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If you read just one thing …

... read about what gets left out of international criminal justice.

When the UN International Tribunal for Rwanda was investigating the violence that gripped the country in 1994, it gathered evidence from a range of sources. Many people gave evidence about the horrific genocide perpetrated largely against ethnic Tutsis, which helped the tribunal secure convictions against more than 60 of those responsible for the genocide. The Tribunal also received evidence that the Rwandan Patriotic Front — the Tutsi-led insurgency that ended up controlling Rwanda in the wake of the genocide — had committed major war crimes itself. Yet no indictments ever came from that evidence, as the RPF and its leader, current Rwandan president Paul Kagame, became international darlings for their approach to rebuilding Rwanda after the genocide. Instead, the testimonies remained in UN archives until some of them were leaked to reporters and published [[link removed]] last week. The testimonies, which are from Tutsi RPF fighters, allege mass killings ordered by close Kagame associates that resulted in thousands of Hutu deaths. The leaks raise questions about whose crimes get elided when the international community decides to dispense justice after war.

Revisionist military history

Sometimes, militaries learn the wrong lessons from foreign wars. Sometimes, those wrong lessons come because they don’t even understand what happened in those wars. A new blog post [[link removed]] reexamines the 2014 Battle of Zelenopillya between Ukrainian and Russian forces. The battle has become a touchstone for US military planners, even making its way into official US Army doctrine. As the post details, though, the facts of the battle are badly misunderstood.

In the US telling of the story, Ukranian forces were defeated because they were unprepared for new Russian capabilities, including the use of drones to spot artillery barrages and electronic jamming that disrupted communications. If you ask actual Ukranian veterans of the battle, though, they tell a much simpler story: They were ill-trained, stayed stationary in the open for a long period and were cut to pieces by Russian artillery they did not know was in the area. It was regular old negligence, not new Russian tactics, that decided the battle.

The man responsible for spreading the more jazzed up version of the story to the Pentagon is noted nuclear weapons fantasist [[link removed]] Philip Karber.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Prison food

Prison food is so legendarily bad that it is a truth, universally acknowledged, that it would be improved if a bear [[link removed]] cooked it. Yet there is little research about how bad the food really is and how it affects incarcerated people. A new study [[link removed]] begins to rectify that, drawing on reviews of regulations and interviews with those who have experienced incarceration to give a truly dismal view of how the US feeds those it imprisons.

Three quarters of respondents said they had been served spoiled or rotten food while in jail or prison, and some people reported being served cattle or horse feed.

Not only is the food bad, but it comes in such small portions. Meals were meager to begin with, and many prison systems have shut down dining halls due to the COVID-19 pandemic and are only bringing prisoners two meals per day. One man incarcerated in Texas wrote to his daughter, “We will not die by COVID-19 but we die by hunger!!”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Peacekeeping work: Part II

This week on Deep Dive, we’ll continue our look at some of the recent research identified [[link removed]] by leading peacekeeping scholars Barbara Walter, Lise Morje Howard, and Page Fortna as crucial to shaping future policy discussions around third-party peacekeeping. One of the major challenges peacekeepers face in managing transitions from conflict to post-conflict situations is that, after conflicts have formally ended, often the groups responsible for the most violence aren’t the warring parties that the peacekeepers initially showed up to manage. In order to control these new actors, peacekeeping missions have to be flexible — a quality they tend to lack by design. This week, we’ll dig into a new article [[link removed]] from political scientist Corinne Bara in the European Journal of International Relations that investigates how peacekeepers cope with post-conflict violence, despite their limitations.

Bara’s insights into how peacekeepers manage post-conflict violence come from disaggregating two categories that are often presented as undifferentiated masses: violent acts and peacekeepers. It is relatively easy to come by data on how many people are killed in a certain country in the first year after the formal end of a conflict, but comparatively difficult to estimate which of those killings is an instance of post-conflict violence — violence that would not have taken place but for the conflict — and which are unrelated to the conflict. Similarly, it is easy to gather information on location and strength of peacekeeping missions, but relatively hard to determine what approaches different peacekeepers took in different situations. Bara solved both those issues, and in doing so produced some fascinating results.

To get an accurate picture of post-conflict violence, Bara mapped the instances of violence during the 71 conflicts she studied and then used that map to demarcate the conflict zones — the actual areas in which the conflict violence took place. Then she built a database of instances of collective violence in the wakes of those conflicts that took place inside the conflict zones. The spatial limitation allowed her to weed out violence that took place in the post-conflict period, but would likely have taken place even if the conflict had never happened.

Even with the instances of violence unconnected to the conflicts removed from the set, the role of third party actors — i.e., those not directly involved in the conflict — in post-conflict violence is stark. Third parties are responsible for 66% of the deaths in Bara’s post-conflict dataset.

To gain a more accurate understanding of peacekeeper strategies in dealing with post-conflict violence, Bara differentiated between military troops and police officers deployed and part of United Nations peacekeeping missions. Soldiers in blue helmets do the things we tend to think of when we think of peacekeeping: going on patrols, maintaining buffer zones between warring parties, ensuring that those parties respect agreements on treatment of civilians, etc. In short, their job is to address the conflict and the groups that prompted the need for a peacekeeping mission in the first place. UN police, however, act to supplement and reform local security services in areas with peacekeeping missions. Their responsibility is not primarily to the warring parties, but to the segments of the host country government that manage the threat of local violence.

Looking at the effect of military and police peacekeeper deployments on post-conflict violence, Bara found that UN police are broadly quite effective at discharging that responsibility. A deployment of 400 police predicts a 50% drop in violence during the five years after a conflict, and 1,000 police cuts post-conflict fatalities by an estimated 84%. More surprising, however, is that police were the only kind of peacekeepers who mattered in determining post-conflict violence. No amount of soldier deployments moved the needle on post-conflict fatalities one way or the other.

This is not to say that military peacekeeping deployments are useless in post-conflict situations — they often play a crucial role in making sure “post” remains a relevant modifier for describing the level of violence in an area torn apart by war. Nor does it suggest that UN police have cracked the code of fair and effective policing — the UN’s own reporting [[link removed]] acknowledges that it has not. Bara’s results do suggest, however, that in areas where the international community has been invited to restrict the violence capacity of warring parties, there is also a role for it in helping to manage the state’s response to those who might step into the violence vacuum left behind by war.

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

Anna Kusmer spoke [[link removed]] to historian Joshua Freeman about his friend and mentor Abduqadir Jalalidin, a Uighur professor and poet. Jalalidin has been imprisoned since 2018 in the concentration camps that the Chinese government uses to repress Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang province. Jalalidin has continued writing poetry in the camps, and one of his poems managed to reach Freeman after being passed by word of mouth to people beyond the camp walls. Freeman has translated and distributed the poem, but has still not been able to speak to Jalalidin directly since his incarceration.

Alexander Bertschi Wrigley raised [[link removed]] concerns about the increasing pace of violence in Western Sahara. A decades-long ceasefire between Morocco and the pro-independence Polisario Front broke down last month, but the United Nations has failed to even fill the vacant post of Personal Envoy to Western Sahara to serve as a conduit between the Secretary-General and the warring parties. Sahrawis have been in conflict with Morocco since the latter occupied much of the region following Spain’s withdrawal from its former colony in 1975. Much of the renewed violence since the ceasefire collapsed has taken place near the border between Western Sahara and Mauritania, where Sahwari nationalists have been protesting Moroccan human rights abuses.

Stephen Snyder highlighted [[link removed]] the dangers of the US government designating the Houthis — the Yemeni political group that controls the north of the country and its capital — as a terrorist organization. The Trump administration opposes the Houthis due to the group’s close association with the Iranian government. For humanitarian aid groups trying to operate in Yemen, such a designation would be disastrous, as it would prevent them from coordinating their efforts with the Yemeni government. Many groups would not even be able to get money into Yemen to buy food and other supplies, as doing so would require interacting with the Houthis.

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

The State Department Office of the Historian works tirelessly to produce informative, well-edited collections of primary documents to help the public better understand how US foreign policy decisions were made. Luckily for us, they also throw some comedy into the collection, including this gem [[link removed]] from around April Fools Day, 1985.

When the headline [[link removed]] writer eye rolls as hard as the reporter.

Other companies in this [[link removed]] corporate family include CLSWTZ, a sandpaper [[link removed]] manufacturer, and Cor-Bett, which operates [[link removed]] commercial dock facilities.

The Battle of El-Alameme [[link removed]].

This [[link removed]] is true, but given the state of strategic thinking in “Star Wars,” it maybe isn’t the sick burn on think tanks that the author supposes.

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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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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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