No mothers, no hugs

No mothers, no hugs Received this from a friend? [SUBSCRIBE]( CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. [The World]( [INKSTICK]( If you read just one thing … … read about gangs, garbage and governance. A major assumption of efforts to extend state governance into areas where gangs, insurgencies, or other non-state armed groups provide services is that added state governance will displace those groups. No one needs their garbage collected twice, so if the state reliably picks up bags every Tuesday, the theory goes, then people will stop leaving bags out for the local gang’s garbage truck on Thursdays. A new [paper](, drawing from four years of research and a two-year experiment in Medellín, Colombia, puts that theory in the trash and watches it get taken to the dump twice over. Tracking state governance in areas of Medellín where the city made an active effort to increase its service provision, the researchers [found]( that gang governance actually increased relative to state governance in those areas. This “crowding in” effect, the researchers hypothesize, comes from the positive effects that service provision has on gangs’ other, more illicit businesses. If the drug trade relies on civilian loyalty in a certain area, then gangs will meet an increase in government-service provision with their own service improvements rather than cede the legitimacy of their control in that area. Nuclear missile appropriations remain bigger, longer and uncut In a new [article]( for the Bulletin on the Atomic Scientist, Elisabeth Eaves profiles the newest US nuclear missile, the “ground-based strategic deterrent,” or GBSD, that, under current spending guidelines, will run the US public a cool $100 billion by 2029. What are Americans getting for their money? Basically, a shiny upgrade of existing missiles that, if they fulfill their intended purpose, will get incinerated at the start of a horrifying mass nuclear exchange that will likely kill us all. The point of having a US nuclear missile force is that it requires a country that wants to nuke the US without receiving a nuclear salvo in return to expend a large number of warheads neutralizing US missile silos far from population centers. The silos' role as bait increases the cost of a potential nuclear first strike against the US, but also endangers the rural areas and Native American lands that often abut the missile sites. The US already has a fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles to fulfill that dubious mission of increasing the cost on an attack. The GBSD offers some technical improvements over existing ICBMs, but its real value is political. Spending on new missiles provides money to rural communities for which members of Congress can take credit. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( Korean peace plan As the Biden administration takes stock of the diplomatic situation it has inherited from its predecessors, real questions remain about how Biden will handle the relationship between the US and North Korea. Experts and activists associated with the peace movement on the Korean peninsula released an innovative [proposal]( last week for how the US can move forward: pursuing a peace agreement to finally end the Korean War. US involvement in hostilities on the Korean Peninsula began in 1950 and, in both a legal and practical sense, has never ended. An armistice signed in 1953 serves as a ceasefire, but the US maintains 28,500 troops in South Korea and, from a North Korean perspective, frequently threatens an end to the armistice and a return to hostilities. The new proposal calls for the US to play an active role in replacing the armistice, and the shaky peace it represents, with a permanent peace agreement that will allow North and South Korea a clear basis from which to negotiate things like trade, denuclearization and human rights protections. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [• • •] DEEP DIVE Climate and human security: Part II Last week on Deep Dive, we began our look at the Journal of Peace Research’s special issue on climate change and security by learning about the struggles faced by urbanizing climate refugees. This week, we’ll turn our attention to the countryside by examining how climate change affects food production and how conflicts over food arise. To the extent that political violence is fundamentally a contestation over the management of scarce resources, it is generally agreed that scarcer resources mean more contestation. When there are more resources, more equitably distributed, there tends to be less conflict over resources. That is particularly true of essential resources like food. If there is less food for more people, then fighting over its distribution becomes more likely. When climate change reduces crop yields, therefore, we should expect more violence over the remaining food as a result. That’s a tidy theory, but we actually don’t know very much about the mechanism by which climate change’s effects on food production drive political violence. How does climate change actually affect agricultural systems, and which parts of those systems are most vulnerable to violent contestation? Researchers Paola Vesco, Malcolm Mistry, Matija Kovacic, and Mihai Croicu set out to address aspects of those questions in their new [article](. Vesco et al. focus their questions on where staple food crops actually get produced. Tracking changes in the physical layout of agricultural systems, they reasoned, could provide insight into how those systems relate to the geography of political violence. Specifically, they were interested in the extent to which climate change caused the consolidation of food production in smaller geographic areas and whether that had any impact on the onset of conflict. Luckily, the age of remote sensing makes it possible to measure the geography of crop production and to do it on a global scale. The researchers drew from a dataset of annual crop yields for four major crops from every 55-kilometer by 55-kilometer square of land mass on Earth between 1982 and 2015, estimated using satellite imagery. That data allowed them to calculate a Gini index for crop production (GICP) — a measure of how evenly spread out farming of staple foods is in a given country. Like the more famous Gini index of wealth inequality, higher values are associated with more inequality. A country that grew all its food in one place and did not farm anywhere else would have a very high GICP score, while a country that grew food throughout its territory would have a very low score. Using that data, Vesco et al. found that the effects of climate change — increasing temperatures and higher variations in precipitation — drive up national GICP scores over time. As climate change increases the economic risk of farming, food production becomes more specialized and more geographically concentrated. That concentration can seriously impact food growth and distribution, but, from a political violence perspective, it has one clear implication: Food production that is limited in its geographic scope is easier to control through violence than food production that is more spread out. Indeed, the researchers’ data bears that conclusion out. Countries that saw their GICP grow also saw the chances of civil, ethnic and communal conflict all increase as a result. In countries that rely on agriculture as a major part of their national economy, the effect is far greater, with single standard deviation increases in GICP leading to a 14% increase in the likelihood of civil conflict onset. Interestingly, the researchers find no significant correlation between climate change itself and conflict outbreak. Hotter days and rainier rainy seasons do not, in and of themselves, move the needle on political violence. Yet, when those climate effects take place alongside a GICP increase, they cause a dramatic increase in conflict likelihood. Vesco et al.’s work offers a compelling insight into how the much-discussed increase in conflict as a result of climate change might actually take place. In an urbanizing world, production of inputs that allow cities to function — food, water, energy, and the like — has become restricted to a few crucial rural areas. Climate change speeds that trend, creating both resource crunches when crops fail and more concentrated, lootable areas when the harvest is bountiful. If the trend continues, people may be fighting over those areas for a long time to come. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [• • •] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS Rebecca Kanthor [checked in]( with residents of Wuhan, China, who volunteered in their community during the city’s COVID-19 lockdown. Many people, unable to work during the lockdown, organized mutual aid efforts around the city. They delivered food and personal protective equipment, drove people to the hospital and assisted journalists covering the crisis. Since the lockdown has ended in Wuhan, some volunteers have felt let down by returning to their old work. The economy is still slow, limiting earnings, and many volunteers took on large expenses to help their neighbors. Yet everyone who Kanthor spoke to agreed that they had no interest in returning to a time when the virus was tearing through the city. Katherine Voyles [examined]( the state of the spy novel in the wake of legendary author John le Carré’s death. Though the modern practice of espionage has become a substantially digital pursuit, Voyles argued that espionage stories will remain rooted in analog feelings and ideas for a long time to come. Le Carré, whose work redefined the spy genre, figured out how to communicate something essential about spying: The byzantine structures of the espionage world are built at least as much for the emotional edification of those within them as for the national interest of the countries that fund them. Spies rarely have any indication of whether or not they are affecting things at a strategic level (and they rarely are), but they carry on for an array of reasons that are often more personal than professional. That truth is no less fundamental in the digital age. Elana Gordon [reported]( on the role the Serum Institute in India is playing in the worldwide COVID-19 response. Serum, as the company is known familiarly, is the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, making some 1.6 billion doses of vaccines for various diseases in the last year. The company is developing its own COVID-19 vaccine, which will enter phase 3 trials soon, but it is also partnering with other vaccine developers to produce low-cost vaccine doses for export to low- and middle-income countries. Serum is expected to produce as many as a billion doses of vaccine for that market in 2021. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [ ] WELL PLAYED [Grist]( for the Kennedy administration slash-fiction mill. The [more]( you know. Come for the depiction of John Foster Dulles as a slingshot-wielding [menace]( shooting pebbles at the Soviet delegation in a UN class on human rights, stay for the deservedly central (if slightly demeaning) role ascribed to Lebanese human rights advocate Charles Malik. Lazio, the Roman soccer club infamous for its neo-fascist fans, has called up to its youth team [Romano Benito Floriani Mussolini]( — the great-grandson of fascism’s biggest fan. He will play, of course, on the [right](. [Two]( [pieces]( of incredible art from frequent Well Played contributor Kelsey Atherton. Little did they [know]( at the time that Yosemite Sam would one day [serve]( as secretary of state in a Fudd administration. Netflix, we’re begging you, make [this]( a rom-com. [This]( was prescient because, much like the Iraq War, it’s impossible to finish a game of Monopoly. [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 The World and 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]( | [Web Version]( [Unsubscribe](