Revolutionaries, in form and function, frame their work as a cure for the body politic. The history of revolutions is at least as much a history of organization and skill by those seeking to overthrow political order, as it is a failure of a political establishment to cure what ails it. This failure can take many forms, variations of an existing political and social order inadequately addressing the needs, rights, and desires of a wide cross-section of people within a country.

When revolutionaries and rebels seek to challenge that order, they can do so by addressing the harms done to the bodies of the people within it. In “Defending Society, Building the Nation: Rebel Governance as Competing Biopolitics,” authors David Brenner and Martina Tazzioli argue that the way revolutionaries treat bodies is part of how they define and demonstrate the world they are trying to build.

To understand this in practice, the authors open with the role of the Pat Jasan, a non-state movement waging a war on drugs in northern Myanmar. The Pat Jasan is linked to the Kachin Independence Organization, a ethnonational rebel movement.

“Locally, the cheap availability of opiates and methamphetamines has fueled a public health crisis among already marginalized ethnic minority populations in the context of protracted civil war,” the authors write. They then pose this question: “Why would a rebel movement involve itself in a public health campaign against drugs, especially in a context where many other armed actors fund themselves through the drug trade? And what kind of political and social orders emerge from such interventions?”

Last week, and also in March 2021, Critical State examined resource dependence and resilience among rebel groups, and how control of drug fields or smuggling routes can sustain rebellions. While there are merits and disadvantages to both direct control and functioning as intermediaries, actively destroying a resource with direct black market value must come with some benefit, or else rebels wouldn’t do it.

In this case, the authors argue, “rebels might not only or even primarily provide public goods in exchange for public support. Rather, we propose that rebels engage in governing populations because sustaining and optimizing life is precisely what establishes their sovereignty in the absence of formal statehood.”

The provision of material aid, from bread to shelter, can be seen across rebel groups, looking to win over a population they need against a more heavily armed and repressive central government. But governance is more than material, and the authors point to the role of justice administration and health clinics as ways in which rebels demonstrate themselves as providing government in ways the central government won’t.

By governing in direct contrast with the state, including both destruction of poppy fields and movement-operated rehabilitation camps for users, the movement provides an alternate vision and even reality of governance. Or, as the authors put it, this work molds a population “into imagined communities in direct opposition to the existing nation state.”

By forsaking the material benefits of controlling narcotics that cause direct public health harms, the rebels are demonstrating an imagined cure for body politic.

Rebecca Kanthor observed China’s heat wave as it hit Chongqing in southwest China. The massive city of 31 million suffered both soaring temperatures and overstrained resources to take care of people in them. Some people have beat the heat by seeking the solace of underground, using the damp cool of WWII bomb shelters or even cooking hotpot in nearby caves. Kanthor reports elderly people took chairs to sit in the air conditioning of supermarkets, as those with means paid for lodging where they could sleep in cooled air. It is, at once, a foreshadowing of worse climate futures, an a fulfillment of past unheeded warnings.

Niku Jafarnia surveyed the bleak water situation in Yemen. The country, enduring eight years of war and deprivation on top of already-poor resource management, may be running out of water. Part of this is from the use of opportunity or survival, as communities and farmers dig wells to meet immediate need, without any coordination, draining groundwater beyond sustainable rates and leaving wells dry. Part of this is because the war itself makes it unsafe to manage water, while leaving explosives in the ground that contaminate supplies. Jafarnia notes that in Aden, an inability to get repair parts for a sewage treatment facility pump after it was destroyed in 2015 meant spillover into protected wetlands, a compounding loss.

Tibisay Zea reported on drought and water inequality in Monterrey, Mexico. The city has been struck by bad drought, and water rationing that appears to fall hardest on the poorest residents. “We were supposed to have water for six hours a day during the mornings, but it never happens,” Brenda Sánchez, a school teacher who works in Monterrey, told Zea, “We’ve had up to six weeks without any running water at home.” Meanwhile, wealthy areas close to wells have enough water to fill pools. Exacerbating this problem, 19% of Moneterrey’s water is sold to private industries, like brewing and bottling.

This is the most straightforward chart I’ve ever seen the national security state produce, and it’s a mess of pools and pipes to outline kinds of secrecy.

The state of the memes? Exceptional.

Explaining the Pentagon’s logistical prowess to Alexander the Great and watching him weep with envy.

When your enemy is making a mistake, the most important thing to do is to try and repeat their same mistake but faster and harder.

The international symbol of finding out.

When you’ve already had five republics and start considering a sixth.

Enter Newman and Elaine, wearing Yellow Turbans.