One of the conceits of security studies in America, both among policymakers and scholars, is that the community works from a place of safety. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

… read about the unbearable whiteness of security studies.

One of the conceits of security studies in America, both among policymakers and scholars, is that the community works from a place of safety. We are better able to evaluate the effects of violence, the conventional thinking goes, because we are not directly subject to that violence. For black people in the field, however, that conceit is false and damaging. As civil wars and civilian protection scholar Meg Guliford writes [[link removed]], it’s hard to “keep writing about armed agents of the state victimizing civilians in El Salvador with impunity when I am terrified of the very same thing happening to any Black man, woman, or child in the United States.” White leaders in the field tend to assume that everyone they work with feels safe, even in months like the last one where people of color are reminded over and over of their vulnerability in a racist society. That simply isn’t true, and to assume that it is can be harmful. As Guliford writes about black people in academia — quoting Danielle Cadet, writing about black people in the workplace — “We are not okay. And you shouldn’t be either.”

Rebel birth registration

A new article [[link removed]] from Kathryn Hampton in the International Review of the Red Cross sheds light on a little-discussed aspect of rebel governance: what happens when you get born in a territory not controlled by a state. Birth certificates are a crucial piece of documentation for interacting with a state. It tells the government your name, where you were born, and who your parents were — all crucial to accessing the rights of citizenship. If you’re born under rebel rule, however, your birth certificate might be issued by a non-state actor. What happens then?

Usually nothing good, it turns out. Many people born in conflict zones get no documentation at all — an estimated 45,000 Iraqi children, for example, have no birth certificates because they were born in areas controlled by insurgents. Others get birth certificates from rebel administrators, but then those certificates are deemed invalid if the child moves to state territory (or if the state comes to the child by reconquering their home).

International law doesn’t address this problem directly, but, Hampton argues, there are no prohibitions on states recognizing insurgent birth registrations, and a close reading of current law might even require it.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Farmworkers and COVID-19

Dissent Magazine is doing a series [[link removed]] on how COVID-19 is affecting frontline workers, including farmworkers in Immokalee, Florida. Immokalee has well over 400 cases in a town of 30,000, and farmworkers are among the hardest hit.

Authorities have offered no guidance on how workers who test positive and live, as many farmworkers do, in communal housing are supposed to self-isolate. Workers who have been exposed to the virus but are awaiting test results are being pressured to continue working, further exacerbating the problem.

Currently, the leading healthcare provider for farmworkers in Immokalee is Doctors Without Borders, who are running mobile clinics in the area. The clinics can conduct tests, but they can’t replicate the role of a real hospital, which would include space for COVID-19 patients to recover in isolation.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Protest power: Part I

For reasons that require no explanation, the next two Deep Dives will be on recent research about protest movements and their capacity to produce durable change.

A new article [[link removed]] in the American Political Science Review looks at the effect of black-led civil rights protests in the 1960s on voting patterns. Princeton political scientist Omar Wasow offers a model for thinking about how protest movements make electoral progress through what he calls “agenda seeding.” Wasow posits that protests allow groups that normally have little power to determine what the country cares about, either in politics or in news coverage, to gain temporary control over the agenda. This power grows when violence breaks out, although the effects change depending on who is seen as primarily responsible for the violence.

Even when protests are widespread, few people experience them directly. Instead, mass understanding of protest is typically mediated through what news organizations decide to cover and how they decide to cover it. In order to test his theory that agenda-seeding exists and drives voting behavior, Wasow first had to test that protests — and not civil rights-oriented political campaigns — were actually the main drivers of civil rights news coverage in the 1960s. Drawing from a large database of newspaper articles and polling data, Wasow found that both news headlines and the percentage of the public rating civil rights as the country’s most important problem are much more closely correlated to levels of protest participation than to presidential elections. This suggests that it really is grassroots movements — not elite discourse — that put civil rights on the national agenda in the 1960s.

Wasow also found that violence at the protests, whether by police or protesters, made news coverage much more likely. A protest in which both police and protesters engaged in violence would receive almost three times as much coverage in the New York Times on average than a protest that was non-violent on both sides. Those articles also tend to be longer, doubling in average length depending on whether the protests became violent.

With the role of protest in setting the agenda established, Wasow tried to measure what forms of protest moved the needle in major national elections. He looked at county-level vote share in presidential elections in 1964, 1968, and 1972, and sorted counties by their proximity to protests — one way of measuring their likelihood to experience protests through local media. In counties that were over 90% white — that is, where direct political organizing as a result of civil rights protests was unlikely — Wasow found that being next to a county that had a non-violent civil rights protest increased vote share for Democratic presidential candidates an average of 1.6%.

However, when the protests were violent, regardless of police response, white voters responded differently. When neighboring counties experienced violent protests, 90% white counties actually saw roughly 2% dips in Democratic presidential vote share. The same violence that drove press coverage also cut voter support once white voters heard about it, largely through white-run news organizations. Protest’s power to set agendas is high, it seems, but its power to persuade is limited.

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Halima Gikandi checked in [[link removed]] on COVID-19 response efforts in Sudan, which are not going well. The country’s health care system is in shambles after former president Omar al-Bashir’s regime failed to adequately invest in public health for three decades, and so far it has registered 5,026 COVID-19 cases and 286 deaths from the virus, with both numbers continuing to rise rapidly. US sanctions, left over from when Bashir was in power, are still hobbling the current Sudanese government’s ability to make the investments necessary to control the virus, although members of the Sudanese diaspora are raising funds to fill the gap.

Colleen Scribner surveyed [[link removed]]attempts by governments around the world to blame the spread of COVID-19 on ethnic and religious minorities. In Gujarat, India, the government directed a major hospital to segregate Hindu and Muslim COVID-19 patients, while in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has scapegoated Arabs for allegedly not following social distancing guidelines. As Scribner argued, these kinds of appeals to communalism not only make it harder to fight the virus but are also likely to cause greater discrimination against minorities in both the short and long terms.

Orla Berry examined [[link removed]] civil liberties issues arising from the coming tide of organizations using thermal cameras to determine who is allowed to enter certain buildings. In theory, the cameras should help prevent people with fevers (which could indicate COVID-19 infection) from contaminating others in crowded spaces, but advocates point out that many of the scanners aren’t even accurate, much less diagnostically useful. With many scanners having a hard time differentiating feverish people from those who recently sat under a hot sun, increased scanning will be no replacement for expanded COVID-19 testing capacity. That could mean that companies and governments will be storing data on your temperature each day with no clear public health benefit.

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

Time has lost all meaning in the last month or so, but sources say this [[link removed]] is correct.

Egyptologists aren’t usually known for their sharp contributions to modern political discussions, but this [[link removed]] thread shoots them up the list of engaged history nerd communities (leaving weird Bourbon Dynasty obsessives [[link removed]] in the dust).

You can tell they are the antifa brain trust [[link removed]] because of the famous antifa chant, “tiptoe through our shiny city / with our diamond slippers on.” [[link removed]]

What role did the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have on the adoption of military gear by American police? Here’s a hint [[link removed]].

A neologism [[link removed]] for our times.

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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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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.

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