Editors’ Note
Issue 9: Weapons
OCTOBER 3, 2023
In Ukraine, people have learned to distinguish the sounds of different weapons flying through the air with the same acuity with which they identify bird songs. “Despite the explosions, they chirp on schedule,” Myroslav Laiuk writes in his series of Wartime Poems, “in parks and gardens, in forests you’re not allowed to enter / during wartime. And we guess: / that’s a jay on a poplar, an oriole, a thrush on a fir tree.”
This issue investigates how the circulation, distribution, and global trade of arms is reshaping the contours of contemporary life. In a world where seemingly every utterance and object can be weaponized, our authors ask us to take a closer look at the economic, military, legal, and virtual weapons being deployed in our midst. From Buenos Aires, Lucía Cholakian Herrera exposes how the financial fantasy of the U.S. dollar has fundamentally reshaped Argentina’s informal economy. From Chişinău, the photographer Will Baxter captures how Moldovans are alternately fighting and embracing Russia’s political advances. In Kyiv, Kristina Berdynskykh brings us the inside story of how Ukraine finally secured F-16 fighter jets. Sarah Souli attends Europe’s largest weapons expo at a moment when arms manufacturers are seeing their largest profits to date, and is told to stop asking questions.
Once a weapon is deployed, it can have a long afterlife. From Mexico, Chantal Flores traces how U.S.-made guns are smuggled over the southern border and into cartels, and chronicles the Mexican government’s legal battle to hold gun manufacturers to account. In a sweeping and elegiac investigation, Soobin Kim speaks to descendants of those killed during the 1947 Jeju Island massacres in South Korea and uncovers conservative attempts to cover up the hard-won truth. Kaloyan Kolev unearths the archived pages of Yugoslavia’s national web domain .yu, where memories of the nation live on two decades after it ceased to exist.
Finally, and because journalism is a weapon for good, we have convened a roundtable with reporters in exile from Cuba, Syria, Hong Kong, Myanmar, and more.