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...read about the World Bank’s attempts at human rights enforcement.

Since the 1990s, the World Bank has maintained two venues for investigating claims when the projects it funds violate human rights: its Inspection Panel and its Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman (CAO). Until recently, though, no one had bothered to check whether the Panel and the CAO are actually protecting people. Kelebogile Zvobgo and Benjamin Graham have a new article [[link removed]] out in the Journal of Human Rights investigating just that. They find that the answer is… sort of. Over a third of complaints brought to the Bank result in changes to the projects in question, and once in a blue moon, complainants even get compensation from the Bank. Yet the Panel and the CAO seem to be stricter in some issue areas than others. Complaints regarding harm to Indigenous communities and, to a lesser extent, forced resettlement often result in changes to projects, while complaints about environmental damage are much less likely to succeed.

When police become partisan, do people notice?

In June and July 2018, researchers conducted a national survey in Uganda, to better understand how Ugandans felt about security and policing issues. About halfway through the survey process, the Ugandan police began targeting opposition leader Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, otherwise known as Bobi Wine, and his protest movement against the government’s social media tax. The move was annoying for the survey conductors — events may have messed up their sample — but it was a gift to political scientists. Looking at people surveyed before and after the repression of Wine’s supporters began, Travis Curtice was able to see how partisan repression shaped [[link removed]] public perceptions of police.

Overall, confidence in police decreased after the repression began. People surveyed in the wake of the crackdown saw the police as less legitimate than those surveyed earlier and felt less obliged to follow police orders.

The effect was much larger among people who supported Wine rather than those who supported the government, but it’s not as though government supporters approved of the repression. Their perception of the police also fell.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] From the Department of Proportionality

The US government has issued an official warning to the US ambassador to South Africa, Lana Marks, that the Iranian government is thinking about killing [[link removed]] her. The assassination plot is thought to be a response to the US assassination of Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in January.

Sources speculated that Marks may be a potential target because of Iran’s preexisting intelligence networks in South Africa, which would allow them to operate more freely there than in other parts of the world.

Still, it’s hard to see the connection between Soleimani and Marks, a Trump donor who says her top priority [[link removed]] is to increase trade between South Africa and the US.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Misusing culture in international politics: Part II

Last week, we looked at recent scholarship on how cherry-picked understandings of foreign cultures can shape the politics of international relations. Today, we’ll look at the cultural stories countries tell about themselves, and some of the ways it can blind them to their own policy failures.

University of Wisconsin-Madison PhD candidate Anna Meier has a new article [[link removed]] out in International Studies Quarterly that examines why the German government is so bad at responding to white supremacist violence. As in many countries, white supremacist attacks in Germany are often presented in the media as turning points, after which nothing — and particularly not government security policy — can be the same. Yet, as is also a common experience, those attacks are almost never turning points. Small policy changes offer the illusion of reform, but underlying conditions remain the same and when a new attack comes, the cycle of shock followed by a lack of reform begins again.

As Meier points out, this lack of response is in sharp contrast to how Germany and other “Western” governments react to other violence that gets classified as “terrorism.” When left-wing militants of the Red Army Faction (RAF) carried out attacks in West Germany in the 1970s, the West German government created a whole new legal structure for counterterrorism for the express purpose of containing the RAF. The new laws targeted the RAF’s modus operandi as an organized group that planned attacks long in advance, threatening stiff sentences for people involved in militant groups of at least three people or who engaged in what the law called “preparatory acts” for attacks.

At the same time that the RAF was promptings such a big response, however, West Germany was also seeing a rise in neo-Nazi violence. Neo-Nazi organizations boasted around 3,000 active members between 1970 and 1972, and in 1971, they killed more people than in any year since the government started keeping track. In that one year, neo-Nazis killed more people than the RAF did in its whole history. Yet the legal response to the neo-Nazi killings was anemic compared to the response to the RAF. As one German security professional Meier spoke to described it, in Germany, “before 9/11, ‘terrorism’ always meant ‘left-wing ’ because of the RAF.”

Meier argues that the difference in how the two are treated is rooted in Germany’s cultural understanding of itself. If the thing that differentiates terrorism from other forms of criminal violence is the sense that it threatens a social fabric beyond that of its immediate victims, then it makes sense that violence seeking to upend a social order that sees whiteness as a crucial part of Germanness would be seen as more serious than violence seeking to uphold that order. As Meier writes, “the position of white supremacy as a hegemonic component of national identity in Germany means that to seriously reckon with the phenomenon of white supremacist violence would require questioning a system whose existence depends on not being questioned.”

What’s curious is that, as Meier found in her interviews of German security bureaucrats, many of them find their national double standard about white supremacist violence as ridiculous as she does. One memorably summed up the problem by saying that the German state believes that left-wing and Islamist terrorism “threatens… the foundations of society: property rights, democracy, Christian values, Western values [switches to English and rolls eyes] whatever that means. [switches back to German] This is just my theory, but the victims [of far-right attacks] were ‘only’ migrants.”

Yet those same bureaucrats despair of fixing the double standard because of a lack of public pressure to do so. The national discourse on white supremacist violence paints it as an aberration, despite the fact that it serves to reify the norm of white hegemony in German life. Public pressure to crack down on white supremacist violence as a movement, rather than a series of aberrations, would require the public to grapple with the role of white supremacy in German life — a painful conversation. To people who are not directly impacted by white supremacist violence, confronting its origins in society may be more difficult than simply choosing to be shocked anew each time it happens.

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

Mary Kay Magistad introduced the [[link removed]] first episode of "On China's New Silk Road,” a new podcast from the Global Reporting Centre that tells stories about the local impacts of projects undertaken as part of China’s “Belt and Road” initiative. The initiative has spent over a half-trillion dollars on infrastructure projects in countries around the world, but perceptions of the projects are mixed. The podcast begins in Chengdu, China, where Belt and Road money has turned the city into a major train depot for moving goods between China and Europe. Even with the investment, however, the train route through Chengdu is still neither faster than plane transport nor cheaper than sea transport, leaving the city still figuring out what to do with its infrastructural revamp.

Luke Schleusener proposed [[link removed]] new measures to improve the US military by expanding opportunities for LGBTI+, women, and immigrant servicemembers. The military is widely expected to revoke the Mattis Policy, which bans transgender people from serving, following the Supreme Court’s decision to expand federal civil rights protections to LGBTI+ people. That change, Schleusener argued, is both the right thing to do and crucial for the military to remain relevant when the rising generation of potential recruits is demanding diversity in the workplace. Schleusener also advocated for improvements in how the military handles sexual assaults and for restoring programs that encourage immigrants to join the military.

John Lindsay-Poland tracked [[link removed]] the huge rise in US small arms exports during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the second quarter of 2020, American companies sold over 83,000 military rifles, a more than 250% increase from the same period last year. 2019 was itself a record year for US small arms exports. One reason for the jump is a policy change that moved oversight of many sales from the State Department to the Commerce Department. The change eliminates the need to inform Congress about gun exports, and moves the regulatory onus from a department focused on maintaining international peace to a department focused on increasing US exports.

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

Arsenal right back and fashionista Hector Bellerin used the new Arsenal kit to make a look [[link removed]] that harkens back to the 90s… 1998 in particular.

Critical State will be outsourcing its subject line writing to the foreign service officer responsible for this [[link removed]] cable just as soon as we figure out who they were.

Hamas is annoyed and mystified [[link removed]] to hear that the FBI used them as bait to try to catch irony-poisoned American civil war enthusiasts. It’s a fair complaint — Hamas is many things, but “extremely online” and “obsessed with the film ‘Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo’” are not among them.

Remember that time [[link removed]] Chicago city government got bored waiting for people who police assumed would do crimes — but weren’t actually doing crimes — to do crimes, so they made it a crime to hang around and not do crimes?

Morrissey voice [[link removed]]: “The bear with the box on his head.”

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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.

Worried yet? Listen and subscribe now on Apple Podcasts [[link removed]], Stitcher [[link removed]], Spotify [[link removed]], Pocket Casts [[link removed]], or wherever you get your podcasts to receive a new episode every two weeks.

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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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