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… read about life in Ukraine’s Zero Line.

Battlefields are made, not found, at the point where an invading military is halted or driven back when met with force. For people who lived in the rural places that end up caught between armies, the war brings with it the choice to flee if they can or to try and endure despite the menacing promise of violence around them. In Ukraine, that contested area is known as the Zero Line, the 700-mile-long front where Ukrainian land and Russian-held territory in Ukraine meet. “Outside of the cities, rural Ukrainians live in tiny villages largely forgotten by the media, the aid apparatus, and even the armies who ravage them. Life here is tenuous: Death lurks down side streets and in half-plowed fields sown with mines and shells. It visits in the night with no warning, dropping from the sky,” writes Jack Crosbie [[link removed]]. “Some ravaged towns have clear strategic import — the ones unlucky enough to be close to major highways or transit corridors. Others appear to have been decimated at random, just a few kilometers away from other villages that are largely untouched. Shelling comes and goes.” Crosbie accompanied an aid mission to the Zero Line villages and noticed the abrupt demarcation: within 30 kilometers of the front, everyone was keenly aware of the risk of errant artillery.

Local Natives

The Banyamulenge people live in the South Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they have been for centuries. Yet, because they are primarily cattle keepers, they were classified by colonial administrators as immigrants, contrasted with framing groups deemed native. These classifications persist to this day, writes Delphin R. Ntanyoma [[link removed]], as the group is subject to violence from armed rebels and the government of Congo.

“The Banyamulenge are targeted because they are viewed as ‘foreigners.’ For decades, local armed groups and militias have mobilized to get rid of those perceived as invaders. This ideology is transmitted across generations,” writes Ntanyoma.

Today, these attacks are also fueled by posts on social media, and can even be aided by Congo’s military, who are happy to turn looted cattle into their own source of funding.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] predictable disaster

In popular understanding, the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 marked a turning point, a breach that shaped the rest of the century going forward. For people in Iraq, and many observers at the time, the 2003 invasion was not a break but a continuation of US policy, inching ever closer toward the disaster that President George W. Bush authored. In a roundtable assembled by The Century Foundation, experts discussed [[link removed]] the war’s legacy.

“The destruction of the Iraqi state — beginning in 1990 and continuing through the sanctions era before culminating in 2003 — has yet to be reversed. What we have today is the facade of ‘stateness,’ flimsily propped up on the wreckage of the grotesque Ba’athist state,” argued Fanar Haddad.

“Democratic promises and dreams turned into a power vacuum and a fractured state. Hopes for economic development turned into a kleptocratic and zombie dependency on petroleum,” argues Zeinab Shuker. “However, a new Iraq can still be born. With every hegemonic project of destruction, there is a counter-hegemonic project of building a new country. Such a project is taking shape today in the action of youth across Iraq who are organizing, thinking, and writing an alternative outcome for their homeland.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE founding fatherhood: part II

War complicates the decision to become a parent. For civilians caught up in conflict, the violence and uncertainty can make family planning difficult or impossible, with routes to seek medical care in cities and hospitals dangerous or extortionate. And war carries with it the threat and reality of reproductive coercion. People in war can be forced to carry children they did not intend, and they can similarly be coerced to give up wanted pregnancies.

In “ Abortion access and Colombia's legacy of civil war: between reproductive violence and reproductive governance [[link removed]],” authors Megan Daigle, Deirdre N. Duffy, and Diana López Castañeda look at the decriminalization of abortion in Colombia. The paper was published in July 2022, months before the election of leftist candidate Gustavo Petro, and focuses on reproductive rights and access as contested political space.

“Colombia, therefore, demonstrates, first, the uneven political economies of gendered conflict harms, and second, the complexity of harms beyond explicit violence — that is to say, lack of access to abortion should be read as a gendered conflict harm, as access continues to be limited by conflict-related (im)mobilities and material inequalities that are racialized, localized and classed,” write the authors.

In other words, the conflict shapes the way people can travel and the resources they have on hand, and it does so along lines of gender, race, locality, and class. While the fighting may largely be over, the duration of the war prevented the establishment of rural clinics. This absence of healthcare infrastructure, especially that which can address reproductive healthcare needs, is compounded by the legacy of sexual assaults, forced abortions, and forced births experienced by people caught up in the fighting.

The 2016 peace deal [[link removed]] between the government and the longstanding rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People's Army (or commonly known as FARC-EP) itself became a source of conflict over reproductive rights. The terms of the peace included taking a gender-based approach to redress harms, a framing device that was seized upon by conservative opposition to peace as a compromise too far.

“Criticizing the original peace deal's language on gendered harms, opponents argued for a ‘no’ vote in the plebiscite by appealing to the protection of marriage, family, religion and the legal system. The then attorney-general, Alejandro Ordóñez, called the peace deal a ‘mortal blow to the Colombian family,’” write the authors.

In making this case, conservative forces in Colombian politics set the primary victim of the war as not people but families, a distinction that shifted state responsibility in the aftermath to restoring families, rather than protecting individuals.

“Abortion is cast by these interlocutors as antithetical to Colombian society and the peace process, and opposition to it as a means of forging stability, family, identity and normality in the wake of decades of conflict,” write the authors. That makes the provision of abortion care and reproductive freedom difficult, even when it is technically legal.

“Activists for reproductive justice are keenly aware of these competing demands [for addressing violence and abortion access]: on our visit to La Mesa in 2018, we were handed postcards printed with the message, Nuestro cuerpo es nuestro primer territorio de paz —‘our body is our first territory of peace,’” write the authors.

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Shirin Jaafari spoke [[link removed]] with Iraqis about the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of the country. “[My mother] couldn’t make it to the hospital. She was too scared they might get hit on the way,” Mohammad Hashim Khazim told Jaafari. Khazim was born in the house of one of his mother’s neighbors, on Mar. 20, 2003. Khazim expressed his frustration with the Iraqi government, which has failed to curtail violence and embezzled public funds. Layla Hussain Walli lost six children and her husband to an airstrike on Apr. 6, 2003. “What can I say? We were just sitting there after evacuating our homes. We had done no harm. Don’t [these Americans] have children or families, too?” she told Jaafari.

Zoe Sullivan plunged [[link removed]] into the challenge of water management for the semi-arid parts of Brazil, where abrupt and massive rain creates floods while the sparsity of water leaves locals relying on cisterns for long stretches of time. A PVC-pipe-based [[link removed]] storage and filtration system, designed by Júlio César Azevedo, offers a way for homes to turn rainwater into stored and filtered drinking water. “His invention looks something like Pan’s flute [[link removed]]: the roof’s drains funnel water toward a plastic tube that fills up a series of tubes, one next to the other, that hold the initial rainfall and keep it from contaminating the home’s cistern,” explains Sullivan.

Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman reported [[link removed]] on the vaccine shortages in Ghana, which are delaying immunizations for children and threatening greater and more severe outbreaks of diseases. “As a mother, it is so hard to sleep at night knowing very well that your baby is not protected and could easily get the infections,” Comfort Tetteh told Dini-Osman, about trying to find a clinic with the shots in stock for her four-week-old child. The shortages are already straining health outcomes, with desperate parents draining their savings to get their children access to available doses.

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

When did Stanford start offering Geoengineering Degrees [[link removed]]?

There are many ways to cope with the constant dread of nuclear temporality [[link removed]]. One of the better ones is “eat dessert first.”

Time plus tragedy equals I told you so, man, I freaking told you so [[link removed]].

The subtle art [[link removed]] of French protest.

Old drones don’t die, they just retire to Twitter [[link removed]].

All city in a graphic [[link removed]].

Badger badger badger badger [[link removed]], much room, mistake.

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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.

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