Why is a private investigator tracking down a war criminal in Trader Joe’s. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing …

… read about a private investigator tracking down a war criminal in Trader Joe’s.

War crimes imply the existence of a prosecution, but justice for the victims of war can be especially difficult to find in the courts, as laws on the books are rarely used to actually charge such people. In April 2019, a private investigator served Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s former defense minister, with a civil suit. The investigator found him at a Trader Joe’s in Montrose, California. The suit was for the murder of Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge in 2009, and came from his family, part of the work of lawyers suing accused war criminals on behalf of their victims. The Reveal report [[link removed]], which can be listened to or read as transcribed audio, details the US history of tracking down war criminals and then struggling to prosecute them, or prosecuting them for lesser charges that can stick. It’s a history that runs through presidential prerogatives, and also one that hits at the hard limits of legal authorities and international criminal justice infrastructure to find and punish those who commit harm through the state. Reveal’s story ends on a grim note that only further underscores this impunity: Eight months after Rajapaksa was served that civil suit in 2019, he was elected president of Sri Lanka, a position he holds to this day.

chopper coppers

The United States is selling Nigeria 12 attack helicopters, a move that Alex Thurston predicts will primarily benefit US defense contractors while doing little to meet Nigeria’s actual security needs or bringing its current conflicts closer to an end.

“Selling Nigeria attack aircraft feeds a dangerously exterminationist mentality within the military, whose press releases now constantly trumpet the number of jihadists and bandits who have been ‘neutralized’ or ‘eliminated,’ including from the air,” Thurston writes [[link removed]].

The problems plaguing the country may have violence at the end but can be traced back to a failure of a disconnected political elite, whose wealth insulates them from the dire poverty of the public. That’s not a problem that can be solved by killing from the sky.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Environmental Hazards

The war in Ukraine is a war not just against the people and the government of the country, but against the environment and the biodiversity within it. Contaminants from bombs, risks of further firefights at nuclear facilities, and just the nature of sustained war make life difficult for the natural world, and the humans that depend on it.

As the war continues to have an impact on the price and availability of food across the globe, measures adopted by other countries to manage the insecurity are hurting long-term preservation of the natural world.

“The conflict is also derailing conservation and climate work beyond Ukraine’s borders, with Belarus shutting down conservation NGOs and the EU delaying its biodiversity plan due to concerns about food security,” write [[link removed]] Genevieve Kotarska and Lauren Young.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Discourse of Justice: Part I

The durable end of an armed conflict comes first through the negotiation of a ceasefire, and second, through the ways in which the government in power handles that peace. Civil war is violence, experienced, and the former fighters in a conflict may be willing to pick up arms again if they see the worst of their enemies walking free afterward. Transitional justice can address this, by allowing post-war regimes to reconcile the harms of the past, but it can fail if the victorious side after war instead reneges on its promises.

When that happens, aggrieved parties can take action in the name of human rights, changing the politics of the country and demanding more durable change. Human rights discourse is politics by other means.

Such is one conclusion from “ The Popular Appeal of Human Rights Activism: Reimagining Transitional Justice as a Political Struggle [[link removed]],” an upcoming paper by Frank Richard Georgi. Georgi looks to human rights discourse as a way for marginalized groups to do politics, and bend a bad status quo toward a more workable future.

Georgi contents that “human rights defenders imagine transitional justice in terms of a larger political struggle that exceeds justice for past atrocities,” and that this struggle can be seen in three tropes: “truth as the frontier of political confrontation with right-wing elites, the ‘rights-defending victim’ as a form of popular subjectivity and political underdog, and liberal overhaul of corrupted democratic institutions.”

This makes human rights discourse a complicating factor in conversations around populism, as the universal language of human rights is used to call for and contest rights on a popular basis. It is also an argument against populism as solely a term to describe movements among the political right, which claim popular appeal to attack elites and also narrow the scope of who gets counted and benefits from being a citizen. If marginalized people adopt universal language of inclusion to assert their right in a political space, that is not an elite-driven phenomena but rather a genuine and inclusive understanding of populism.

Georgi’s study is focused on Latin America broadly and Colombia narrowly, where resistance to governments of the right have been a staple of multi-ethnic coalitions for years. While right-populism focuses on the obligation of the state to a select portion of the population, with boundaries tightly policed, Georgi sees human rights discourse as contesting the space by demanding a multiethnic polity under the protection of law.

“[T]he political struggle of Human Rights Discourses] does not defy pluralism and liberal institutions — as postulated in prevalent populism research — but, quite the contrary, defines legality and basic rights as the horizon of their struggle against unbounded, authoritarian rule,” Georgi writes.

The idea is explained even more concisely by Martin, a lifelong activist, who answers Georgi’s question about the goal of transitional justice as ““¡Democracia!” Or, as Georgi puts it, marginalized groups using the language of human rights to demand change are calling for a “‘different democracy,’ where people can disagree without being stigmatized or killed, where the rights of indigenous people and afro-descendent communities are as respected as the land claims of small peasants and workers’ rights.”

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

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

Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman reported [[link removed]] on how the rise in oil prices globally is exacerbating wealth disparities in countries across Africa. With the high prices hitting transportation and in turn consumer goods and services in everything from grooming to food, the burdens of the cost spike from high oil prices are being born by poor and working people. But the high prices are a boon for governments that draw funding from oil revenues, and has led to an increase in funding for oil exploration. "Remove the taxes on the fuel prices. That may not necessarily reduce the costs of the food, but it will definitely stabilize it,” Accra resident Rose Lawson told Dini-Osman.

Gabriel Mondragón Toledo revisited [[link removed]] Germany’s post-World War II history of arms exports. While governments in the West and then unified Germany “managed to position the country as a civilian power committed to human rights,” writes Mondragón Toledo, “a closer look at history shows double standards and a continual expansion of German arms sales.” This includes using exports of German-made weapons as an industrial driver, and selling to countries with such obviously appalling human rights records as apartheid South Africa. What is new about German arms to Ukraine, then, is not selling them, but the German government’s performance of a change in policy in order to make the sale look like an aberration.

Anmol Irfan interviewed [[link removed]] journalists and writers in Pakistan, about the expected censorious impact of two presidential ordinances changing the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act. The Act, first passed in 2016, is seen as a weapon wielded by politicians against the press, and the new changes increase penalties for defamation. “If you can’t hold government and state institutions accountable then society is at risk of falling victim to dangerous power imbalances,” Islamabad-based journalist Rimal Farrukh told Irfan. “The new laws insulate government authorities against criticism even more than before, which is quite frankly, alarming.”

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

Sometimes, it’s okay to just take a minute and whistle Union Dixie [[link removed]].

Substack pays all its most prominent writers in Dunning-Krugerrands [[link removed]].

The need for midlife crisis management [[link removed]] has never been clearer.

Twitter is terrible in part because it is perfect [[link removed]].

200 years? At most, every main character gets 15 minutes, and even then, only if they’re interesting enough to warrant it [[link removed]].

In this universe, a Sims Card is what era of the popular family-managing game [[link removed]] you first played.

Our Labcoat Means Death [[link removed]].

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 Kelsey D. Atherton with 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.

Preferences [link removed] | Web Version [link removed] Unsubscribe [link removed]