Return of the orb

Climate events are becoming more and more devastating. Received this from a friend? [SUBSCRIBE]( CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. [PRI's The World]( [INKSTICK]( If you read just one thing… ...read about how climate change makes everything else harder. As climate events become more and more devastating, the likelihood that they will hit places already contending with major human security challenges increases. In Mozambique, for example, two major cyclones that hit earlier this year have created [unprecedented challenges]( for efforts to treat HIV. In Beira, a major city flattened by Cyclone Idai, one in six adults are HIV positive. After the storm, displaced HIV patients could not reach health centers and lost touch with the complex system that delivered medicines used to control the virus. As a result, the Beira health center has seen a 25% increase in the number of advanced-stage HIV cases since the storm. Doctors Without Borders is using the Mozambique case to develop programming for future cases of climate events that disrupt complex treatment programs, but even now they do not understand the full extent of the cyclone’s effects. How wildlife trafficking actually works International trade in illegal wildlife products is an estimated $20 billion per year industry, but the transactions that drive it are notoriously difficult to track. A new [investigation]( found that much of the purchasing for illegal wildlife products in China — the world’s largest market for poached goods — is done through the secretive feiquan banking system. In feiquan, buyers in international purchases use “an established Chinese account holder abroad as a channel to add smaller amounts to an official invoice to a supplier, with the supplier then paying out the extra amount in cash on the receiving end.” Goods, rather than money, cross national boundaries, and therefore transactions don’t enter the international financial system. The system works because contraband is so easily divisible. Like currency, things like rosewood and rhino horn can be subdivided as necessary to produce various levels of value necessary to complete transactions. Because traders treat products like rhino horn and elephant tusk as currencies, they also speculate on them like currencies. Poachers appear to be stockpiling ivory like goldbugs, treating it as an exchange vehicle as much as a consumer product. This complicates efforts to disincentivize poaching, as it partially decouples prices from consumer demand. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( The spirit of Stonewall Last week, people around the world celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots — the New York City uprising protesting police violence against LGBTQ people — and widely credited with sparking the modern gay rights movement. While one [white, male]( commentator used the occasion to declare the fight for gay rights over, many others, including trans women and [people of color]( in El Paso, Texas, spent the anniversary highlighting the violence that LGBTQ people still face. The El Paso protest was the latest in a series of events held by Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, to bring attention to the mistreatment of trans immigrants. It took place near where Johana Media Leon, a trans woman from El Salvador seeking asylum in the US, died in the custody of American Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this year. In 2016, Human Rights Watch [collected]( credible allegations that transgender women in ICE detention were singled out and put in danger of “sexual harassment and abuse, of mistreatment, of the dangers of being placed with the male population, and [lack of access] to medical treatment.” Johana Medina Leon is the second trans woman to die in ICE custody in just over a year. Roxsana Hernandez Rodriguez, an asylum-seeker from Honduras, died of dehydration in ICE detention in May 2018. An independent autopsy found that her body showed signs of abuse during her time in ICE custody, a charge the agency denies. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [ ] DEEP DIVE So yesterday Data can tell us a lot about things that have already happened. As our increasingly digital world produces an ever-more complete record of world happenings large and small, our ability to roll back the clock and see exactly how things played out has never been greater. But, like, who cares about yesterday’s news, man? For a certain type of policymaker, bent on throwing off the shackles of chronology, the promise of big data is not that it can elucidate the past but that it can predict the future. Security is as prone to this tendency as any other field, and a rash of research has made attempts to use new data harvests to predict the outbreak of security challenges. In the next two editions of Deep Dive, we’ll check in on the state of the conflict prediction research agenda. Last week, a group of economists and political scientists released a [working paper]( in which they applied a series of proposed statistical conflict prediction methods for two cases: Colombia from 1988 to 2005 and Indonesia from 1998 to 2014. If machine learning models could predict the location and timing of conflict within those periods — authors Samuel Bazzi, Robert Blair, Christopher Blattman, Oeindrila Dube, Matthew Gudgeon, and Richard Merton Peck reasoned — the algorithms that produced them might be useful in predicting future conflicts. The results will confound [“the time haters.”]( It turns out that the models are pretty good at predicting where violence will take place, but not very good at saying when it will happen. There are certain “hot spots” for violence that data can identify, but predicting when those hot spots will erupt remains elusive. Even when data is disaggregated to the year — that is, when the model is asked whether violence will increase in a certain calendar year over a previous year — the models explained none of the year-to-year variation in violence levels in particular locations. The authors offer some possible explanations for why it is so hard for machine learning models to predict conflict timing. One idea is [Fearon’s 1995 defense](: If war is irrational as a method of conflict resolution, how can we use logic-based models to predict it? Another suggestion is that conflict actors sometimes make countercyclical decisions for strategic reasons — both sides in a conflict might hold off attacking in a certain location at a certain time if they believe the other side is likely to do the same. One argument the authors largely dismiss, however, is the idea that more data will solve the problem. The Indonesia and Colombia datasets are substantial, and the models are equally bad at predicting conflict timing if you feed them just the first couple years of the data or all of it. If you start measuring conflict events over, say, thirty years, you’re at least as likely to be conflating fundamentally different parts of a conflict than you are to be making valid discoveries in new data. [LEARN MORE]( [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [• • •] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS Deepa Fernandes [spoke]( to refugee families in Greece who are caught in a legal bind: When they entered Greece as asylum-seekers, they were entitled to housing benefits and other support that allowed them to survive in an unfamiliar country. As some of those families have won formal recognition as refugees, however, that support — tabbed for those still seeking refugee status — is being revoked. Left without sufficient resources, and tied more than ever to staying in Greece, refugees must find other means to maintain their families' lives. Cassandra Stimpson and Nia Harris [followed]( the money behind the network of lobbying groups advocating for war with Iran. Iran’s main regional rivals, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, spent about $30 million last year on Washington lobbyists and in addition to their usual lobbying activities, those lobbyists, in turn, donated more than $3 million directly to candidates. The biggest recipients of that money, it turns out, have been some of the loudest voices in Congress advocating military confrontation with Iran. Juke Carolina [tracked]( the decline of religious pluralism in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The region had long been a prime example of good relations between Catholics and Muslims in the country, but instances of intolerance and even sectarian violence have increased recently. One of the drivers of the increased conflict seems to be the rise of hardline Muslim vigilante groups in the region. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [ ] WELL PLAYED Two weeks ago, Critical State highlighted state intelligence services’ increasingly sophisticated use of LinkedIn to recruit spies. This week, we see that they still have [some ways to go](. This week’s [prize]( for headline writing goes to the Financial Times, although, as Twitter user @ug_sig pointed out in the replies, the cocaine, though in Spain, was mainly on the plane. Along with much of the rest of Europe, Spain experienced a record-breaking heat wave last week. The heat there caused cow manure to burst into flames — an apt [metaphor](for inaction on the climate crisis — resulting in the largest wildfire Catalonia has seen in 20 years. Some responded to the heat with crass jokes and others turned those jokes into [poetry](. The more you dig into this [story](, the wilder it gets. Current South Korean President Moon Jae-in served in the US military operation launched to avenge the killing of the erstwhile tree trimmers, which they called, surreally, Operation Paul Bunyan. For those of you who bet that [the orb]( was a blockchain-related grift, you may now [collect your winnings](. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( Follow The World: [fb]( [tw]( [ig]( [www]( [DONATE TO THE WORLD]( Follow Inkstick: [fb]( [tw]( [ig]( [www]( [DONATE TO INKSTICK]( Critical State is written by Sam Ratner and is a collaboration between PRI’s The World and Inkstick Media. The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRI/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. [Preferences]( | [Web Version]( [Unsubscribe](