Read about the failures of post-war gender quotas. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing...

...read a gripping account of a heroin deal gone wrong.

In 2014, Greek authorities intercepted a two-ton shipment of heroin that was slated for eventual retail sale in Belgium and the Netherlands. The traffickers guarding the drugs were arrested, and, from a legal standpoint, the matter seemed closed; police got a big win by stopping a record-breaking drug shipment, and some drug traffickers went to jail. In the underground economy, however, the ramifications of losing such a large shipment were much greater. In sorting out what went wrong, who turned on whom, and how roughly $165 million worth of heroin had been lost, 17 people were murdered and charges reached a Greek shipping magnate and an important political figure in Turkey. The story [[link removed]] of the Noor One — the ship on which the heroin entered Greece — offers details on some of the illicit networks that knit together the political and criminal worlds of Europe.

Who reads, who writes, who tells your story?

One way to learn the difference between subjects and objects in English grammar would be to look [[link removed]] at the way American news organizations treat Palestinians. A new look into coverage of Palestinian issues on the opinion pages of major US publications shows that, in an era when American policymakers have had huge influence over Palestinian lives and political fortunes, Palestinians get written about a great deal but hardly ever get to be the ones doing the writing.

The New York Times, for example, published 2,490 opinion articles mentioning Palestinians between 1970 and 2019. Palestinians wrote 46 of them — a whopping 1.8%. The New Republic, not to be outdone, published 497 opinion articles about Palestinian issues, of which exactly none were by Palestinians.

The effect of constantly being the object, rather than the subject, of American political discourse is that Palestinians have a difficult time making their case to American policymakers.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Health care workers as abusers in DR Congo

The World Health Organization (WHO) touts its zero tolerance policy regarding sexual abuse by its employees in public health crisis zones, but in Democratic Republic of Congo, that policy hasn’t been worth much. Women in Ebola-stricken areas of DR Congo have come forward, describing [[link removed]] 30 incidents of abuse and exploitation by WHO employees involved in Ebola response, as well as smaller numbers of incidents by workers with other aid groups and the Congolese government.

The women describe how the power held by international aid workers makes it difficult to turn away unwanted sexual advances. In an environment where WHO employment could result in doubling a woman’s regular wage, sex became, as one woman put it, a “passport to employment.”

The United Nations put in place a hotline for people to report abuse a year after the Ebola response program began, but most of the women who spoke to reporters had never heard of it because it was not adequately publicized.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Effects of scare-city: Part I

From “Mad Max” to “Snowpiercer,” pop culture is rife with depictions of climate change leading directly to conflict over diminishing natural resources. Yet, even as the effects of climate change are felt more and more sharply, the debate about how natural resources relate to conflict is far from settled. As we enter October and the spooky season arrives, we’ll spend Deep Dive looking into how the “scare” gets put into scarcity by discussing the latest research on resource conflicts.

In a new article [[link removed]] in the Journal of Peace Research, Tobias Ide, Miguel Lopez, Christiane Fröhlich, and Jürgen Scheffran look at water conflicts that are many steps removed from the dystopia of “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Call it “Consternation Path,” maybe. While most studies of resource conflicts focus on when those conflicts erupt into shooting wars with battle deaths and/or electric guitar flamethrowers [[link removed]], Ide et al. chose instead to examine nonviolent protests and demonstrations that arise out of disagreements over water usage. These smaller, less drastic forms of political contestation, they argue, both matter on their own — protests can be a source of political change — and can also be warning signs for when certain disagreements about water grow into deeper, more dangerous political divides.

Sometimes, a drought leads to political organizing against established authorities, with people who are suffering from lack of water demonstrating against people in charge of keeping up water reserves. Other times, a drought is just a drought — people conserve and suffer, but don’t take out their frustrations in the streets. To figure out why some droughts are tinderboxes and other are just dry, the researchers mapped all the droughts that occurred in the Middle East and North Africa between 1996 and 2009, and then compared that map with a database of all the water-related protests that took place in the region over the same time period.

Then, applying a range of other data and (appropriately for a Halloween-themed Deep Dive) Boolean algebra, Ide et al. tried to determine what conditions are sufficient for a drought to result in protests. In every case where a drought brought on protests, the place where the protest happened was governed by an autocratic regime and had preexisting social cleavages. In over 90% of cases, interruptions to the regular water supply combined with preexisting social cleavages also produced demonstrations. In situations where these sufficiency conditions weren’t met, however, droughts generated this kind of nonviolent pushback relatively rarely.

As the authors point out, that finding is at odds with the idea that climate change is, on its own, a path to violence, even in areas where societal tensions are high. In drought conditions, social cleavages alone are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for protests, much less armed conflict. Instead, it is governance choices — either regime type at the macro level or water cuts at the micro level — that combine with drought and social unrest to spur mass political action.

To underline the importance of politics in driving resource conflict, the authors pointed to a case that doesn’t fit their model. In early 2005, Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, experienced drought, water cuts, and deep social cleavages due to Israeli occupation, yet there were no conflicts over water. It is impossible to prove the negative case but, the authors speculate, Rafah residents, living under occupation, likely had political priorities that took precedence over the water cuts. Climate change will reshape the world, but it cannot dictate how people respond to it. Just as political decisions have brought on the climate crisis, it will be political decisions that determine who bears the brunt of its effects.

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

Shirin Jaafari profiled [[link removed]] Najeeb Michaeel Moussa, the Catholic Chaldean Archbishop of Mosul, Iraq, after he was nominated for a prestigious human rights prize. In 2014, when ISIS invaded his city of Qaraqosh, in northern Iraq, Moussa organized an evacuation that brought many of his co-religionists and hundreds of historical manuscripts in his care to safety behind Kurdish lines. At one point, ISIS fighters drew level with their convoy before being driven back by Kurdish forces. The manuscripts have since been scanned and made available to scholars, but the originals remain in Iraq as part of the country’s rich cultural heritage.

Ore Koren discussed [[link removed]] the potential for violence in the wake of upcoming US elections in the context of past contentious elections from around the world. Electoral violence, he notes, mostly takes place in countries without the resources or institutions to constrain it. The US, he argued, has durable institutions and well-organized security services that can serve as a check on post-election violence. So far, the vast majority of American political demonstrations in 2020 have been peaceful, another strong indicator that major post-election violence is unlikely.

Orla Barry reported [[link removed]] on widespread support for US president Donald Trump among members of far-right groups in Europe. On one hand, European right-wingers largely support Trump, and see him as an ally in their efforts to upend established institutions. On the other, some coverage of Trump as an important inspiration to the European right is overplayed, experts point out. The far-right has a long history in Europe that far predates Trump’s arrival on the American political scene and, as Barry quoted political scientist Cas Mudde as saying, European far-right parties “have a much more developed ideological frame than Trump will ever have.”

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

There’s been a lot of speculation in the past week about whether President Trump being in treatment for COVID-19 poses a threat to US national security. Are US adversaries readying their forces to conquer the American homeland now that the commander-in-chief is in the hospital? Experts say [[link removed]] “definitely not, what are you even talking about?” but they’re forgetting a crucial historical example. In 1963, when the United States’ national security apparatus was thrown into chaos by the killing of John F. Kennedy, four dastardly Liverpudlians wasted no time establishing a beachhead in the States. They quickly became the vanguard force of an irreversible onslaught from the United Kingdom that became known as the British Invasion [[link removed]]. So keep an eye out for mop haircuts in the coming days.

The rare topical math joke [[link removed]].

As conflict grows [[link removed]] between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Azerbaijani military has either scored a major propaganda coup or suffered a self-inflicted publicity misstep, depending on your opinion about hair metal [[link removed]].

Sultan Mehmed V, Ismail Enver Pasha, and Archduke Josef Ferdinand all figured out [[link removed]] how to change their Zoom displays, which is a decent consolation prize after losing World War I.

This [[link removed]] really obviates the need for all the Lego ICBM silos we’ve been constructing under our backyard.

“Thank goodness I was able to shave 10 minutes off my emergency response time,” the medic says as he shoots jet exhaust directly [[link removed]] into the patient’s face.

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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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