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read this article on life under rebel control.

Most literature on civilians in civil wars focuses on the decisions they make in pursuit of survival — what Nimmi Gowrinathan and Zachariah Mampilly call “victim’s agency" in their new Comparative Politics article [[link removed]]. Yet, as Gowrinathan and Mampilly demonstrate, civilians who engage with rebel groups are after all kinds of things beyond simple survival — from greater freedom under rebel control to changes in rebel political priorities. Looking at life under the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka, they show that people who accept rebel control where they live can make real change in rebel governance through nonviolent activism.

The hidden nuclear test

Forty years ago last week, American satellites saw something that looked very much like a nuclear blast off the coast of South Africa. The Carter administration quickly came to the conclusion that it had caught either South Africa or Israel conducting a nuclear test, but, with military aid to Israel on the line and Strategic Arms Limitation Talks coming up, American officials soon adopted a policy of covering their eyes and shouting “la la la” to avoid having to confront the issue. A new retrospective [[link removed]] reexamines the data surrounding the test and explains the cover up that followed.

Israel is the most likely culprit for the blast, as it had close relations with the apartheid-era South African government and the South African nuclear program was not advanced enough at the time for the type of test detected. Yet, as then-National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi later told a biographer, “for political reasons … [the investigation] wasn’t pursued to the very end because it wasn’t clear. Suppose we find out, what do we do then?”

The device that actually spotted the blast was a bhangmeter, an incredibly-named sensor built for the sole purpose of detecting nuclear explosions. Though it does measure bangs, the name derives from “bhang,” an edible marijuana paste. Fred Reines, the leader of the team that invented the bhangmeter, cheekily adopted the name to suggest that you’d have to be stoned [[link removed]] to think the device would ever come into use.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Missed opportunities for peace

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists offers a short history [[link removed]] of attempts to reach a durable peace between India and Pakistan. Almost all of the conflicts between the two countries have been followed by declarations that future disputes should be settled peacefully, but the actual conflict-resolution mechanisms necessary to prevent war have never been developed.

The first attempt at a no-war pact came in 1949, just two years after partition. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru suggested that the two countries issue a no-war declaration, and Pakistani Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan agreed, on the condition that the two countries create a schedule for resolving their various disagreements. No timetable was ever forthcoming and the idea lay dormant until 1966.

The authors make the case that, despite past failures, the present tensions between Pakistan and India demand a return to the pursuit of a credible no-war pact. The pact would be no guarantee of an end to war, but it could create a framework for more constructive dispute resolution than the current environment of brinksmanship and distrust.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE RETHINKING RUSSIA’S FOREIGN POLICY

Last week in Deep Dive, we looked at the archival record on the American approach to NATO expansion in the mid-1990s. This week, we’ll focus on an article [[link removed]] from Kimberly Marten in the European Journal of International Security that challenges the conventional wisdom on the effects of NATO expansion on Russia’s security stance.

A popular view of NATO expansion is that, by bringing countries in Russia’s near-abroad into an American-led alliance, it pushed Russia toward a more adversarial stance toward the US and Western Europe than it might have had otherwise. Marten challenges that view, using a series of interviews with policymakers in both the US and Russia to suggest that Russia’s “reaction” to NATO expansion actually predates the decision to expand.

Marten begins in much the same place as M.E. Sarotte’s article from last week: with an acknowledgment that domestic political factors in the US were the primary driver behind NATO expansion. Marten, however, focuses on how Russian policymakers responded to American political pressures. In her interviews with then-Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, she found that there was little trepidation about NATO expansion as a threat to Russian security among the small group of decision-makers in the Yeltsin administration. Instead, the problem was Russian domestic politics, both within the bureaucracy of the security apparatus and in the country as a whole.

Kozyrev was unpopular in the foreign ministry, where he attempted to root out bureaucrats who were not committed to engagement with the West. The conciliatory policies he and Yeltsin advocated also lacked broad support. In 1992, 69% of Russians favored maintaining Russia’s great power status, even at the cost of worsening relations with other countries. When there was a coup attempt against Yeltsin in 1993, opposition militias specifically demanded that Kozyrev be hanged.

In the aftermath of that 1993 coup attempt, Yeltsin was forced to compromise with nationalist opposition parties in a way that he hadn’t before. This, Marten argues, is the tipping point in creating anti-Western foreign policy in Russia, not decisions on NATO expansion that came later.

Marten’s piece also refers to a great moment in the early post-Cold War period, when Kozyrev went to Stockholm to address a 1992 meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. In the run-up to the meeting, Kozyrev and his government had been conciliatory and open to cooperation with the West. During his 45-minute speech, though, Kozyrev seemed to announce a new, much more aggressive policy, thundering [[link removed]] that the former Soviet Union was “a post-imperial space where Russia has to defend its interests by all available means.” Attendees from Western governments were shocked — had there been a coup in Russia? Kozyrev let the crowd stew nervously for a while, then came back out and announced it had all been a fun joke, a light prank to demonstrate what Russian policy might be like if President Yeltsin lost out to ultranationalist conservatives. A tough day for Western diplomats, but a compelling data point for Marten’s argument — even in 1992, Russian leaders were hyper-aware of the potential for domestic political pressures to shape their foreign policy approach.

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

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

Emily Green recounted [[link removed]] the story of 43 disappeared student teachers in Mexico whose murders remain unsolved after five years. Mexican police were the last to see the students alive when they assaulted the bus the students were taking to a protest, but authorities have so far failed to provide a convincing explanation of the students’ fates. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has promised to get to the bottom of the case.

Anticipating the Trump administration’s decision [[link removed]] to accept just 18,000 refugees into the country in the next year, Caroline Smith and Mariam Iskajyan made the case [[link removed]] for an American refugee policy rooted in an acknowledgment of America’s role in forcing people to seek shelter far from their homes. Around 8,000 of the 10,000 refugees who arrived in Greece last month, for example, came from Afghanistan, where the US-led war has entered its 18th year. A reasonable refugee policy, Smith and Iskajyan argued, would reckon with that record and provide support for Afghan refugees.

Manuel Rueda reported [[link removed]] from Bogata, Colombia, on calls from Colombian coffee farmers to cartelize coffee production to stabilize prices. Wholesale prices for Arabica coffee beans more than halved in 2019, driving many producers into deep financial hardship. The Colombian and Honduran presidents both referred to the plight of coffee farmers in their UN General Assembly speeches last week, but neither went as far as to call for an OPEC-style cartel for coffee.

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

Frank Zappa, on what counts [[link removed]] as a country. The quote is good, but for the full Zappa-as-political-scientist experience, check out this [[link removed]] clip, from a 1986 episode of Crossfire, in which Zappa looks like a man sent back in time from the year 2069 to be yelled at about sex and politics by professional scold, Robert Novak, and two guys whose fashion icon is Robert Novak. The 1980s were very bad.

The World and Inkstick Media have not yet developed an editorial policy on how to render endless screaming in print, but once a policy is in place we will likely return to this cursed image [[link removed]].

In what is presumably some sort of sabotage operation aimed at grinding Pentagon bureaucracy to a halt, the Defense Department’s official dictionary no longer includes [[link removed]]the word “doctrine.”

Imagine being this guy [[link removed]]'s agent.

This [[link removed]] is cool, but the real skill is in controlling the hundreds of little cruise-missile kites that will chase it around.

Pour one out [[link removed]] for US Special Representative for North Korea, Steve Biegun.

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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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