When droughts pushed many Nigeriens out of pastoralism, the smugglers’ fathers joined a range of professions, from farming to driving to teaching. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

…read about climate shocks in the Sahel.

A common narrative about the relationship between climate change and political insecurity holds that changing temperatures drive conflict by pushing people out of professions that rely on a stable environment, like agriculture or pastoralism, and into the embrace of armed groups. A new report [[link removed]] from the Overseas Development Institute, however, challenges the causal relationships suggested by that narrative. Researchers spoke to 29 current smugglers and their fathers from Niger to understand how different generations coped with climate shocks in the Sahel, and they found that responses to changes in the weather differed radically over time. When droughts pushed many Nigeriens out of pastoralism, the smugglers’ fathers joined a range of professions, from farming to driving to teaching. Today, those men’s sons all carry guns and make their living transporting people and goods across borders illegally. What has changed is not the existence of climate shocks, but the political situation in the region — today, smuggling is in high demand and offers more opportunities than wage labor.

Cyber Urals

A new Russian law that aims to separate Russian internet users from the rest of the World Wide Web, allowing the government to strictly monitor and manage information flows into the country, took effect last week. As security expert Candace Rondeaux argued [[link removed]], however, the law may not give the Kremlin the added control it imagines.

First, the law poses some major technical issues. There are about 3,000 internet service providers in Russia, and very few of them are set up to continue their services if access to the outside world is suddenly shut off. The search for security will come with a distinct economic cost.

Second, Rondeaux argued, what Moscow sees as cyber defense may well be taken in Washington as cyber provocation — the most futuristic of all provocations. Giving American intelligence services a Russia-specific digital target makes US cyber operations against Russia more recognizable, and is therefore likely to drive escalation between the two countries.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] The real backstory in Ukraine

The big story in impeachment centers on the accusation that President Donald Trump withheld American military aid to Ukraine in an effort to pressure the Ukrainian government to collect embarrassing information about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. News organizations have understandably focused on the quid pro quo, but nuclear disarmament expert Mariana Budjeryn delved into why [[link removed]] the US was trying to send almost $400 million in security assistance to Ukraine in the first place.

The answer, in a roundabout way, is nuclear nonproliferation. Back in 1994, a newly-independent Ukraine held the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal — warheads left over from the Soviet Union. The Ukrainian government wasn’t interested in becoming a nuclear power, but the warheads were a valuable chit and Ukraine wanted something in exchange for giving them up and signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. What the NPT-recognized nuclear powers gave Ukraine was the Budapest Memorandum, a promise not to coerce Ukraine in ways they could have deterred had they held onto their nukes.

Russia, a signatory of the Budapest Memorandum, broke its commitment in a pretty big way when it invaded Ukraine in 2014. The memorandum doesn’t lay out exactly what the other signatories have to do in the event of a Russian breach, but Ukrainians were working under the assumption that it would involve substantial security assistance. The slated $400 million wasn’t explicitly tied to the memorandum, but Budjeryn argued that it still relates to the memorandum in principle and, for the sake of the global nonproliferation regime, shouldn’t be withheld for narrow political gain.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE THE POINT OF NO RETURN

Displacement of civilians has long been understood as a predictable and devastating effect of conflict. When violence makes it unsafe for people to stay in their homes, many choose to leave and seek a new home, either temporarily or permanently. In recent years, however, much of the security discourse around refugees and conflict has supposed that refugees are as much a cause of conflict as an effect, often with little direct evidence. The next two Deep Dives will look at what we actually know about how conflict-driven migration affects security challenges in areas where refugees settle.

This week we’ll look at Midnight Oil alumna Stephanie Schwartz’s new article [[link removed]] in International Security, covering what happens when refugees displaced by civil conflict return home after the conflict to a changed, and charged, political environment.

As Schwartz notes, the return of refugees to their home communities is often seen as a kind of capstone for a peace process. If people who have been displaced can go back to where they used to live, the thinking goes, then that repatriation might serve to undo the harm caused by their displacement. Lives will return to normal, and returnees will reintegrate back into the communities they left behind.

The problem with that thinking is that no amount of repatriation can turn back time. The communities to which refugees return have been changed by conflict and a peace deal is no guarantee that the tensions of the conflict have dissipated. What’s more, migration has changed returnees as well. Their experiences of the conflict are radically different from those of the people who stayed behind, and the traumas and opportunities created by each set of experiences can create distinct identities based on migration decisions: those who left and those who remained.

To better understand how those divergent identities shape the contentious politics of ostensibly post-conflict societies, Schwartz conducted ethnographic research within Burundian communities following the country’s civil war. She found that migration-based identities — rapatriés and résidents — were highly relevant in post-war Burundi, and that government policies only heightened the tension between the two. Migration during the war and as a result of earlier conflicts had created de facto land reforms, with résidents taking over some of the land rapatriés left behind. When the rapatriés returned, land disputes followed. After the war, the Burundian government created a commission that eventually set to work systematically resolving land disputes in favor of the rapatriés, giving added shape to the grievances of the résidents.

Eventually, growing grievances on both sides exploded into further conflict. In 2015, a decade after the end of the civil war, an election crisis forced many to leave Burundi to avoid violence. The main predictor of who fled in the 2015 crisis was not who opposed the governing party but rather who had fled before and was now engaged in a land dispute over land they left behind and had tried to reclaim. Past migration status, an identity that was an artifact of previous conflicts with different cleavages, became itself a main cleavage in the 2015 crisis. This example, Schwartz argued, means that policymakers must make post-conflict decisions with an eye not just to the tensions that preceded the conflict but also to the tensions that the conflict itself created, including disputes caused by refugee returns.

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

Randy Thompson drew [[link removed]] a line between the Trump administration’s reversal of course on pursuing a ceasefire in northern Syria and the president’s need to maintain support from his political base among white, evangelical Christians. Initially, President Trump’s decision to pull American troops from Syria without any agreement between the remaining forces left Kurdish militias there largely at the mercy of the Turkish military. White evangelicals, who see Kurdish militias as being particularly tolerant of Christian minorities in the region, quickly pushed back, leading to the policy change.

Jamie Withorne interviewed [[link removed]] North Korea experts Jenny Town and Esther Im about American policy toward the Korean peninsula and their experiences navigating the policy world. Both Town and Im bemoaned the state of American discourse about North Korea, arguing, as Im said, that “we think of [North Korea] in these caricatures and monoliths that may or may not be true today.” Without accepting that the Kim regime is dynamic and capable of change, they noted, it is impossible to imagine a productive way forward in US-North Korea relations.

Indra Ekmanis and Matthew Bell compiled [[link removed]] the impeachment inquiry tick-tock you need to keep track of a story that gets more complicated by the day. This week, you’ll learn about Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s testimony about a “perfect” — President Trump’s assessment — July phone call between Trump and Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and the procedures for impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives, among other things.

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

Within the nuclear triad, ballistic missile submarines are unique for their survivability. Even in a world crisis, you just can’t get rid of the things. Anyway, here’s a good suggestion [[link removed]].

Political scientist Robert Pape famously argued [[link removed]] that attempts at coercion through threatening civilians are doomed to failure. Every year around this time, millions of schoolchildren prove him wrong [[link removed]]. Hope you had a happy Halloween, everyone.

Excel skills are an important part of wonkdom, but if your spreadsheets [[link removed]] can’t terrorize a bucolic village with their mighty honking, what are you even doing?

Don’t try to spam text an expert [[link removed]]on nuclear text alerts. It’ll go poorly [[link removed]].

The military dog that joined the mission to kill ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi became the main character on Twitter for a day last week when the Pentagon and White House quarreled over whether his name could be released to the public. For people with access to the special [[link removed]], puppers-only portion of the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System, however, Conan [[link removed]] was already a celebrity.

Someone involved in the pitch meeting for this [[link removed]] mystifying product, please write in. If no one explicitly described the target audience for little green army men — but ironic — as Critical State readers, we’re offended and want to know about it.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Follow The World: DONATE TO THE WORLD [[link removed]] Follow Inkstick: DONATE TO INKSTICK [[link removed]]

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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