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A Buzzfeed news investigation [[link removed]] drawing on satellite photos and interviews with former inmates in China’s Xinjiang province concentration camps shows that the camps now contain over 100 factory facilities in which detainees are forced to work. Put together, the factories dwarf the largest production facilities in the US, outstripping Ford’s River Rouge complex by over 5 million square feet. Former detainees — many of them Uighur Muslims, a minority population the Chinese government has sought to repress in Xinjiang — report being pressed into service as laborers for less than $1.50 per month in pay. Their labor drives US companies from Nike to Apple — both of which have supply chains that run through Xinjiang. According to experts, there is no way for those companies to do business in the province without benefiting in some way from the massive scale of forced labor taking place there.

New year, same mass negligent homicide

The end of 2020 brought no relief for people incarcerated in US prisons and jails, who continue to be subjected to COVID-19 infection at wildly disproportionate rates. In Alaska, over 40% of prison inmates — 1,966 people in all — have tested [[link removed]] positive for the virus. Of those, only 192 entered the prison system infected. The other 1,744 all contracted it under the state’s care.

In the state’s largest prison, Goose Creek Correctional Center, 1,115 inmates have tested positive out of a total of 1,236 — an infection rate of over 90%.

So far, five Alaska prisoners have died of the virus, including two in the last week. Their deaths add to the 1,738 people incarcerated in the US who had died of COVID-19 the last time national numbers were released in mid-December. So far in Alaska, over five times as many correctional staff have been vaccinated than inmates.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Foreign fighters and sexual violence

A new article [[link removed]] by political scientist Austin Doctor uses data from recent civil wars to argue that the introduction of foreign fighters into rebel groups makes them more likely to engage in systematic sexual violence against civilians. When foreign fighters show up, rebel commanders change their tactics based on the costs and benefits the foreigners bring with them.

Research has long shown that militant groups that use sexual violence often do so as a method of increasing cohesion among their ranks. Fighters who have committed terrible crimes together are less likely to defect from their group, and less likely to be accepted by local communities if they do so. For units that face cohesion challenges due to fighters coming from a variety of locations, sexual violence is a gruesome method to overcome those challenges.

In addition, the presence of foreign fighters means that insurgents are less reliant on local civilian support to provide them with recruits. As a result, the long-term costs of sexual and other forms of violence against civilians are lowered by the foreign fighters, increasing the likelihood that such violence will take place.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Civilian labor in reconstruction: Part I

For policymakers involved in conflict resolution, ceasefire announcements and peace treaty signing ceremonies usually bring some well-deserved relaxation. With the fighting over, they have time to pop some champagne, get some sleep and start writing their memoir about how pivotal they were to the peace process. For many civilians in conflict zones, however, the moment a conflict formally ends is the moment when their most difficult work begins. Post-conflict reconstruction — of built infrastructure, political bodies and social ties — is often grueling, decentralized and poorly compensated work. This week and next on Deep Dive, we’ll look at recent research on what that work entails and the toll it can take on the people who are forced to take it on.

The US Civil War produced more combat deaths than any war in US history, but still fewer than it might have if it had taken place a few years earlier. Medical advances before and during the war meant that many wounds that might have been fatal earlier were treatable — the percentage of US Civil War soldiers surviving their wounds was more than twice what it had been in earlier American conflicts. Those treatments, however, often included amputation and other drastic measures that left patients carrying a disability for the rest of their lives. After the war’s end, their disabilities shaped the veterans’ capacity to participate in the postwar economy, and it also shaped the lives of their children, who often had to support their ailing fathers.

In a 2020 article [[link removed]] in the Journal of Health Economics, economists Dora Costa, Noelle Yetter, and Heather DeSomer investigate just how dramatically postwar lives were shaped by the work necessitated by war wounds. They drew on records of 6,228 Union Army veterans and 9,811 of those veterans’ children to track how their occupational and health outcomes changed over the years after the war ended.

For the veterans themselves, Costa et al. found more or less what you might expect: Wounded veterans who were older when they suffered their wounds were less able to change their occupations to suit their disability, and suffered significant losses of wealth as a result. By 1870, the median older severely wounded veteran had 37% less wealth than the overall median veteran, and almost none of them had been able to leave repetitive, labor-intensive jobs in farming. Younger veterans had significantly more capacity to switch occupations, often leaving farming for either professional careers or less stable but more varied jobs as laborers. They suffered no significant wealth penalty.

For children of veterans with severe injuries, however, Costa et al. found that the costs of war wounds were durable, profound and extremely gendered. Sons of older wounded veterans were 5-12% less likely to become farmers — the most stable and sought after of the widely available professions in their generation — than their peers, but sons of younger wounded veterans saw no ill effects to their occupational class. Sons also saw no ill effects to their own mortality as a result of their fathers’ injuries.

Daughters, however, paid both wealth and mortality penalties for their fathers’ wounds. Daughters of severely wounded fathers were 8% less likely than their cohort to marry farmers, regardless of their fathers’ age. Once they reached 45 years old, daughters of older severely wounded veterans were 31% more likely to die in any given year than other members of their cohort. For daughters of older farmers — the veterans least likely to be able to find better employment opportunities after their injury — the hazard of early death increased to nearly 45%.

Costa et al. trace the early mortality effects to poor early-life conditions, which create cardiovascular problems later in life. Women with a severely wounded father were 138% more likely to die of heart problems than their peers whose fathers had avoided the worst of the war. The researchers attribute the gender gap in outcomes between sons and daughters to increased sensitivity to in-utero malnutrition among girls, but gender roles in the children’s lives may also have contributed to the gap. Girls, who worked inside, were more susceptible to childhood diseases than their brothers who worked in the fields, the researchers point out. In addition, if severely wounded fathers were forced to remain in farming, families might have used limited resources to feed sons — who were perceived as more capable of helping in the field — at the expense of daughters, whose mothers did not have physical disabilities from the war and therefore did not need as much immediate assistance.

Postwar work is often rendered invisible in historical accounts, so it should be no surprise that women often bear the greatest costs of it. The apportionment of the physical and emotional labor required to persevere after violence is no less gendered than the recruitment processes that determine who perpetuates the violence in the first place. As Costa et al. show, labor and the costs associated with it can carry on long after the fighting comes to a close.

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

Rupa Shenoy spoke [[link removed]] to people concerned about the recent death of Karima Mehrab Baloch, a leader in the Balochistan independence movement. Baloch died in Toronto in late December, and Canadian police determined that her death was “non-criminal” soon after her body was discovered. Yet many of her friends and those associated with her cause still suspect foul play, as other Baloch leaders have been targets of violence by the government of Pakistan, the country from which Baloch nationalists wish to secede. Among those who have disappeared under mysterious circumstances is Zahid Baloch, Karima Mehrab’s predecessor as chair of the Baloch Student Organization.

Inkstick Media compiled [[link removed]] its top 10 most-read stories of 2020, putting a breathless year for security news in historical, cultural and political context. The stories include Kate Kohn’s essay [[link removed]] on the US Army’s use of video games as a recruitment tool, Jamie Withorne’s reflection [[link removed]] on memes as a form of communication in modern conflict and Peter Charles’ deconstruction [[link removed]] of the idea that Chinese strategists are unparalleled geniuses rather than mistake-prone humans like the rest of us.

Andrew Connelly reported [[link removed]] on how Armenian wine producers are contending with the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and its aftermath. Wine production in Armenia dates back six millennia, and wines from Nagorno-Karabakh have played a large role in a recent Armenian wine renaissance. The recent conflict, however, damaged many fields and production facilities, and, with Azerbaijani forces now in control in the region, Armenian vintners now fear for their businesses. Nevertheless, some wineries are beginning to restart production in the hopes that at least some of their grape crop can be salvaged.

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

The anniversary of the US assassination of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani is coming up, and the Iranian propaganda machine is shifting into overdrive. Some propaganda farms focus on demonstrating the ability of Iranian eagles to avoid US bullets by doing barrel rolls [[link removed]], while others showcase Iranian allies’ formidable skill [[link removed]] in baking giant cakes [[link removed]].

A disgraceful outbreak of violence marred [[link removed]] the *squints* college football *squints even more* Lockheed Martin *eyes fully shut* Armed Forces Bowl.

President-elect Joe Biden named Kathleen Hicks, a Pentagon veteran and think tank leader, to be his deputy secretary of defense. She would be the first woman in the role, something media outlets figured out was important, but couldn’t quite [[link removed]] articulate why.

Saying [[link removed]] “People like you power me like a battery” to factory workers is a perfect example of how Putin can be both a populist everyman and oligarchic supervillain simultaneously.

British national ambition was severely circumscribed [[link removed]] by World War II.

Time to go back to a foundational story [[link removed]] about survivorship bias [[link removed]].

A rare case where two wrongs (attempted election fraud and the Broadway musical Rent) do, in fact, make a right [[link removed]].

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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 GBH.

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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