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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 some new ideas for old problems.
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The fact that younger generations tend to see climate change as the defining foreign policy challenge of their lifetimes will likely go a long way toward reshaping American foreign policy discourse. Matt Korda offered a particularly dramatic example of this last week, when he argued for adapting the principles of the Green New Deal to nuclear weapons policy. Internationalism has long been a key principle of arms control activism, but as global threats overtake national threats in the public consciousness, cases like Korda’s that apply internationalist tools to multiple global challenges are likely to grow in popularity.
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Concentration camps in Assam
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Longtime Critical State readers will remember Sarita Santoshini’s coverage of the Indian government’s attempts to revoke the citizenship of thousands living in Assam state, which borders Bangladesh. The state has opened legal cases against thousands it now considers foreigners and is now building a concentration camp solely to house people detained under the citizenship reevaluations.
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The camp, the first of 10 proposed for Assam, will house 3,000 people on just over six acres. It is being built to expand the capacity of Assam’s existing prisons, which in May held around 1,000 people detained as stateless, often in inhumane conditions.
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People whose names have been left off the government’s National Register of Citizenship have 120 days to prove that they are Indian citizens — a difficult task when the government has officially denied citizenship out of the blue — after which non-citizens remaining in Assam will be detained. Detentions are indefinite.
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Mountie allegedly gone bad
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The mood among Canada’s national security community went Due South last week when Cameron Ortis, a senior official in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s strategic intelligence unit, was arrested on espionage charges. Ortis was the RCMP commander’s lead intelligence adviser and played a role in Canadian counterintelligence operations, making his potential distribution of classified information particularly damaging.
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Prosecutors have been tight-lipped so far about who Ortis is alleged to have been working for, but sources say that he tried to sell large amounts of information, including a list of undercover operatives.
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One source, who declined to be named presumably because they were violating treasured Canadian norms of politeness, described the case as “serious spy s—t.”
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This week’s Midnight Oil guest is Marie-Ève Reny, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Montreal. Her book, “Authoritarian Containment: Public Security Bureaus and Protestant House Churches in Urban China,” won the Hubert Morken Best Book Award at this year’s meeting of the American Political Science Association.
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WHAT IS THE HARDEST PROBLEM YOU WORK ON?
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I am a political scientist and I spend my time looking for answers to puzzles in social sciences. I have a particular interest [in] the study of authoritarian regimes, including China, and more recently, Burma/Myanmar. One of the latest puzzles I have been busy thinking about is why China supports armed insurgencies in Myanmar, despite its proximate ties to the Burmese government in Naypyidaw [the capital of Myanmar]. I am particularly interested in China’s support to Myanmar’s largest insurgent group, the United Wa State Army (UWSA). The UWSA originates from the Burmese Communist Party (BCP), which was dismantled in 1989. China’s support to the UWSA might not seem that surprising given that, during the Cold War, it also supported the BCP, which was in conflict with the Burmese state. China’s diplomatic relationship with Burma then had its ups and downs, but it remained one of Burma’s
main allies.
Yet, times changed. China stopped supporting communist insurgencies in Asia in the 1980s. The Cold War is over. Communism as an ideology declined in reform China. Since the 1990s, China has entered an era of multilateral and regional cooperation. China can no longer afford [to support] insurgencies in neighboring countries from a diplomatic perspective. So what accounts for its informal support of insurgencies near its border in Myanmar? This is the question my second book project will address.
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HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT TRYING TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM?
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Not all puzzles require my doing field research, but this one does. My data primarily originate from interviews with individuals who are experts on the subject and who belong to the organizations I study. Interviews are either semi-structured, with a pre-established list of questions, or open, going beyond a pre-established list. I design questions to help me test the relevance of the answers I get to certain pieces of the puzzle. They might reveal that what I initially thought might have been the answer to a puzzle was not entirely representative of reality. Interviews also help collect information I had not anticipated might be helpful. Most of my research is inductive: it allows data to influence theory and gives the individuals I interview agency in shaping my perspectives.
Solving a puzzle requires more than collecting data. I also have to interpret the data I collect, by extracting the most important lessons that can be drawn from interviewees' narratives. It is a brainstorming of primary data that eventually helps me find answers to my initial question.
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Charles Maynes visited a camp in Shiyes, northern Russia, where local protesters have been living on the edge of the planned site for Europe’s largest landfill since last year. The 20-square-mile site would house trash from Moscow, and, protesters believe it would contaminate water across a wide swath of northern Russia. The protest has drawn a cross-section of rural Russians disillusioned with President Vladimir Putin.
Last week was the 18th anniversary of 9/11 and Nancy Parrish wrote about her indelible memories of the day and what it means to her children, who barely remember it at all but have grown up among the unremitting wars that followed it. Few Americans predicted the drift into constant war that 9/11 precipitated, but 18 years on, Parrish argued, it is time to stop that drift and reevaluate our strategic direction.
Emma Jacobs chronicled efforts to reduce the spread of misinformation in the run-up to Canada’s Oct.21 national parliamentary elections. Facebook has hired Agence France-Presse, a wire agency, to vet content shared on Canadian walls by independently evaluating stories users flag as “false news.” Jacobs’ article also includes a helpful list of links to online tools to help you ferret out fabrications yourself.
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John Bolton is out as national security adviser and the world mourns.
This one was under serious consideration to be featured as a Deep Dive, but it failed to make the cut.
It’s best, if you’re an international drug runner, to let sleeping seals lie.
As ever in the Pentagon, the Marines get all the best branding.
Legendary feminist security scholar Cynthia Cockburn passed away last week, but you can go back and read her extensive collection of short articles for Open Democracy.
The best new wrinkle in democratic peace theory: more democracy in a country is correlated (eventually) with that country having more metal bands. Rock on.
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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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