What if it got slightly hotter and then things just started exploding? Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

…read about shells that can’t stand the heat.

Usually, when we talk about climate change driving conflict, we mean it in an indirect sense. Rising temperatures change rainfall patterns and make drought more likely, for example, leading to increased competition over resources and a heightened threat of violence. But what if the connection was more direct? What if it got slightly hotter and then things just started exploding? In arms depots and old battlefields around the world, that’s exactly what’s happening [[link removed]]. High summer temperatures make explosives more volatile, to the point that even slightly jostling an artillery round might set it off. In a country like Iraq, where ammunition dumps and unexploded ordnance abound and summer heat now routinely tops 110 degrees, that is a deadly state of affairs.

A leak in the Friendship Pipeline

The Intercept received [[link removed]] 700 pages of Iranian intelligence reports on the country’s activities in Iraq between 2013 and 2015, offering an unprecedented look into how Iran’s intelligence operations function. From a US perspective, the lesson of the report is clear: A decade into America’s war in Iraq, Iran had substantially more control over Iraq than the US or any other foreign power.

The reports detail the extent to which Iran has embedded itself within Iraqi politics and security forces, despite American attempts to encourage Iraqi independence. Hatem al-Makusi, who was Iraq’s military intelligence commander in 2014, reportedly told Iran, “All of the Iraqi Army’s intelligence — consider it yours,” including intelligence gathered from mobile wiretapping technology provided by the US.

As with any archival document dump, the Iran leaks also contain some comedy gold. Iranian operatives, for example, went to the trouble of trying to burgle a German cultural institute in Iraq but got flummoxed and left empty-handed when they couldn’t open the safes inside.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Erdoğan vs. the NPT

In his UN General Assembly speech in September, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan asserted that the concept of limiting the nuclear club to those countries that already have the bomb — the cornerstone of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — is unacceptable. Instead, he said, “Nuclear [military] power should be forbidden for all or should be permissible for all.” Victor Gilinsky and Harold Sokolski argued [[link removed]] that Erdoğan’s claim is serious and threatens to become an argument that will subvert the international nonproliferation regime overall.

Other governments have bucked against the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in response to perceived provocation from a particular enemy, but it is rare for a national leader with the power to launch a serious nuclear program to say that any country having nuclear weapons justifies any other country pursuing them.

Turkey already hosts American nuclear weapons through its NATO connection and Erdoğan has repeatedly made noises about the country pursuing its own bomb.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] MIDNIGHT OIL

This week’s Midnight Oil guest is Gretchen Baldwin, a policy analyst in the Women, Peace, and Security program at the International Peace Institute. Her debut article [[link removed]] in the Journal of Modern African Studies examines changes in ethnic and national identities in Rwanda since the country’s 1994 genocide through the lens of Kwibuka, Rwanda’s annual 100-day commemoration of the genocide.

WHAT IS THE HARDEST PROBLEM YOU WORK ON?

There were a lot of difficulties associated with the Kwibuka project because of its political sensitivity and the concerns necessarily affiliated with research questions around ethnic violence, trauma and nationalism in a "post-ethnicity" state like Rwanda. How does a post-genocide government and its populace deal with the collective memory of mass atrocity at the national level? How does nationalism build and rebuild in a post-genocide state? In Rwanda, Kwibuka is the primary process through which collective memory of the genocide is publicly expressed, but it exists alongside national-level policies against "genocide denial and ideology." These policies have been criticized as intentionally vague and repressive; one component is that naming ethnicity is now considered criminally divisive, which makes researching past ethnic violence quite challenging. Instead, a new nationalism has emerged that declares, "We are all Rwandan," which serves to double down on the erasure of ethnic identity.

Ethically and methodologically, how to consider and account for my own positionality as a researcher was also a challenge. I am acutely aware that my identity — white American with an elite education — plays a role in the types of data I can and can't access, how people interact with me, how I move through a city like Kigali. This can be an advantage, but seeing it as advantageous can quickly become exploitative. Researchers in any discipline or subject run a serious risk of interviewees saying what they think that researchers might want to hear; in a surveillance state like Rwanda, discerning what is and is not "true" becomes even more difficult.

HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT TRYING TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM?

Studying LeAnn Fujii's work [[link removed]] has been critical for my research. She wrote on the importance of "meta-data," which refers to that which is unspoken by interviewed informants. Some examples of this are silence, evasions, rumors and invented stories, all of which I considered invaluable and used to build on and adjust my research design as I carried out the project. Attending to “meta-data” is especially useful when assessing how current social and political realities may influence people's articulation of the genocide and its aftermath, given the sensitivities, discomfort, risk and traumas that can accompany recalling experiences of political violence. It can also indicate a person's level of comfort with a researcher and can shed light on response bias, meaning respondents' instinct to respond to questions in a way they believe the interviewer would want them to.

For my work in Rwanda, observation — both of large, public spaces and activities and of the nuance in individual conversations that I was or was not a part of — helped me to identify how new national identities have emerged in light of discussion of ethnicity being ostensibly outlawed. For example, I never used the words Tutsi, Hutu, or Twa to refer to ethnicities during interviews. Instead I paid attention to coded language I heard in speeches and conversations and then adjusted my own language accordingly. What I noticed was that interviewees were very comfortable identifying themselves as Tutsi without my ever using the word or asking about ethnic identity, but that the word Hutu and Twa were rarely — almost never — said in any context. Likewise, those who self-identified as Tutsi had a very strong sense of community around their Tutsi identity, which was coded in public discourse as "survivor." Ultimately, my research demonstrates that ethnic identity lives on in Rwanda, even in younger generations (folks who were not alive during the genocide), and that is exacerbating existing social tensions around those identities.

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

Catherine Osborn reported [[link removed]] on the decline of sex education in Brazilian schools under the administration of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Numerous Brazilian cities have passed laws limiting sex education at Bolsonaro’s urging and he supports a nationwide rollback of sexual health curricula. Meanwhile, condom use has decreased and HIV infection rates have skyrocketed in the country.

Ryan Summers and Ben Freeman listed [[link removed]] some of the many legal ways governments from around the world exert pressure on American political processes. From Saudi Arabia hiring Washington lobbyists to pass favorable bills in Congress to China plying academic researchers with grants in exchange for censoring course materials, examples of foreign influence abound. The only antidote, Summers and Freeman argued, is increased disclosure of foreign money in domestic politics.

Kalpana Jain profiled [[link removed]] Durga Vahini, the women’s wing of the Hindu nationalist organization Vishva Hindu Parishad. Thirty-five thousand women belong to Durga Vahini, and the group runs paramilitary training programs for its members that mix weapons instruction with lectures on conservative Hinduism and the threat Muslims pose to Hindus in India. Durga Vahini leaders, including newly-elected Member of Parliament Pragya Singh Thakur, have been involved in terrorism against Muslim communities in India.

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

Pun [[link removed]] of the week.

2019 has been a banner year for the technology of protest, with people around the world finding innovative ways to push back against riot police and state surveillance. In Chile, protesters have taken up the mass use of laser pointers to frustrate and disorient police — a tactic that has the residual benefit of looking incredible [[link removed]] on film.

In large swaths of the world, a truism of politics is that the best political discussion takes place on WhatsApp, and through memes. Candidates in Guinea Bissau’s upcoming national elections have taken that truism to its logical conclusion: politicians need to post stickers of themselves [[link removed]] on WhatsApp.

Speaking of memes, this is the official [[link removed]] one of the AI revolution.

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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 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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