In the mind of Hassan, a veteran Hezbollah fighter and missile specialist, the question is not whether Lebanon’s Iran-backed Shiite militia will wage a final, decisive battle against Israel, but when.

“Things have changed; it’s not like before,” says the fighter, a Hezbollah member for 22 years who uses a pseudonym. “Historically, they [Israel] are the ones who have threatened. Now we threaten them – whenever we want, on our timeline.”

Even as Israel today is absorbed by unprecedented political turmoil at home, Hezbollah seems emboldened by its growing strength on the Jewish state’s northern border.

Both sides have built up assiduously for renewed war since their last major conflict in 2006, which lasted 33 days. But that fight was so destructive and costly that, ever since, each has sought to deter the other from dangerous escalation, while carefully calibrating its own moves.

Deterrence and restraint still hold for now, analysts say, and neither side wants all-out war, despite a string of actions in recent months that has raised tensions and the risk of miscalculation to their highest point since 2006.

Yet the deterrence arithmetic may now be changing, suggests the Hezbollah missile specialist.

Hassan scoffs at recent Israeli estimates that Hezbollah can fire 4,000 precision rockets and missiles daily into Israel during the early stages of a new conflict, compared with 100 per day in 2006.

“There is no number – it is unlimited, open,” he says of the capacity of Hezbollah’s current missile arsenal, which analysts note has advanced considerably – with Iran’s help – in scale, precision, range, and punch.

Hassan speaks calmly and confidently, but with tired eyes. Incongruously, for a militant whose life has been devoted to attacking the power of the United States and its Israeli ally, he wears a bright red U.S. Polo Association shirt with an American flag patch.

“Hezbollah is working around the clock when it comes to technology,” he says. “When one group goes to bed, another group goes to work.”

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor/File

Lebanese families return to destroyed apartments in the southern Beirut suburb of Haret Hreik hours after dawn Israeli airstrikes, Aug. 7, 2006.

Words versus deeds

Amid months of tit-for-tat provocations – with Hezbollah poking its Israeli foe – it is an article of faith among the Lebanese Shiite fighters that war is coming.

Veteran fighters proudly tell the Monitor about their many expectations for any future conflict – including “surprises” such as the destruction of Israeli airports, the neutralizing of Israel’s air superiority, and even a ground advance to seize territory.

But Hezbollah’s moves to repeatedly prevent escalation, analysts say, indicate little appetite now for all-out war among the leadership – or in Iran.

“Your ardent Hezbollah guy would argue that fighting Israel is more important than worrying about your neighbor’s house being blown up in another war,” says Nicholas Blanford, a Lebanon-based senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a U.S. think tank.

“But pragmatically, the Hezbollah leadership knows that if they are seen as responsible for starting a war that is going to turn Lebanon into a car park, there is going to be a huge backlash against them, not just from Christians and Sunnis and Druze, but from their own [Shiite] constituency,” says Mr. Blanford, author of the book “Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah’s Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel.”

“They are pushing the envelope more now, but they are very much keeping it within limits. At the end of the day, Hezbollah does not have leeway to go and start a war with Israel; that’s the choice of Iran,” says Mr. Blanford.

“The Iranians are not going to be happy if Hezbollah triggers a massive war with Israel” over a minor border dispute, “because the Iranians invested all this time, effort, weaponry, and money in Hezbollah to serve as a deterrent for its own interests,” including its nuclear program.

Indeed, Iran would appear to have little immediate interest in a Hezbollah-Israel battle: A U.S.-Iran deal is reportedly in the works to free five Iranian American dual nationals held in Iran, in exchange for unfreezing $6 billion in Iranian funds. Iran is also beginning to reconcile with U.S.-ally Saudi Arabia, after years of severed ties.

And Iran’s own domestic scene has been troubled in the past year by months of anti-regime protests, an economy damaged by U.S.-led sanctions and by mismanagement, and questions about the succession to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Renewed focus on Israel

Still, Hezbollah is battle-hardened and turning its attention again to Israel, after fighting successfully for nearly a decade in Syria – alongside Iran and Russia – to preserve the rule of President Bashar al-Assad. Morale has notably improved since the hardest days of the Syrian entanglement, when the flow of Iranian money was tight and some fighters questioned a mission not targeted at Israel.

When Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned Hezbollah last month that Israel would return Lebanon to the “Stone Age” in any new conflict, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah replied within days, highlighting Israel’s internal turmoil and boasting that “all available evidence” indicated that Israel, too, would be “returned” to the Stone Age.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor/File

Tobacco farmer Ahmed Srour lifts an Israeli 155 mm artillery shell that landed in his living room and failed to go off, Aug. 19, 2006, in Ait al-Shaab, Lebanon.

“We definitely have no problem with what is happening in Israel; we are watching very closely,” says a ranking Hezbollah officer reached in a tiny village in southern Lebanon, who gave the name Ahmad. Wearing a blue polo shirt and with the sunburned arms of a farmer, Ahmad laughs when asked to compare Hezbollah’s readiness now to 2006.

“Today the game has changed. The Israelis can’t come here to this village and not pay a price,” says Ahmad. “Don’t misunderstand me. The Israelis are a military superpower; they have air superiority. We understand that real well. We know that the Israelis have 2,000 targets already in their pocket, if things happen. But we have 2,500 targets in Israel.”

He says Hezbollah will certainly “fight these people [Israel] again, and fight to the end,” but only on the orders of Mr. Nasrallah, the leader to whom, Ahmad says, he and all his family give “blind loyalty ... to the last breath.”

“We are not trying to scare anybody; we’re just telling the facts of what will happen ... if this war is renewed,” says Ahmad. “In 2006, we used to launch missiles that put holes in walls. This time, if they hit one building in Dahiya [Hezbollah’s southern Beirut stronghold], we will hit two buildings in Tel Aviv.”

Preventing escalation

Such tough talk belies moves by both sides to swiftly stop the kind of escalation that could lead to war.

“One reason we surmise that neither party actually wants a large-scale conflict is that both Hezbollah and Israel have made clear efforts, in response to previous provocations, to contain the spiral and try to avoid things getting out of control,” says David Wood, the Lebanon analyst in Beirut for the International Crisis Group.

Hezbollah’s moves “are all pretty meaningless stuff, but they are designed to anger the Israelis, which is working,” says Mr. Blanford of the Atlantic Council. He notes that a barrage of 34 rockets fired into Israel last April was “amateurish by design,” with little real impact that would “make a big noise, but ... limit the potential for damage in Israel that could result in an escalation.”

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

A tour guide looks at a mural, as Hezbollah, a powerful, Iran-backed Shiite militia in Lebanon, opens a museum near Baalbek celebrating its 41-year battle with Israel.

Hassan, the missile specialist, dismisses chances of the Shiite militia taking advantage of the political turmoil in Israel to attack now.

“Hezbollah is waiting for Israel to get weaker and weaker,” he says. “If we attack them now, it makes them strong, because it will unify them.”

A new museum’s message

Similar confidence is on display at a Hezbollah museum that opened last week in the hills above Baalbek, an ancient Phoenician and Roman city in the Bekaa Valley. The museum is built on a site where Israeli commandos landed by helicopter for a brief mission in 2006 and took selfies.

Outside is an array of captured Israeli equipment, including tanks, as well as Hezbollah’s own camouflaged fast-attack boats, drones, and three SA-6 surface-to-air missiles.

Hezbollah and Lebanese flags whip in the wind, and the hot summer air is rich with the scent of freshly laid and watered turf. Visiting families place small children on tanks for photos; one father shows his daughter how to operate a heavy machine gun.

“What you are looking at here is all hardware of Israelis that we captured, and made a playground for our children,” says a uniformed, bearded Hezbollah officer at the site, who gave the name Jibril. “What is here is a fraction of the capability we have now – that is the message.”

Reba Saldanha/Reuters

An attendee waits for Donald Trump’s speech in Windham, New Hampshire, Aug. 8, 2023. Some legal scholars say the GOP front-runner is disqualified by the 14th Amendment. Others aren’t so sure.

David Scanlan, the New Hampshire secretary of state, had a busy end to his summer – and it wasn’t related to the August special election in Grafton County.

The subject was a different election: the 2024 presidential race and whether former U.S. President Donald Trump – the current front-runner for the Republican nomination – could be disqualified from the state ballot if his actions surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection trigger Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The question, which conservative legal circles began raising, now is being considered in several states, including Colorado, where a lawsuit to disqualify Mr. Trump was filed Wednesday by a watchdog group, and the battlegrounds of Arizona and Michigan, where a legal challenge was filed last week. 

The New Hampshire furor erupted last week when conservative talk show host Charlie Kirk falsely told listeners the state was trying to sideline Mr. Trump. Within days, Mr. Scanlan’s office had fielded hundreds of calls. Mr. Scanlan and New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella met and issued a joint statement.

Despite “misinformation,” the statement read, neither office has taken a position on the applicability of the amendment to the 2024 election.

“The Attorney General’s Office is now carefully reviewing the legal issues involved,” the statement concluded.

On Monday night, Mr. Trump dismissed the legal arguments as “election interference” in a post on his Truth Social network. He wrote that “almost all legal scholars have voiced opinions that the 14th Amendment has no legal basis or standing relative to the upcoming 2024 Presidential Election.”

It’s been over 150 years since someone has had to review these particular legal issues. Congress drafted the 14th Amendment, in part, to prevent former Confederate officials from holding office in state or federal government. Since Reconstruction, there’s been little use for it.

But then efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election – culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol – happened, and for the first time in history, a former president has been indicted on charges in both federal and state courts. Now legal and political minds across the country are debating whether Section 3 of the amendment is needed once more, or whether it’s best left in the history books.

At its core, the debate around Section 3 involves two arguments: Should someone who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, then violated that oath, be allowed to make that same oath again? Should it ultimately be left to voters – not courts – to make that decision?

What is Section 3? And why does it exist?

Let’s start with the text. Section 3 reads:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

The Confederacy surrendered in 1865, after a war that killed more than 620,000 people. Just a year later, former Confederates – many of whom had sworn oaths to uphold the Constitution prior to rebelling – were angling to regain power through elected office.

The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, and Union-loyal Republicans won significant majorities in Congress in subsequent elections. Section 3 was rarely invoked after 1872, when Congress passed a general amnesty for former Confederates, restoring their political rights.

But almost all legal experts agree that Section 3 is not a Civil War-specific feature of the Constitution.

“It’s been dormant. [But] it’s utterly implausible to say that it’s a dead letter, or moribund in the sense that it no longer has the force of law,” says Lawrence Solum, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and an expert on constitutional theory.

“There are ... issues that I think deserve really careful consideration,” he adds.

Have people been invoking Section 3?

Yes, both this year and in the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections.

The 2022 cases provided little legal clarity. A case against Madison Cawthorn, a member of Congress from North Carolina, became moot when he lost the election – though a federal appeals court did rule that Section 3 applied in his case. Cases against U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, and Reps. Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs, both Arizona Republicans, were dismissed or dropped.

Couy Griffin, a county commissioner in New Mexico who joined the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, did not fare as well. Because he took “an oath to support the Constitution as a county official,” a state court ruled in 2022, “he is subject to disqualification under Section Three.” 

Mr. Griffin’s case is believed to be the first application of Section 3 since the Civil War. It has never been used to try and disqualify a presidential candidate, but it seems increasingly likely that America will break that constitutional ground before November 2024.

New Hampshire, which will hold the nation’s first presidential primary next year, has quickly become a proving ground of the 14th Amendment debate.

Bryant “Corky” Messner – a Trump-endorsed candidate for Senate in 2020 – met with Mr. Scanlan late last month and urged him to seek legal guidance, according to reports. And last week, a long-shot Republican presidential candidate from Texas filed a lawsuit in New Hampshire seeking to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot.

Mike Segar/Reuters

New Hampshire is one of the states where challenges to disqualify Donald Trump from the ballot are being weighed. Above, a voter in the presidential primary election in Manchester, New Hampshire, Feb. 11, 2020.

The candidate, attorney John Anthony Castro, has said he is filing similar lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Georgia. Meanwhile, the secretaries of state in Arizona and Michigan have said they’re also researching the 14th Amendment issue, The New York Times reported last week. A Michigan activist with a history of suing public figures filed a challenge last week, while in Florida, an Obama-appointed judge dismissed a 14th Amendment challenge due to a lack of standing.

Republican officials in New Hampshire have said they would challenge any effort to remove Mr. Trump, or any other qualified candidate, from the ballot. Mr. Trump’s campaign is also likely to appeal any attempts to remove him from a state ballot. State courts would hear the initial challenges, but the issue would likely move quickly to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“In the disqualification cases we’ve had so far, these people have gotten hearings; they’ve had rights to appeal,” says Mark Graber, a professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.

“There will be chaos in the beginning,” says Professor Graber of the current round of lawsuits. “But there should be [more] organization as people figure out how to do this.”

What are the arguments?

In legal circles, the past few months have seen the 14th Amendment debate driven, surprisingly, by conservative scholars.

It kicked into high gear when constitutional law professors William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen – both members of The Federalist Society – published a law review article arguing that Section 3 disqualifies Mr. Trump from running for office. J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by George H.W. Bush, and Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, echoed that view.

A cloud of questions surrounds how Section 3 should be interpreted. Many of these questions have not been examined for over a century.

Is the office of the presidency even covered by Section 3, for example? It isn’t mentioned in the text, and scholars disagree over whether its authors, or the average person in 1868, would view it as being covered.

Some scholars suggest the broader “office ... under the United States” language shouldn’t be read to include the presidency. Other scholars, such as Gerald Magliocca at Indiana University, say there’s no way Congress or the public in 1868 would have understood “that Jefferson Davis could not be a Representative or a Senator but could be President.”

To answer that question, “you have to carefully investigate the meaning of the phrase ‘under the United States’ as of 1868,” says Professor Solum. But, he adds, “no one has done the historical work necessary to answer that question.”

There is similar confusion around the meaning of the section’s triggering phrases “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” and “given aid or comfort.” In Representative Greene’s case, a Georgia judge ruled that there was insufficient evidence that she had done anything to trigger the section.

Michael McConnell, a professor at Stanford Law School and a former federal appeals court judge, notes that while the U.S. Department of Justice has charged more than 1,100 Jan. 6 defendants – including, last month, Mr. Trump – none of them have been charged with insurrection. However, more than a dozen defendants have been convicted or pleaded guilty to the related charge of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to up to 22 years in prison.

The more important question, he says, “is whether the people should be deprived of being able to vote for the candidate of their choice when it appears.”

A counterargument is that the plain text of Section 3 requires that choice be taken away from voters, much like if it suddenly became clear that a candidate was 29 – and too young to run – or not a natural-born U.S. citizen, says Professor Graber, author of “Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty: The Forgotten Goals of Constitutional Reform After the Civil War.”

And “notice what we haven’t taken out of the voters’ hands,” he adds. “Voters can still vote for MAGA. They can vote to restrict immigration; they can vote to ban abortion.

“They can vote for everything Donald Trump wants them to vote for – simply for a [candidate] that has not committed an insurrection against the United States.”

Where does that leave us now?

While Section 3 still has legal force, some scholars say its use in the 1860s and ’70s has limited precedential value for today’s controversies.

Most cases involved men who had been Confederate officials mere years before.

“It was the Civil War, so no one needed to debate the finer points of what an insurrection was,” says Professor McConnell.

For judges who may have to rule on Section 3 challenges now, the answers aren’t so clear, he adds, and “you’re [not] going to find a whole lot of history that answers a lot of questions.”

In other words, the 14th Amendment debate is pushing the U.S. into uncharted territory. Some scholars worry that if Section 3 challenges proliferate around the country – likely on the pressurized timeline that election cases often involve – the consequences could be severe for an already fragile American democracy.

Bluntly, having candidates on ballots in red states but not in blue is not going to increase Americans’ faith in elections.

“For the legitimacy of the election, [for] public acceptance of the results, that is a worry,” says Professor Solum.

The country should instead hope that Republican primary voters “spare the country the ordeal of renominating an insurrectionist president,” wrote David Frum in The Atlantic.

“This summer’s wish for a constitutional anti-Trump magic wand is an unfeasible, unhelpful fantasy,” he added.

But those who believe Mr. Trump should be disqualified argue that if the Constitution is to mean anything, the country has no choice but to pursue it.

The framers of the 14th Amendment believed that “the government should be composed only of people committed to legal ways of political change,” says Professor Graber. “If you participated in an insurrection, whether you are Jefferson Davis or Donald Trump, you don’t get to be the leader of a democratic government.”

The optics spoke of shoulder-to-shoulder Western unity against Russia’s assault on Ukraine. But last week’s European foreign ministers’ meeting was most significant for an unscripted eruption of tension between Ukraine and its key allies over a core aspect of the conflict.

How to prevent it from becoming a “forever war.”

And in the longer run, whether and how a diplomatic resolution might be found – an especially agonizing prospect for Ukraine, given the huge price it has been paying for its resistance.

The strain has been intensifying since the launch of Ukraine’s long-planned counteroffensive in June, and its initially slow progress in overcoming deeply entrenched, heavily mined Russian positions in the east of the country.

It was thrust into the open at the European ministers’ meeting by media reports quoting unnamed U.S. and Western officials as criticizing Ukraine’s battlefield tactics.

Prompted for comment by reporters, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Mytro Kuleba did not mince his words. “I would recommend all critics to shut up,” he retorted, “to come to Ukraine, and try to liberate one single centimeter by themselves.”

Washington moved quickly to reassure Kyiv. The day after Mr. Kuleba’s remarks, the National Security Council spokesperson said Ukrainian forces had made “notable progress” in the previous few days against the second line of Russia’s defenses.

Isabel Infantes/Reuters

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Josep Borrell, high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy, attend an informal meeting of EU foreign ministers in Toledo, Spain, Aug. 31, 2023.

Still, the outcome of fighting over the next eight weeks could be decisive when it comes to choosing how to address the next stage of the war. It may not prove easy to match Kyiv’s priorities with those of Washington and Ukraine’s European allies as they seek to agree on a strategy.

On one aim, the allies are united behind Kyiv: to see Ukraine’s counteroffensive make as much headway as possible before heavy rain and plummeting temperatures, likely beginning in November, make significant advances impossible.

But a major breakthrough, dramatically recasting the conflict in Ukraine’s favor, is currently looking unlikely.

And if that doesn’t happen, the question facing Ukraine and its allies will be, what next?

For Ukraine, the answer is straightforward. The best way to bring the war to an end would be for the allies to redouble their stated commitment to Ukraine’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

And to commit to providing the weapons that Ukraine needs to prevail.

Because although huge quantities of Western weapons have kept Ukraine in the fight, many of them have been delivered piecemeal.

Kyiv is still pressing for two kinds of hardware that Western military analysts say are essential to the counteroffensive: more advanced mine-clearing equipment, and longer-range American ATACM tactical ballistic missiles, allowing Ukraine to target Russian supply lines and strike targets in occupied Crimea.

Yet the reason for the sometimes halting delivery of weapons underscores the difference between the political calculus behind the Biden administration’s Ukraine strategy, and Kyiv’s approach.

U.S. President Joe Biden led an unprecedentedly united allied response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s initial invasion. He has vowed to back Kyiv “for as long as it takes.” But he has also been keeping a wary eye on Mr. Putin.

From the outset, the White House has been worried about breaching the Russian leader’s presumed “red lines” and provoking him to widen the conflict further. That has had the effect of slowing some weapons deliveries.

In Europe, those U.S. allies geographically nearest to Russia – Poland and the Scandinavian countries – share Ukraine’s view that this has risked playing into Mr. Putin’s hands, diverting attention from the fundamental need to push back the invaders. But some major European states, like Germany and France, seem to share Mr. Biden’s worries.

If the battlefield stalemate persists into 2024, Ukraine could well face an even more unpalatable prospect: that pressure will build for a diplomatic resolution, and a deal that would leave Russia in de facto control of the parts of Ukraine it has taken over.

So far, only a scattering of Western voices – most prominently, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy – has broached that scenario publicly. They have been squelched by allied governments.

But that, the Ukrainians worry, may only be because negotiations are so clearly unrealistic at the moment.

Kyiv will be reassured, for now, that the European foreign ministers reaffirmed their commitment to the peace plan announced last year by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy – which calls for a full withdrawal of all Russian troops and a special tribunal to prosecute alleged Russian war crimes.

Yet those terms, of course, are nonstarters for Mr. Putin, and will remain so unless his forces in Ukraine suffer major setbacks that threaten possible defeat.

That is the goal that Ukraine is still aiming for, which is why Kyiv remains insistent that the allies’ surest route to a diplomatic exit is to provide Kyiv with the range of weaponry it needs to effect a major change on the battlefield.

Red lines or no red lines.

When officials and delegates arrive in Delhi for the G20 summit this weekend – marking the culmination of India’s yearlong presidency of the group of 20 leading nations – they will be treated to brand-new roads, lush greenways, and striking art installations. 

But they won’t find Ayesha Sharma, a transgender woman who has survived by begging for the last seven years. One hot morning in April, Ms. Sharma had been begging for only a few minutes at a traffic signal in Delhi’s Dwarka neighborhood when six police officers arrived and detained her. A number of other trans persons were also detained at other traffic signals that day. 

“No one gave us any clear answer why we were being detained until we were produced in court,” she says. “In court, we were told that ‘G20’ is going to take place in Delhi so all the beggars are being picked up. I asked what G20 is, but no one replied.” 

Ms. Sharma is one of thousands of poor or destitute Delhi residents whose lives have been badly disrupted in the lead-up to the G20 summit, which is set for Sept. 9-10. As tulips were flown in and posters of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi went up, thousands of poor people in India’s capital have been displaced amid a strategic beautification drive. Experts say the $112 million face-lift has come at a hefty cost to the city’s most vulnerable people.

“This is not the first time the poor are being removed from sight ahead of an important international event,” says Indu Prakash Singh, a member of a Supreme Court-appointed committee that monitors homeless shelters in the capital. “The Indian government tries its best to hide its poverty, stripping the disadvantaged of dignity. They consider them an eyesore.”

Amit Sharma/Reuters

Displaced residents of Delhi stage a sit-in following a demolition drive that destroyed their homes.

In 2020, when then-U.S. President Donald Trump visited Mr. Modi’s home state of Gujarat, the authorities built a wall overnight along the road from the airport to hide poor people from the visitor’s sight. During the Commonwealth Games in the 2000s and Asian Games in the 1970s, thousands of poor people were left homeless in a similar beautification drive. 

Earlier this year, as international officials held G20-related meetings in the port city of Visakhapatnam, those begging were evicted from the city and informal settlements were hidden behind huge tarpaulins.

In Delhi, an estimated 20,000 persons are engaged in begging, which has been decriminalized since 2018.

Since her arrest, however, Ms. Sharma has not dared to beg. “We were forced to take a pledge that if we were caught begging at a traffic signal, we would be responsible for our own fate and police can arrest us in any case” on trumped-up charges such as petty theft, she says.

Yet while thousands of beggars and homeless people are removed from Delhi’s streets and forcibly bused to the city limits, where they are dumped, hundreds of thousands more are added amid a spate of demolitions. 

The most recent occurred on Aug. 24, when the Delhi Development Authority bulldozed around 150 homes in the Badarpur district on the outskirts of the city. In May, the research network Land Conflict Watch recorded a demolition drive in the Tughlakabad area that razed more than 1,000 buildings.

Officials, who have targeted 260 sites in the capital, say that the demolitions are part of an ongoing crackdown on illegal settlements, not the G20 beautification drive. However, watchdog groups say the uptick in demolitions reflects the city’s priorities.

“These are certainly the most widespread and large-scale demolitions that have taken place in the past decade,” says Mukta Joshi, a researcher with Land Conflict Watch. “In many cases, either no notice was served or short notice was given to victims with no plans of rehabilitation.” 

Some beggars and displaced residents are being relocated to shelters on the outskirts of Delhi. But Mr. Singh says the authorities have given little thought as to how they will earn a living once they get there. “Often while removing the poor from the street, the government falsely claims that they are rehabilitating them,” he says. “But that rehabilitation is ill-planned.”

Aseem Sundan

Bajrang (left) and Mala talk about their struggles after police moved them on from the spot where they once sold handicrafts on the street. Now they hide from the police.

He also says the anti-begging push disrupts people who aren’t technically begging – like Bajrang and Mala, an older couple who have been living on Delhi’s streets since the 1970s when a drought in western Maharashtra forced them to migrate. They sell handmade crafts on a roadside in Connaught Place, in the heart of the city.

Indian law defines begging as soliciting or receiving alms in a public place, irrespective of any products or services offered in exchange. According to the law, even a poor-looking person can be rounded up if they appear not to have the means to sustain themselves. 

Shortly before a Monitor correspondent met Bajrang and Mala, police had shooed them away from their spot. 

While gathering their belongings, including tiny umbrellas handmade from colorful thread, Mala – who like her husband and many people in India goes by one name – complains about “this ruckus” that the G20 has brought. 

“We get fed up every time the police ask us to move,” says Mala, who is partially blind and cannot walk without support. 

“It is a very misplaced notion that people like Bajrang and Mala are beggars,” says Mr. Singh. “They are poor [people] who do not have the means to set up a shop. Where will they go? Onto the streets.”

“Removing the poor will not make Delhi beautiful,” says Bajrang. “Removing poverty will.”

Colin Pili is up early. At dawn, he pushes his boat onto the misty surface of Lake Turkana to try his hand out on the water. He learned to fish from his father, he says, and moved to these shores 30 years ago after his cattle died from poor pasture conditions. 

These arid parts of Kenya are unforgiving. Five rainy seasons have failed since 2020. And yet, several ethnicities of traditional pastoralists still build their livelihoods here around the world’s largest desert lake. Many, like Mr. Pili, have had to adapt.

Livestock are the traditional backbone of pastoral culture – those without animals are called ngikebotok, meaning “those who have nothing.” But that share of the population is growing. 

Fish are now the main source of protein. And weekly markets where vendors hawk everything from cellphone chargers to acacia pods for goat fodder are fueling a population rise along the Turkwel River, which flows into the lake.

Pastoralists have the capacity to adapt to alternate livelihoods, and boom and bust cycles have long dictated the pace of life. But encroaching human development also challenges these communities: A dam built in neighboring Ethiopia on Lake Turkana’s main tributary altered the seasonal pulses that signal breeding and migration season to the fish. 

Kang-Chun Cheng

Turkana herders in Lodwar, the county’s largest hub, persist in the time-honored livelihood of grazing livestock and adapting to harsh conditions.

Mr. Pili does not expect all his children to follow in his footsteps. Some of them go to school, he says. A few may attend university, turning away from the unpredictability of a fisher’s life.

In Nangitony, a remote outcrop on the lake’s western shore, Paulina Asurut guts Nile perch on a sandbar. She’s an orphan and a single mother, she says, and has no one to give her livestock. 

But in a small village like hers, resources are shared. She’ll be supported by her neighbors – yet another reflection of the way of life endemic to this unique arid ecosystem, one born of survival.

The reporting for this story was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. 

Kang-Chun Cheng

A sheep gnaws at an "akai akamatei," a traditional hut. The huts are meant to be used temporarily, but as Kenya faces another failed rainy season, fishers have settled along Lake Turkana for longer than expected.

Kang-Chun Cheng

A child eyes a fresh catch in Nangitony, a village on the western shore of Lake Turkana. The region is a major fish supplier, but the future remains shaky for subsistence fishers living in remote pockets along the lake.

Kang-Chun Cheng

Nile perch, carefully salted and sun-dried in a village by Daraja Beach, are ready for market in a nearby town. Buyers come from as far as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda for the fish.

Kang-Chun Cheng

Sheep cross the sandbars on Kanamukuny Beach. Livestock are the foundation of Turkana pastoral livelihoods.

Kang-Chun Cheng

A donkey carcass lies on the road to northwestern Turkana. Kenya has experienced five consecutive failed rainy seasons since September 2020.

Kang-Chun Cheng

A man wades to shore with his catch. This style of drift netting, known as "lorikejen," employs a vertically hung net to catch fish.

Reuters/file

The Boston skyline stands behind the Tobin Bridge and the city of Chelsea as seen from Everett, Massachusetts.

The U.S. elections next year may well again reinforce a narrative of a country divided on most any issue. Yet on one hot topic – a shortage of available and affordable homes – there appears to be a strikingly optimistic and unifying political view.

“Interest in zoning reform is a rare spot of bipartisan agreement,” writes Noah Kazis, a law professor at the University of Michigan, in a newly published compendium. “This is a moment of ferment – and experimentation – in land use policy.”

One example: A Sightline public survey of residents in Washington state in February showed that 72% – Republican and Democrat, urban and rural – supported a proposal to eliminate local zoning laws allowing only single-family houses in cities with populations over 6,000. That represents a 10-point increase from just a year ago.

The current scarcity of homes, estimated at 2.3 million for both single- and multi-family housing, is partly a result of more than a century of laws that shaped local housing markets. Many markets were skewed by race or by attempts to exclude low-income buyers. Yet lately another factor has been work. Since the pandemic, an increase in remote work has enabled more people with high-wage jobs to move into low-priced housing markets. As a result, more residents in a growing number of smaller cities face more competition in finding a home.

Factors like those are helping to drive a shift in attitudes from NIMBY (not in my backyard) to YIMBY (yes in my backyard) as cities, states, and the federal government strive to lift building restrictions and rewrite tax codes to construct more dwellings. Many reform proposals in state legislatures and Congress have bipartisan sponsors, such as a Senate bill jointly drafted by Republican Todd Young and Democrat Brian Schatz.

Minneapolis helped kick-start housing reforms at the urban level in 2018. In the years since, a focus on scarcity has intersected with growing imperatives to reduce the wealth gap between races. San Francisco wove housing reforms into proposals for reparations earlier this year. Los Angeles lifted single-family zoning restrictions to encourage more density. Even ritzy neighborhoods like Beverly Hills have warmed to erecting town houses.

That momentum is grounded in shared values, notes Richard Kahlenberg, a former senior fellow at The Century Foundation. “Zoning seems like a technical topic, but it touches many of the issues Americans care about most deeply,” he wrote in a new book. A growing number of studies, for example, have shown that investments in affordable housing contribute measurably to childhood academic success.

Montana has lately set one model for reform. In recent years, an influx of remote workers has helped drive up housing prices, shutting many residents out of the market. Gov. Greg Gianforte responded by setting up a task force. Within five months it produced dozens of ideas leading to legislation this year that carefully balances state and local authority in housing decisions.

The key lesson, a Mercatus Center study found, is that any debate over housing reform welcome both dissent and scrutiny while aiming for greater inclusivity within a community. “Even in states that experienced high-profile failures,” it noted, “the issue of housing supply has become an ongoing priority.” 

This rare moment of bipartisan approaches to housing – one that balances individual gain with shared prosperity – could be a model for American politics.