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...read about how the Belt and Road Initiative is not a vast debt-trap conspiracy.

A new Chatham House report [[link removed]] reexamines the conventional wisdom about China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), through which China has built roads, ports and other projects throughout Asia and Africa. Western analysts have tended to see BRI’s infrastructure projects, and the financing schemes around those projects, as instruments for extending Chinese hegemony and increasing the amount of foreign debt held by China. Instead, the report finds, financing of BRI projects is usually driven not by China but by recipient countries, eager to use Chinese investment for domestic political ends. The Chinese development finance system is “too fragmented and poorly coordinated” to execute a strategy of systematically trapping developing countries in debt with bad financing deals. Instead, in the most often-cited examples of Chinese “debt-trap diplomacy,” it was a combination of domestic political graft and failures of international financial markets that created such poor financial outcomes in those cases.

What happened in Mali?

Last week, a military coup overthrew the government of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, and replaced him with a military junta. Sahel expert Alex Thurston examined the coup in a two [[link removed]]- part [[link removed]] article, asking what went wrong for Keïta and how the international community could have acted differently to prevent the coup.

On Keïta’s part, Thurston describes a history of corruption and political missteps, beginning in 2014, with a move Thurston ruefully refers to as “buying that jet [[link removed]], man…” Yet, as Thurston notes, these problems largely stem from the extremely difficult position Keïta found himself in from the start of his presidency, with his country embroiled in conflict, some of which was driven by external forces, and a severe lack of resources with which to respond.

For its part, however, the international community compounded problems by making counterterrorism its priority in Mali, while simultaneously discouraging negotiations between violent Islamist groups and the government and ignoring government security force abuses against civilians. De-emphasizing civilian security helped create political space for the coup to take place.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Racism in international feminism

In the wake of allegations that racism pervades working environments at a number of international women’s rights organizations, Lori Adelman wrote [[link removed]] about the international feminist movement’s problems with race.

Like the development organizations they often work with, international feminist organizations often seem to be recreating colonial relationships, with white leadership from colonizing countries directing and funding the work of women of color in the “global south.”

As Adelman writes, “Race is clearly on the table in our sector,” even if it has not been a traditional focus for global women’s rights groups. The solution, she argues, lies in reorganizing institutions to upend, rather than reify, colonial relationships.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE The international politics of COVID-19: Part I

The journal International Organizations is putting out a special issue [[link removed]] on COVID-19 and its effects. The issue is the first collection of scholarship on the pandemic in a flagship international relations journal, and we’ll be devoting the next two editions of Deep Dive to some of the most interesting articles in it.

In their contribution [[link removed]] to the issue, political scientists Michael Kenwick and Beth Simmons dig into one of the most obviously political aspects of pandemic response: how pandemics change how countries treat their borders. As Kenwick and Simmons point out, there is no scientific consensus suggesting that closing borders is a necessary, much less sufficient, measure to combat COVID-19, yet it has become a popular response from governments around the world.

To understand why governments are so quick to close borders, Kenwick and Simmons use their concept of “border orientation” — basically, a measure of how much a state is interested in the impregnability of its borders at any given time. Border orientation is necessarily a fiction because no border is truly impregnable and most are extremely porous, but it can be a politically useful fiction. Kenwick and Simmons wanted to know whether governments that relied on increased border orientation for political support prior to the pandemic would be more likely to implement border restrictions to fight the pandemic.

To find out, they used a database that tracked which policies countries around the world enacted to fight the pandemic, and the date each policy was enacted. They coded the policies based on whether they targeted domestic or foreign audiences, and then measured the onset of the policies against a border orientation score that they had previously developed [[link removed]]. The score is drawn from physical investments that governments make in border security, which are relatively easy to measure and demonstrate concretely how much states are willing to spend to seem like they are controlling their borders.

Comparing the data, Kenwick and Simmons found that countries with higher border orientation scores — that is, those most interested in demonstrating their control of their borders — implemented border controls in response to COVID-19 before other countries and held onto those policies for a longer time. That was true even if, by the time the border restrictions were in place, the virus was already spreading within the country. As Kenwick and Simmons write, “border orientation is associated with a distinctive externally focused response to pandemics,” in which foreigners are asked to bear the costs of pandemic response before citizens. In fact, the researchers find there is some evidence that reliance on externally focused policies might actually replace some more costly internal policies — a border closure, for example, might assuage domestic political audiences enough to avoid demand for an order to wear masks in public.

International relations scholars tend to think that the main purpose of borders is international — to denote geographic distinctions in sovereignty within a community of states. What Kenwick and Simmons underline in their article is that international borders are at least as important within countries as between them. The salience of borders changes in relation to domestic political challenges, and those changes can shape how governments respond to even the most pressing policy challenges. The concept of the border can be used to manage the political costs of a pandemic — even if it does little to stop the pandemic itself.

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

Lydia Emmanouilidou spoke [[link removed]] to users of the social media app WeChat, who are concerned that a recent executive order from the Trump administration might make it much harder for them to stay in touch with family and friends. The app, which is hugely popular in China and has over 19 million active users in the US, has been targeted by the Trump administration as part of its ongoing war of words with the Chinese government. China does use WeChat as a surveillance tool, but even activists who criticize the app oppose a potential ban.

Gabriella Gricius examined [[link removed]] whether the Trump administration’s calls to institute international snapback sanctions against Iran are legal. The sanctions, which cover more than cheap hats and could cripple Iran’s economy, are supposed to come into force only if Iran seriously violates its 2016 agreement to limit its nuclear program. The US alleges that Iran has violated the agreement, but Iran, in addition to denying that it is in violation, accurately points out that the US withdrew from the agreement in 2018. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went to the UN to argue that withdrawing doesn’t prevent the US from enforcing the agreement — an argument that the other parties to the agreement have not found persuasive.

Danielle Preiss reported [[link removed]] on homophobic protests, and counterprotests by LGBT rights groups, in Warsaw. With the re-election in July of President Andrzej Duda on a platform that called homosexuality an “ideology worse than communism,” legal discrimination against queer people has increased in Poland. A bill being considered currently would criminalize sex education, which proponents of the bill claim is being used to “groom” children toward homosexuality. LGBT activists have taken to the streets to fight the bill, and one of the protest leaders, 25-year-old Małgorzata Szutowicz, is being held in pre-trial detention on assault and property damage charges.

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

COVID-19 is prompting a test [[link removed]] of Article 5 of the North American Theater Owners treaty.

The military coup in Mali is yet another feather [[link removed]] in the cap of the United States’ efforts to train foreign officers in Huntingtonian civil-military relations theory.

“It’s me, the, uh, spy inspector [[link removed]]. I’ve come to inspect your spying? Tell me… all about this spying you’ve been doing.”

This [[link removed]] whole article on Steve Bannon’s alleged defrauding of a privately funded border wall is well worth your time, but the detail that jumps out is that one of Bannon’s co-conspirators, an Air Force veteran named Brian Kolfage, used proceeds from their scheme to buy a boat that he christened the “Warfighter.” Now, it is the official position of Critical State that fraud is bad, but Kolfage gets credit for being the first person in 30 years to use the inane neologism “warfighter” correctly — that is, as the name for the fruits of a right-wing grift.

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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.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX, BBC, and WGBH.

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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