Read about the failures of post-war gender quotas. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

…read about Chinese students stuck in the middle of a war of words.

Among those most directly affected [[link removed]] by escalating anti-China rhetoric in American politics are the nearly 370,000 Chinese students who attend American high schools, colleges and universities. As Chinese citizens in the US, some have been the targets of hate crimes and many report that the level of everyday racism they encounter has increased dramatically during COVID-19. Back in China, however, as people who have committed to engaging with the US, they are sometimes ostracized, with one student saying, “You’re considered an outsider on both sides. Even back in China, they don’t see you as ‘one of them.’” In an effort to take some control at a time when they are being buffeted by the winds of global politics, some Chinese students have taken to activism, engaging with Americans about the common goals shared by regular people in China and the US.

“I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our corn hair mussed...”

When does deterrence theory make the local news? When your locality becomes the squishy end of what deterrence theorists like to call the “nuclear sponge.” The Omaha World-Herald spoke [[link removed]] to nuclear experts to figure out why Nebraska must die for America to survive a nuclear exchange.

Nebraska is home to a huge number of intercontinental ballistic missiles, which exist solely so any potential nuclear aggressor would have to nuke them in a first strike in order to avoid the missiles being fired in response. Destroying the Nebraska missile sites would use up — soak up, you might say — warheads that an opponent that would then not be able to fire at a “higher value” target like Washington, DC.

For the farmers and indie rockers of the Cornhusker State who would be collateral damage in a strike on Nebraska’s missiles, however, “higher value” is in the eye of the beholder. Activists, both in the state and nationwide, are pushing for the US to remove intercontinental ballistic missiles from its arsenal.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Rebel group democracy

In a short article [[link removed]] in the Journal of Politics, political scientists Katherine Sawyer, Kanisha Bond and Kathleen Cunningham explained their findings about how the way rebel groups choose their leaders affects whether they engage in sexual violence.

Much like how regime type effects wartime decision making in de jure governments, the structures of rebel groups have major impacts on the way the groups act during conflicts. In rebel groups, Sawyer et al show, having elected leaders drives down the likelihood that the group will commit sexual violence by over 10%.

Furthermore, the more inclusive the leadership elections are, the more pronounced the effect is. Groups that allowed civilians to vote in leadership elections were even less likely to commit sexual violence than groups that limited the vote to just group members. In groups where elections were just held among the group’s top leaders, however, the likelihood of sexual violence increased slightly.

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

This week we continue our discussion of civilian agency in conflict by looking at another particularly stark expression of civilians having their say in the midst of fighting: non-violent mass protests during wartime. Even in the face of overwhelming military power, civilians take public stands during conflict to demand improved treatment by armed groups, changes to political structures, or even an end to the fighting altogether.

A new article [[link removed]] by Johannes Vüllers and Roman Krtsch in the journal Political Geography uses geographic data to determine when and where civilian protests happen during wartime. Intuitively, protests related to a conflict should be more likely to take place away from the actual fighting, since the more armed groups there are in an area the more dangerous it will be for civilians to speak out against them. Yet Vüllers and Krtsch, informed by an extensive literature about how civilians assert themselves during conflict, approached the question with the opposite assumption. They looked at the ways war both reacts to and produces political foment and hypothesized that non-violent civilian protests would actually be more likely to occur closer to battles.

Vüllers and Krtsch drew on databases of protests and civil wars in Africa between 1992 and 2013 that marked the dates and locations of individual demonstrations and battles to test their theory. Having the geographic and temporal distribution of conflict events allowed them to make statistical measures of whether various forms of violence predicted protests in the same area. After running the data, they found that they were correct: protests were more likely to happen near where battles had recently taken place. More strikingly, the more battles that were fought in an area, the more likely protests were to follow. A single battle in a month increases the likelihood of a nearby protest by a little over 1%, but six battles in the same area increases the chance of protest by over 35%. If you only look at protests against the civil war itself, the effect doubles — six battles in a province in a month makes protests against the war in that province 75% more likely.

The researchers offer a couple of different plausible explanations for why civilians might be more likely to protest as clashes between armed actors become more frequent. It’s possible that battles provide the kinds of political shocks necessary to build protest movements. People who may not have been interested in protesting, either because they were not particularly aggrieved by any governing group or because they felt the risks outweighed the benefits, might feel differently after their community or property became collateral damage in a battle. In fact, the violence might create a new political consciousness within communities, uniting people in their identity as victims of armed groups. That identity, then, can become an organizing tool that makes it easier to generate protests.

Conversely, battles could also lead civilians to demonstrate because they indicate increased, not decreased, civilian power. If there are a large number of battles in an area, control of the area — along with the loyalties of the people living there — is likely contested between two or more armed groups. In a situation where no one armed group is confident in their ability to control local civilians, civilians are in a position to demand concessions from armed groups in exchange for their cooperation. That increase in civilian power is typically short-lived — hence the close temporal relationship between battles and protests — but it gives civilians a chance to make their demands heard in the midst of conflict.

In either case, Vüllers and Krtsch’s data shows that civilians are active participants in the politics of civil wars, even at the point where the danger of political involvement is ostensibly highest. Civilians find ways to make their voices heard above the fighting, establishing themselves as important, independent actors in civil wars even when unarmed.

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

Rebecca Kanthor spoke [[link removed]] to students having to call in to their Shanghai-based classrooms from halfway around the world due to COVID-19 travel restrictions. The students’ families traveled to the US in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis in China and got stuck there after travel bans went into effect. Now that schools have reopened in Shanghai, the children are struggling to learn while video conferencing into class late at night and being separated from their classmates.

Mariana Budjeryn and Togzhan Kassenova examined [[link removed]] the history of racism in the Soviet nuclear program. Like the US, the Soviet Union chose to locate its nuclear test sites in areas where non-white people would bear the brunt of the health and environmental effects of frequent nuclear blasts. Soviet nuclear planners conducted over 400 nuclear tests on the Kazakh steppe, an area they referred to as “uninhabited” but was actually home to thousands of ethnic Kazakhs. When local residents complained of frequent health problems following the tests, officials in Moscow dismissed them, saying the illnesses were the result of poor hygiene and diet among Kazakhs.

Lydia Emmanouilidou followed up [[link removed]] with some migrants and refugees who were forced to move after a fire destroyed the Moria camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. The fire displaced 12,000 migrants and refugees, who are now crowding into a new camp that has been hastily constructed to hold them. Conditions are poor: sanitation facilities are inadequate, and people are being forced to sleep close together in tents. There are already around 200 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the new camp, and residents are afraid the virus could spread rapidly under current conditions.

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

Maybe the reason US anti-ballistic missile systems don’t work is that we don’t deploy [[link removed]] our hype men close enough to the actual launchers?

All of these [[link removed]] student-made interpretations of Kenneth Waltz’s oeuvre are wonderful, but the Babadook child as a multi-polar system [[link removed]] takes the cake.

There’s been lots of scholarship examining the relationship between presidential systems and conflict, but remarkably little on the relationship between cash back or low APR financing on Presidents’ Day Weekend car sales [[link removed]] and conflict.

Back in the late 1940s, the United Nations solicited proposals for a UN military force, and the American proposal was… a bit more robust than the others that came in. Richard Gowan rightly points out [[link removed]] that 90 submarines is a lot for a force that would ostensibly want to avoid any confusion about its intentions, but we’re more interested in the air forces section. Was Walt Disney [[link removed]] the one who demanded 2,250 fighter planes for the UN?

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come under criticism for bringing [[link removed]] his extra dirty laundry to Washington on his visits to the US, forcing the staff at Blair House to wash it for free. Surely this is Bibi’s play for the millennial vote by utilizing free laundry service whenever it's available and there’s no other laundry-related scandal he’s hiding fro — oh, there is another [[link removed]] laundry-related scandal.

The challenge of bringing two allied navies together for operations in a littoral area controlled by an enemy is sure to be mutually stimulating for officers in both navies, so perhaps this [[link removed]] acronym isn’t so unexpected after all.

Twitter’s image preview algorithm is racist [[link removed]], but it’s also biased in some less [[link removed]] predictable ways.

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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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