the grains are intensely boring. Last week, though, a Twitter thread offered a look at how politics and budgets interact to shape American support for Israeli missile defense.
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Andrew Exum, who as a deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy in the Obama administration helped set up the current funding system for Israeli missile defense, explained how the charge that Democrats in Congress are cutting support for Iron Dome and other programs is incorrect.
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Before the latest memorandum of understanding between the US and Israel on missile defense, US support varied wildly year-to-year and came out of the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) budget in unpredictable increments. Under the current agreement, Israel gets the average amount appropriated in those unpredictable years ($500 million annually) and the MDA gets to plan its budget accordingly. Because $500 million is less than what the US spent in some previous years, though, Republicans are calling it a spending cut. This happens a lot.
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Measuring post-conflict trust in Colombia
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More important conflict research continues to come out of Colombia, where strong record keeping, researcher access, and a durable peace deal have created conditions that provide academics an unprecedented look at the microdynamics of a civil war and subsequent peace. Joakim Kreutz and Enzo Nussio have a newly free-to-read article in International Studies Quarterly in that vein, examining the drivers of trust and mistrust between governments and non-state armed groups in post-conflict situations.
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In 2008, the Colombian government went back on its word and extradited former members of pro-government militias who had laid down their arms and accepted an amnesty but were facing drug charges in the US. Kreutz and Nussio looked at how that betrayal affected trust in the government among rank-and-file former members of armed groups.
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They found that former paramilitary members trusted their former government allies less after the extraditions, even though it was only paramilitary leaders who were extradited. More interestingly, demobilized anti-government guerillas who received separate but similar amnesty deals from the government didn’t change their opinion of the government at all — they didn’t see amnesty failure for their opponents as a sign of things to come for them.
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Our Midnight Oil guest this week in Corinna Jentzsch, an assistant professor of International Relations at the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University. Jentzsch studies civil wars and the emergence of informal institutions of security governance and especially how civilian communities organize against insurgent violence. You can read some of her recent work in the edited volume Experiences in Researching Conflict and Violence.
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WHAT IS THE HARDEST PROBLEM YOU WORK ON?
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Civil wars are the dominant form of contemporary political violence. Civilians — those who don’t join armed groups — often bear the brunt of violence during civil wars. They can’t necessarily rely on protection from government or rebel forces. What I seek to understand is how civilians protect themselves from wartime violence. Many flee their homes, but among those who stay, some form self-defense groups or even peace communities. Why do civilians, even under such difficult circumstances as wartime insecurity and uncertainty, manage to get organized and defend themselves?
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HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT TRYING TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM?
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I try to answer this question by comparing the experiences of different communities in Mozambique, which, during the civil war in the country (1976-1992), formed militias to protect themselves from violence perpetrated by the government and the rebels. I have collected oral histories with many of those who experienced war in these communities and many archival documents of wartime government reports. Relying on these and other sources, I am writing a book about how and why these militias formed. In another project with a colleague, Juan Masullo, we compare communities in Colombia and Mozambique and try to understand why some communities in Colombia created nonviolent peace communities, while many communities in Mozambique formed violent militias to defend themselves.
In both projects, oral histories help me understand the dynamics of war from the perspective of those who experienced it and to understand what kinds of ideas made them organize collectively to end the war. For example, those former militia members I spoke with often stated that they had been “tired of war,” expressing a sense of urgency and ripeness of the conflict for collective action, and they spoke in awe of those who initiated self-defense forces, suggesting that the ideas that militia leaders spread resonated with those communities. The interviews also offer a crucial first written draft of history for aspects of conflicts that were undercovered when they were taking place, such as the Mozambican civil war.
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Stephen Snyder chronicled the controversy over the Andy Ruiz Jr-Anthony Joshua heavyweight boxing title rematch set to take place in Saudi Arabia in December. Critics have pointed to the so-called Clash on the Dunes as an example of “sportswashing” — the Kingdom using major international sporting events as a way of laundering its awful human rights record. Since Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, Saudi Arabia has also hosted a World Wrestling Entertainment pay-per-view and a PGA European tour golf tournament, among other events.
Bishop Garrison argued that racist violence in America can only be understood in light of the country’s 400-year history of white supremacy and racial exploitation. Whether it is mass shooters claiming to be fighting “white genocide” or government policies that abet housing discrimination that reinforces racial segregation, racist violence engages with narratives that predate American independence. One way to better understand the historical connections, Garrison suggested, is to read the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which marks the anniversary of the first enslaved Africans arriving in colonial Virginia.
Luis Gómez Romero and María de la Macarena Iribarne González described major recent protests by Mexican women decrying widespread violence against women in the country. The proximate cause of the protests was slow government response to two reported rapes committed by Mexico City police officers against teen girls, but the marches take place against the background of startling country-wide statistics: 1,812 women were murdered in Mexico in the first seven months of 2019, the second-highest mark in Latin America, after Brazil.
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On one hand, access journalism is bad — covering politics like it’s a series of dinner parties ignores the profound ways government shapes people’s lives. On the other hand, there has never been a better use for the Politico playbook house style that Mike Allen brought to Axios than the calendar note kicker of this story: “Atlantic hurricane season runs until Nov. 30.”
Last week marked a year since the emergence of a pernicious new security threat: the toxic mix of cartoonish holes in the ground and indomitable human curiosity.
Last week was also the anniversary of Eunice Foote’s 1856 paper demonstrating that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, which is the core principle that explains human-driven climate change. Foote’s work went long unacknowledged, and John Tyndall, who published similar results three years later, was credited with the discovery until a geologist found Foote’s paper in 2010.
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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.
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