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… read about the plot to kill Qasem Soleimani.

A longread [[link removed]] from Jack Murphy and Zach Dorfman offers new background on the Trump administration’s decision to assassinate Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. The killing, which took place in January 2020, had been a priority for the Trump administration from nearly its first days in office. In 2017, then-CIA director Mike Pompeo called a meeting to plan Soleimani’s assassination, telling participants, “Don’t worry about if it’s legal.” The Pentagon opposed killing Soleimani, arguing that US troops would likely bear the brunt of the backlash. Nevertheless, CIA and National Security Council officials planned a decapitation strike, targeting not just Soleimani but a range of Iranian security officials. By the time the order to kill Soleimani came, it was accompanied by orders to move forward on at least three other simultaneous options against Iranian targets, despite warnings that escalation at that level might spark a war with Iran.

@TheBadISIS

Political scientists Tamar Mitts, Gregoire Phillips, and Barbara Walter have a paper [[link removed]] out where they attempt to measure the effect of ISIS tweets on recruitment for the group. They categorized different types of ISIS content and then tracked users who saw the group’s tweets to see whether they expressed positive feelings about the group after seeing ISIS propaganda.

Many people were open to ISIS content that extolled the group’s religious and political project. Posts about the social benefits the group provided and the grievances they held made a measurable positive impact on people’s support for the group.

Once the posts included violent imagery, however, that impact disappeared and, in some cases, reversed. People were much less likely to express support for ISIS shortly after the group had posted a decapitation it had carried out or the ruins of a building it had destroyed. Even when those images were paired with messages about the social benefits of ISIS, people were turned off.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Sources of hospitality

In an article [[link removed]] in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, political scientists Alexandra Hartman, Benjamin Morse, and Sigrid Weber use a 2017 survey of Syrians living in rebel-held areas of the country to measure what drives people to take in displaced people who arrive on their doorsteps.

They found that a great deal of altruism seemed to come from empathy. Syrians who had been exposed to violence themselves were more likely to take in displaced people fleeing violence. Even moreso, they preferred to host the most vulnerable displaced people — those who were sick, or female-led households, or members of the Kurdish minority.

Empathy was also tinged by political reality. Christians, also a vulnerable group, were comparatively shunned by potential hosts, likely due to Christians being assumed to have connections with the Syrian governme

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Rebels with a business cause: Part I

Much of the rhetoric around smuggling trades and insurgency operates from the assumption that an enemy of the state is any other enemy of the state’s friend. If rebels are trying to overthrow the state and traffickers are trying to avoid it, then surely they must be in business together to achieve their shared ends. That logic, however, doesn’t hold up too much upon careful scrutiny. If rebels and traffickers both want to avoid state attention, then hooking up with the state’s other biggest security priority probably isn’t a great idea.

Yet rebels do get into the smuggling game, and with some frequency. This week and next in Deep Dive, we’ll look at new research on how rebels negotiate the international business world when they don’t want to go into business with their criminal compatriots.

Political scientist Rachel Sweet has a new article [[link removed]] in the journal International Organization addressing exactly this issue. Sweet got ahold of 126 contracts between various private companies engaged in cross-border trade in Democratic Republic of Congo and the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD), the largest rebel group in the Second Congo War. The contracts, and a range of other records about the deals, describe a whole world of negotiations between the RCD and firms that wanted to profit off the conflict but did not want to get caught doing so.

The contracts cover a range of export commodities, with the RCD partnering with private companies to ship coltan, diamonds, gold, other minerals and agricultural output out of the country in exchange for much-needed cash. They are notable as a source of material support for the RCD war effort but, as Sweet points out, they are perhaps more remarkable as a form of legitimacy-seeking by the rebels.

The RCD addressed firms’ concerns about doing business with an internationally sanctioned rebel group and domestic worries about the group’s capacity to govern simultaneously. Rather than partner with criminal organizations to move minerals out of the conflict zone, the RCD invested resources into accessing forms of legitimation that would make private companies willing to do business with the rebels.

In practice, this meant not evading Congolese state authorities but drafting them into the cause. As the RCD took over territory, it took care to make sure that local offices of the Congolese state dealing with business — tax collection offices, customs houses, mineral certification bureaus — weren’t left deserted. Instead, these offices were retooled. All the seals and stamps and signifiers of state authority remained in place, but the taxes and fees they remitted were sent to RCD headquarters in Goma, instead of Kinshasa.

Those same seals and stamps then appeared on the RCD’s contracts, along with other accoutrements of legitimate business. Of all the contracts Sweet saw, 87% cited specific state laws, and 82% required the contracted firms to work with state agencies and pay state taxes. As a contract between the RCD and a South African firm read, “with the support of the OFIDA customs bureau, tax collectors, and DGRAD [the Congolese tax authority], [the firm] commits to pay the fiscal duties relevant to this file on the fifteenth of every month.” It was the same language that might have appeared in a contract between the firm and the de jure Congolese government, but both the firm and the RDC understood that the OFIDA customs bureau and the DGRAD tax authority in question were the RCD’s OFIDA and the RCD’s DGRAD. The contracts worked too — at least 77% of contracted firms sent money to the RCD through state agencies.

Not only did this double bookkeeping approach to legitimacy help calm the nerves of companies doing business with insurgents, it also flummoxed the international regulators charged with preventing that business from happening. When governments and nongovernmental organizations attempting to limit the conflict economy challenged firms doing business with the RCD, they simply pointed to the contract language, claiming that they were doing business with the Congolese government. Many avoided accountability in this way, even in cases where the firms had actually been denied contracts by the Congolese government and gone to the RCD in hopes of a better deal.

Far from running toward crime as a funding source of first resort, rebels with pretensions to one day become a state in their own right often try to adopt the state’s approach to raising funds. As Sweet’s research shows, private firms are often willing to assist rebels in that effort, as their interests align with the insurgents in a way that traffickers do not.

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Andrew Connelly examined [[link removed]] the relationship between Brexit and renewed tensions in Northern Ireland. Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union threatened to harden the land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which remains an EU member. That possibility was deemed to be a clear violation of the Good Friday accords that ended the secession conflict in Northern Ireland, so instead, to preserve Britain’s separation from the EU, customs checks are being implemented on goods traveling between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom. The implied separation has angered unionists in Belfast, and contributed to street violence in Protestant areas of the city.

Sunaina Danziger contrasted [[link removed]] the image of “Strong India” put forward by Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and the country’s failure to manage the COVID-19 pandemic. India has a robust public health system and is a worldwide leader in vaccine manufacturing. Yet, despite producing 66 million vaccine doses for export, the Modi government’s domestic vaccination program has been slow and has failed to meet demand. Instead, Modi held massive, maskless rallies in West Bengal in the run-up to state elections there as infection rates soared. Today, the COVID-19 situation in India has been described by experts as “apocalyptic.”

Shirin Jaafari spoke [[link removed]] to Syrian refugees in Turkey who are unimpressed with Syria’s upcoming presidential election. The election is scheduled for May 26, and results are expected to be similar to the last election in 2014, when Bashar al-Assad won with nearly 90% of the vote. Many Syrian refugees have built stable lives for themselves in Turkey, but wish to return to Syria if Assad leaves power. To them, the election is a symbol of Assad’s ongoing dictatorship, a position that has been echoed by the United Nations and a range of other international observers.

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

Security sector reform, as it is practiced [[link removed]].

This week’s geo-loafation [[link removed]] challenge.

You can tell when someone is firing this [[link removed]] gun even if you’re far away because of the distinctive “kreplach” sound it makes.

France and the UK are in a standoff [[link removed]] over the island of Jersey — a tax haven — and its surrounding waters — a fish haven. The dispute is ostensibly about the effects of Brexit, but, as with all conflicts around the world, it can be reduced to an expression [[link removed]]of ancient hatreds [[link removed]].

Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces made their own, terrible “Punk’d” [[link removed]] that everyone hates.

If he’d turned himself into a cat, at least then people wouldn’t have seen [[link removed]]his seat belt.

Many of the academic journal articles linked in Critical State exist behind steep paywalls that charge users exorbitant prices to view individual pieces of research. It’s a strange situation, given that most of the research featured in the journals is publicly funded and the authors and reviewers of the articles generally receive no payment for writing the articles nor any royalties from you reading them. A decade ago, Kazakh computer programmer Alexandra Elbakyan invented an ingenious way to remedy the situation, creating Sci-Hub, a website [[link removed]] that allows anyone to get behind academic paywalls and read academic journal articles to their hearts’ content. For her trouble, she has been sued repeatedly by the academic publishers who make their money off of restricting access to journals. In 2019, the FBI got involved, investigating Elbakyan on the theory that encouraging open access to academic work somehow advanced the goals of Russian intelligence services. They apparently didn’t find much, since last week Elbakyan tweeted [[link removed]] a screenshot of a notice she received from Apple saying that the company was finally allowed to inform Elbakyan that the FBI had subpoenaed her Apple data in 2019.

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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 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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