If there is a theme for June 2020, it is the lies that systems based on hierarchy, order and violence tell themselves about their relationship to race — laid bare. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

...read about the original sin of international relations.

If there is a theme for June 2020, it is the lies that systems based on hierarchy, order and violence tell themselves about their relationship to race — laid bare. International relations, a field that fairly revels in its purported ability to explain and manage large-scale violence but has long denied its roots in racism and so-called “race science,” is getting in on the action. Political scientists Kelebogile Zvobgo and (Midnight Oil alumna) Meredith Loken laid out the truth in a Foreign Policy article [[link removed]] last week, declaring that, “Race is not a perspective on international relations; it is a central organizing feature of world politics.” They trace the origin of the field from its roots as the study of effective imperialism and managing “race development” through to today when that history is buried and race is barely mentioned in major journals. Yet, early racism in the field is still evident today, both in the fact that less than one in 10 international relations scholars identify as Black or Latinx, and in the world of international relations, in which structures and policies that produce everything from climate change [[link removed]] to counterterrorism [[link removed]] ensure that people of color feel the brunt of the world’s violence.

White House budget requests

It’s getting to be budget season, and the Trump administration — perhaps jealous of what his British counterpart has accomplished [[link removed]] — is back at it again when it comes to requesting brutal budget cuts in foreign assistance. A new report [[link removed]] from the Project on Middle East Democracy digs into the White House’s proposed budget to see what new cuts Congress will be rejecting this year.

The proposal would see overall foreign assistance cut 22% and assistance earmarked to support democracy and governance cut by 30%. As in previous years, however, Congress is expected to essentially ignore the president’s desire to gut foreign assistance and do its own thing.

One area of the White House proposal that doesn’t get short shrift is security assistance. Of the $6.5 billion President Donald Trump would like to earmark for the Middle East, $5.5 billion is for security. Funding for Tunisia, which doesn’t buy that many American weapons but is the one country to successfully democratize as a result of the Arab Spring, would be cut 65%.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] The first national troll army

Rest of World, a new publication covering tech stories from outside the US, has a fascinating account [[link removed]] of the rise of Twitter trolls as an important part of Ecuadorian politics dating back to the administration of former president Rafael Correa.

Back in 2015, Correa gave a nationally televised address in which he berated an 18-year old Ecuadorian who had criticized him on Twitter and called on people to expose the true identities of anyone who spoke out against him on the internet.

Then, to enact revenge against those people, Correa spent public money to build armies of Twitter bots to defend him and harass his critics. By combining those tweet wars, which were seen by many in the country’s urban elite, with his more widely-viewed television addresses, Correa was able to construct a very effective method of communicating his views and deterring dissent.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE When reform hasn’t worked: Part II

Last week on Deep Dive, we looked at how efforts at police reform can fizzle due to policymakers who believe that there is no way to provide services to people who are routinely targeted by police other than by deputizing armed police as service providers. This week, we’ll get into another reason why police reform can feel like a mirage, leaving options like police defunding and abolition as the only remaining options for targeted communities to get justice.

A common subplot in the debate about police reform is that we don’t really know which specific reforms work to reduce police violence overall or disproportionate police violence toward Black people. Does de-escalation training for police work to reduce violence? A survey of 64 evaluations of de-escalation training programs conducted over 40 years says [[link removed]]… we have no idea. Police body cameras, an in-vogue intervention that has led to millions in dollars of public spending on cameras and data storage? The best program evaluation minds in the business say [[link removed]] there’s no evidence they do much of anything to reduce police shootings.

One response to that lack of knowledge, particularly popular among social scientists, is to do more social science. If we do more experiments, the argument goes, we’ll be able to find the best technical solutions to the problem of police violence and implement them broadly. With the right research design, maybe the 65th de-escalation training program evaluation will tell us something persuasive about whether those programs work.

A new paper [[link removed]] from Samantha Goerger, Jonathan Mummolo, and Sean Westwood throws some cold water on the feasibility of that idea. Like so many of their colleagues, Goerger et al. wanted to study how different interventions in policing affect how law enforcement actually functions, and to do that they needed cooperation from police departments. It’s hard to study police practices surreptitiously — police keep a lot of detailed numerical data on crime and policing, and without accessing that data or speaking to officers, tracking the effect of police reform would be tough. So Goerger et al. did what social scientists tend to do in this situation: They asked cops to form research partnerships with them.

What Goerger et al. did differently, though, is that they asked a ton of cops and they didn’t ask them all in the same way. Instead, they did a kind of pre-experiment experiment. They randomly selected roughly 3,000 police and sheriff’s departments across the US to reach out to, drawing from the FBI’s list of law enforcement agencies. Then they divided most of their sample departments into pairs, with each department coupled next to a department that operated in the same state and had roughly the same number of people in their jurisdictions.

Within each pair, they randomly assigned one department to get an introduction letter asking for a research partnership that highlighted how the department’s clearance rate for violent crimes or mean use of force per officer compared to other departments, and the other department to get an introduction letter with a request for a research partnership but no mention of rankings.

The idea was to see whether the implication that their performance would be evaluated as part of the research partnership would make departments less likely to participate. Unsurprisingly, the answer is yes. Departments that had their clearance rates or use of force ranks highlighted were significantly less likely to participate. More surprisingly, that was even true of departments that ranked highly in those measures. The resistance, it seems, was not to being potentially embarrassed by the rankings, but to being evaluated at all.

Some 300 departments took Goerger et al up on their offer and further research with those departments is in the works. But the paper highlights some problematic questions for those who believe more research is the answer: If police departments control how much access those who want to study reforms receive and are unwilling to grant that access if it means real evaluation of those reforms, then what is the real prospect for that 65th de-escalation study to tell us something meaningful?

And, more importantly, how long must people who see the issue of police violence against Black people as stemming from structural racism wait for social scientists to be convinced that technical solutions are inadequate? Will it be another 40 years of inconclusive program evaluations before mainstream social scientists offer a stronger recommendation on confronting the scourge of racist police violence than calling for more studies?

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Shirin Jaafari reported [[link removed]] on the State Department going back to the well to hit members of the Assad government in Syria with yet more sanctions. The new sanctions target the finances of 39 people and organizations associated with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, including his wife, Asma al-Assad. Yet critics point out that the new restrictions will further threaten Syrian civilians who are already suffering in a weakened economy. Lines for staple goods are already growing in Damascus, and Syrians Jaafari spoke to expect food insecurity to increase.

Bonnie Jenkins described [[link removed]] efforts she has led to diversify one of America’s whitest and most male fields: international peace and security. As the founder and president of Women of Color Advancing Peace, Security, and Conflict Transformations, Jenkins has pushed the think tanks, nonprofits, and philanthropies that populate the field to root out white supremacy in their organizations. With her encouragement, a range of leading groups in the field have pledged to take steps such as hiring people of color at all levels, from boards of directors on down, developing new recruiting pathways to find talent among local and low-income communities, and ensuring that contributions by people of color are actually recognized within their organizations.

Megan Janetsky spoke [[link removed]] to Venezuelans who fled their home country’s economic and political crisis but are now struggling in the face of the sharp economic downturn caused by COVID-19. Latin America is the new center of the pandemic, and it is also where most of the 5 million Venezuelans who have left Venezuela in recent years are trying to make lives for themselves. With work drying up and the threat of infection increasing, nearly 75,000 have chosen to return home, but the Venezuelan government is ill-prepared for them. Returning migrants have been forced to quarantine in packed, run-down buildings, and there has been violence reported against people who resisted the measure.

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

For a while there in the 1950s, the US was developing a plan [[link removed]] to nuke the moon, as one does. That plan never came to fruition, but according to one account [[link removed]] of the Defense Department’s new space strategy, modern planners are taking seriously that old motivational poster koan: “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.”

It’s not remarked [[link removed]] on enough how no one has ever seen Kenneth Waltz [[link removed]] and A.Q. Khan [[link removed]] together in the same room at the same time.

Decades of diplomatic isolation have made North Korean leaders particularly adept at non-verbal forms of communication [[link removed]].

The next time someone tries to tell you that the US isn’t over-reliant on securitized solutions to non-security problems, show them this. [[link removed]]

The biggest international security story from last week was on the border between India and China, where Chinese soldiers killed [[link removed]] 20 Indian soldiers with metal rods and clubs (Chinese casualties from the melee are unknown, but some estimates put them at 35). Both sides have worked to keep the conflict under wraps, so the most insightful analysis may be found, as ever, in memes [[link removed]].

Incontrovertible proof [[link removed]] that Gen Z has successfully built a time machine (and used it to travel back to 1880s Calgary, which seems like a very Gen Z use of a time machine).

In the study [[link removed]] of people saying things they don’t mean, dumb tweets are the highest form of praxis [[link removed]].

American newsrooms tend to treat the Associated Press and its style guide like the English-language version of the Académie Française [[link removed]] — official arbiters of proper English usage. It’s big news, therefore, that the AP finally caught up with the times (and the Los Angeles Times) and announced [[link removed]] that it would now be capitalizing “Black” and “Indigenous” when “referring to people in a racial, ethnic or cultural context,” the same way it has long done with other racial categories like “Asian” or “Latino.”

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Great Power Competition is: “I think we should really look at it through the lens of uh… competition." — a real life security expert.

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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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