Forced displacement is a classic state tactic in civil wars. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

...read about how to track forced displacement.

Forced displacement is a classic state tactic in civil wars. When civilian populations are dispersed and it is hard for state security forces to exert control over them, states frequently use violence to make civilians move to higher-density areas where they will be easier to monitor. Historically, states were often able to displace people with effective impunity because state violence was easy to hide — states just claimed that civilians entering cities and displaced person camps were fleeing insurgent violence. As an Amnesty International report [[link removed]] from last week demonstrates, however, it is getting harder for states to use those excuses. Amnesty used a combination of interviews with civilians and satellite imagery to show that the Nigerian military is burning villages to the ground in order to force civilians away from areas in the northeast of the country where Boko Haram operates. Victims reported that soldiers torched civilian homes and then loaded the newly homeless into trucks that took them to displaced person camps close to the city of Maiduguri — as clear an example of forced displacement as one could imagine.

Yemen solidarity in action

Longtime Critical State readers will remember Stephen Snyder’s story [[link removed]] about protesters holding up shipments from Europe by the Saudi national shipping company Bahri in hopes of preventing weapons shipments from reaching Saudi Arabia, and contributing to Saudi atrocities in Yemen. Last week, Italian dockworkers in Genoa continued [[link removed]] the protest by refusing to load electricity generators onto a Bahri ship carrying weapons to Jeddah.

The ship’s voyage began in Antwerp, Belgium, where it took on a load of arms, but protesters prevented an additional set of weapons being added at Le Havre, France.

The dockworkers’ refusal to load the generators was a fallback plan, after union attempts to have the ship banned from all Italian ports failed.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Abortion-by-mail

Abortion access is shrinking in the US, where a combination of health care costs and legal and extra-legal harrassment of abortion providers has left nearly 90% of American counties without clinics that can perform abortions. One increasingly popular solution for people who are seeking an abortion but live far from clinics is to order the pills for a medication abortion — a non-invasive procedure that basically induces a miscarriage — online. Marie Solis spoke [[link removed]] to three women who went that route about their reasons for doing so and their experiences.

All three women reported cost as a major factor in not going to a clinic. Online, the pills for a medication abortion cost less than 20% of the average cost at clinics, and Aid Access, the company that prescribes and ships the pills from overseas, will waive the fee for people who can’t afford it.

Aid Access’ work is still illegal in the US, where the FDA has banned one of the necessary drugs from being sold online. Also, many of the same states that have sought to roll back clinic access have also criminalized self-managed abortion, raising the risk for people whose choices have been constrained by diminished clinic access in the first place.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE RACISM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: PART I

One consistently understudied area of international relations is the role that racism plays in international politics. On one hand, IR scholars’ hesitancy about race makes sense — engaging with racial prejudice means engaging with the concept of race itself, and, much to the chagrin of racists throughout history, race means different things to different people in different places and times. The slipperiness of the concept and the difficulty of assigning motive to actions makes race and racism hard for students of international politics to measure.

On the other hand though, come on. Even someone with a passing [[link removed]] familiarity [[link removed]] with the American foreign policy world — much less with the relations of colonial European powers that have been historically the focus of IR scholarship — could tell you that racism plays a role in international relations. The challenge of studying racism on the international stage is hardly an excuse not to study it.

For the next two editions of Deep Dive, we’ll look at new work from political scientists taking on the study of racism in international relations. First up, Andrew Rosenberg has an article [[link removed]] in the latest issue of International Studies Quarterly that seeks to measure a form of racism in international politics of particular interest in our current political moment: racism in international migration outcomes.

In order to measure the role racism plays in shaping how and when people can move between countries, Rosenberg started by creating a mathematical model of a world where racism played no role in migration. He used existing studies on migration to model all the non-racial variables political science has yet come up with to explain international migration — economics, conflict, natural disasters, political transition, etc. That model predicted what migration between every pair of countries would look like without racism entering into migration policy decisions.

Then he looked at the actual migration data from 1991 to 2010 — which is to say, the period after most migration policies that explicitly target certain races had been repealed. If those repeals had ushered in a post-racism utopia, the differentiation between the model’s predictions and the actual data would be random. Some country pairs might experience higher than predicted migration, some lower, but there wouldn’t be any clear bias one way or another.

Of course, that’s not what happened. The real migration data looks markedly different than the predicted data, and the differentiation has everything to do with race. States perceived to have majority black populations experienced a full standard deviation less emigration than what the model predicted. For rich countries perceived as having majority white populations, the differentiation from the model is miniscule. As Rosenberg writes, “racial bias [in migration] still exists even though racial discrimination is illegal.”

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Cecilia Nowell chronicled [[link removed]] the return of a classic form of political protest in Chile: depictions of injustice and struggle embroidered on burlap. The practice, known as the arpillera, originated under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship as a way to smuggle news of government crimes past the secret police and out of the country, all under the cover of “women’s work.” Today, Chile is gripped by protests in favor of political and economic reforms and the arpillera is making a comeback.

Emma Ashford made a late entry [[link removed]] in the dunk contest with an indictment of Michael Bloomberg’s foreign policy record. Bloomberg had a rough outing at his first Democratic presidential debate last week, and his opponents didn’t even dig into his past as an Iraq War supporter, an Iran nuclear deal detractor, and a targeter of protesters for police investigations as mayor of New York. In a Democratic primary that has had precious little focus on foreign policy, Ashford argued, discussing the contrasts between Bloomberg and the other candidates would be a boon for undecided voters.

Theo Merz reported [[link removed]] on Moscow’s first queer dance festival. The event, largely attended by young women, was designed to be a space for positive queer representation in Russia’s profoundly homophobic culture. In the same month as the festival, a Moscow jury acquitted a man of murdering a gay man in the face of overwhelming evidence and a journalist covering repression against gay men in Chechnya was attacked in the street in Grozny. The festival, however, went off without a hitch.

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

Good luck getting this [[link removed]] out of your head.

Before people enter conflict zones on United Nations business, they have to take an online safety training offered by the UN Department of Safety and Security. Like any online training, the course includes a lot of cartoon depictions of various characters in the professional ouvre it’s describing. For a researcher studying gender issues for the UN, however, one caricature hit a bit close to home [[link removed]].

A new version of the endless quote-tweet meme appears every few months, but this [[link removed]] is the first time it’s ever been appropriate. Bonus points to this [[link removed]] perfect addition.

AI photo recognition wins again [[link removed]].

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Critical State is written by Sam Ratner and is a collaboration between The World and Inkstick Media.

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Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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