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...read about the failures of post-war gender quotas.

Gender quotas in government have become popular components of post-war political arrangements in recent years. From Colombia to Nepal, the use of quotas after conflict have dramatically increased the number of women involved in national, provincial, and municipal government. Yet, as political scientists Marie Berry and Milli Lake write [[link removed]], increased representation for women often serves to increase, rather than offset, the power of the groups that fought during the conflict. In Rwanda, for example, women make up 61% of parliament, the highest proportion in the world. Yet that representation did not prevent the government from jailing opposition leader Diane Rwigara when she announced she would run against longtime president Paul Kagame. Instead, women members of parliament from Kagame’s party helped provide what Berry and Lake call a “veneer of democratic progress” to cover Kagame’s political repression.

How international organizations drive the ‘presource curse’

A new World Bank study [[link removed]] looks back at just how wrong the Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other putative experts were in projecting economic growth from the discovery of Africa petroleum resources in the last two decades. The answer is that they were consistently, extremely, and damagingly wrong.

International policymakers tended to predict quick, huge returns on petroleum discoveries. Instead, petroleum projects took, on average, 73% longer to come to fruition than experts predicted (and only came online sooner than predicted once in 19 tries). Worse, government revenues from the projects were often far less than predicted when they finally did get started. In Ghana, actual revenues are under 50% of what was originally estimated. In Mozambique, where revenues from natural gas are still largely theoretical, projections have been revised down some 80%.

This preposterously bad prediction record is a problem because countries used those predictions to plan future economic and political decisions. Of the 12 countries studied, nine are in a worse debt situation than they were before petroleum discoveries were announced, and only one, Guinea-Bissau, has seen its debt situation improve.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Chinese nuclear myths

Negotiations to extend the New START agreement to reduce American and Russian nuclear arsenals now turn, according to the Trump administration’s lead negotiator, on China’s willingness to join the treaty. However, the idea that China’s nuclear stockpile is a threat to the world on a similar scale to the American or Russian arsenals just isn’t really true, as David Logan writes [[link removed]].

Some have argued that China has a massive secret nuclear stockpile and needs to submit to inspections to allow the rest of the world to see the truth. In reality, there’s no evidence for a secret Chinese nuclear stash. Indeed, the Pentagon just estimated [[link removed]] China’s nuclear warhead count in the “low 200s,” below some independent estimates and well below the roughly 5,800 warheads the US currently has.

Other claims include the charge that China’s pledge not to be the first to use nuclear weapons in conflict is fraudulent, and that the Chinese government is deploying tactical nukes to use in first-strike situations. Yet neither of those claims stand up to scrutiny — internal Chinese military documents reaffirm the no-first-use policy, and China has canceled, rather than deployed, tactical nuke delivery systems.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Civilian decisions in conflict: Part I

One of the core insights of conflict studies is that civilians, despite definitionally being the worst-armed faction in any conflict, still retain a great deal of control over how many conflicts play out and what their role in the conflict will be. This week and next, Deep Dive will look at new research on how civilians make important decisions about their lives, priorities and politics during conflict.

Political scientist Mara Revkin has a new article [[link removed]] in the Journal of Conflict Resolution that investigates one of the most fundamental choices civilians make in wartime: whether to stay in their homes and live under the control of an armed group that has conquered their city, or to abandon their homes and flee to somewhere they hope will be safer.

Revkin focuses on Mosul, Iraq, when it was under the control of ISIS between 2014 and 2017. The ISIS conquest of Mosul offered Moslawis a stark choice, since ISIS was renowned for its viscous violence and strict approach to governance of the areas it controlled. The group allowed civilians freedom to move in and out of Mosul during its initial months running the city, leaving plenty of opportunities for people to get away. Yet, even in the face of ISIS’s fearsome reputation and with opportunities to leave available, three quarters of Mosul’s population was still living there after eight months of ISIS rule.

Revkin was interested in these “stayers” and why they made the counterintuitive decision to ride out life under ISIS rather than escape. After Iraqi state forces retook Mosul in 2017, she traveled to the city and ran a door-to-door survey of people who had either stayed through the period of ISIS control or had left and returned once ISIS was ejected from the city. She also sat down for extended interviews with both stayers and “leavers” to better understand their motivations.

Revkin’s most remarkable finding is that the ISIS’ reputation for cruelty didn’t cause a mass exodus the moment ISIS entered Mosul. Even among leavers, many stayed in Mosul for months after ISIS’s arrival to see how life would be under their governance. In fact, the majority of leavers Revkin sampled left after the start of 2015, six months after ISIS fighters first entered the city.

Rather than evaluating ISIS based on its reputation, both stayers and leavers largely chose their reactions based on how they and their city fared under ISIS control. Stayers tended to experience ISIS governance as an improvement over the way the city had been run by the Iraqi government. One stayer, a school administrator, told Revkin that “Mosul was the cleanest I had ever seen it” in the first six months of ISIS rule. Similarly, stayers were more likely than leavers to say that ISIS governance — measured in terms of taxes charged and services provided — was more fair than under Iraqi state rule.

This is not to say that decisions to stay or leave were not heavily influenced by the threat of ISIS violence. Almost everyone who left said they did so largely out of fear that ISIS would hurt them, and even many who stayed described their fears that leaving put them at more risk from ISIS than staying as a major reason for not fleeing the city. Yet, given the pervasiveness of that fear, Revkin shows that individual experiences of governance before ISIS’s arrival still mattered in determining whether people found it necessary to leave after ISIS took over Mosul.

Revkin’s results speak to the experience of conflict not just as a horrifying break from normalcy, but as a time when civilians can engage with potential new normals if they were dissatisfied with the pre-conflict status quo. Moswalis largely remained in ISIS’ Mosul during the period when leaving was plausible, in part, because many of them saw improvements in the city under ISIS rule. Their ability to express their governance preferences even amid ISIS violence is a prime example of the roles civilians carve out for themselves in conflicts.

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

Shirin Jaafari spoke [[link removed]] to Palestinians who are unimpressed with the recently signed Abraham Accords, which will normalize diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Many Palestinians see the accords as a betrayal by the UAE and Bahrain, because it goes back on a 2002 commitment by Arab states to refuse Israel normal diplomatic relations until it ended its occupation of Palestinian territory and recognized a Palestinian state. As one former Palestinian Liberation Organization official told Jaafari, “What [Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates are] really, in effect doing, is saying that Israel’s behavior is acceptable when it’s actually not acceptable.”

Kate Kizer made the case [[link removed]] for a transitional justice program in the US to establish exactly how the American response to 9/11 has led to two decades of war abroad and an increasingly militarized society within the US. US policymakers, Kizer pointed out, typically treat transitional justice as something other countries need, often after the end of civil wars. Yet this kind of exceptionalism obscures the value truth commissions could have in understanding — and ending — an era of endless war. By exposing the true cost of war at home and around the world, truth commissions could provide the impetus for a new approach to US security issues.

Mary Kay Magistad reported [[link removed]] on Chinese Belt and Road Initiative investment in Kazakhstan. Lack of transparency around Belt and Road Initiative-funded projects prompted protests in Kazakhstan, leading the government to release documents last year showing that 55 projects received a total of $27.6 billion in Chinese loans and investment. Opinions are mixed about the value of the projects. Some see them as a way for Kazakhstan to get foreign funding that is hard to obtain from other sources. Others, however, see them as a way for China to launder its reputation in Kazakhstan, even as it forces Uighurs and ethnic Kazakh Muslims into concentration camps just across the Chinese border in Xinjiang province.

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

Iran-Contra’s own Elliott Abrams warning [[link removed]] people in 2020 not to sell arms to Iran in contravention of US sanctions has got to be the most elaborate scared-straight program of all time.

Presumably the point of these pizzas [[link removed]] is to build consensus around the idea that they definitely shouldn’t exist.

The nice thing about the accordion [[link removed]] trade is that it makes such a melodious sound regardless of whether sales are contracting or expanding.

This [[link removed]] is the headline of the week, but the story is compelling because it touches on a real competition between the US and Russia over who owns what in space. If NASA gets to be a moon rock dealer [[link removed]], who’s to keep Russia from just claiming Venus?

A caution if you work in an academic political science department: Realists may be particularly smug [[link removed]] this week.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] LISTEN TO 'THINGS THAT GO BOOM'

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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