He’s a prince of a minor kingdom who needs your help to access millions of dollars his father left to him! Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

… read about the new era of light-touch American diplomacy.

Listeners to the recent season of Inkstick’s “Things That Go Boom” podcast will remember Brian Hook, the Trump administration’s affable pointman on Iran policy. It turns out that, constitutional bans on titles of nobility aside, Hook has another role: He’s a prince of a minor kingdom who needs your help to access millions of dollars his father left to him! The Financial Times got its hands on a distinctly spam-like email [[link removed]] Hook sent to the captain of an Iranian oil tanker, asking the captain to deliver his shipment into US custody rather than to Syria in exchange for a multi-million dollar bribe — or, as Hook described it, “reward.” “With this money, you can have any life you wish and be well-off in old age,” Hook wrote, before presumably asking for the captain’s bank account number and routing information.

Pregnant in jail

A new podcast tells the story [[link removed]] of Shandra Williams and Catherine Windham, two women whose experiences in Texas county jails and subsequent activism have changed the way pregnant people are treated in the Texas court system. Williams and Windham both gave birth in county jail under horrific conditions. Most activism around incarceration focuses on prisons, where inmates tend to serve longer sentences for more serious crimes, rather than jails, but Williams and Windham inspired work to investigate conditions in county jails that hold so many who simply can’t afford bail while awaiting trial.

Some 4,000 pregnant people spend time in Texas jails each year, and until 2009 the state kept no records of pregnancies among those in custody and allowed jailers to shackle pregnant people during labor.

The Texas Jail Project, an activist group that grew out of Williams’ willingness to share her story, now extends to all aspects of jail conditions, including overcrowding and medical access.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Among the hawks

Anthropologist Negar Razavi did two years of fieldwork among one of America’s most shocking subcultures: Washington-based Iran experts. What she found out [[link removed]] about the people who drive the debate on American confrontation with Iran was not, by and large, confidence-inspiring.

One finding in particular stands out: Only about half of Iran experts in Washington are at all literate in Persian, which is a tough look for a subject area that focuses so much on the intricacies of signalling through public statements, many of which are in Persian.

This anecdote in particular seems like it comes from a very Washington sketch comedy show: “One research assistant working at a prominent think tank told me how, as someone who reads Arabic, he would read Persian language news articles aloud for another research assistant who could only speak [but not read] Persian. The two of them together would ‘translate’ Iranian news articles for his boss, an expert who works on the Middle East and comments on Iran frequently.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Deep Dive Lies my teacher told me

It’s a special edition of Deep Dive this week, because the journal Millennium has temporarily allowed open access to a modern political science classic, Penn State professor Errol Henderson’s 2017 article, “The Revolution Will Not Be Theorised: Du Bois, Locke, and the Howard School’s Challenge to White Supremacist IR Theory.” [[link removed]]

As the title suggests, Henderson’s article makes the case that black American theorists W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke deserve much more credit than they typically receive for their contributions to international relations theory and that their work offers an important counter to the racist origins of international relations as a field.

“Racist origins of international relations as a field?” you, a person who took at least one available international relations course, might ask. Well, yeah. At the turn of the 20th century, the base unit of budding international relations scholarship was not the country but the race. Founding figures in the field, such as Paul Reinsch and Franklin Giddings, wrote openly about how white people had a responsibility to subjugate “the inferior races of mankind” through the use of state power, and even Foreign Affairs, today the leading popular international relations journal, began its life in 1910 as the Journal of Race Development. Of course, the thinking that racial identity is a fundamental underpinning of national identity never really left the field — in the same intro to an international relations class where you didn’t learn about Giddings or Du Bois, you probably did read Samuel Huntington’s 1996 bestseller “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.”

Du Bois and Locke are both famous for their research, writings and activism attacking the scientific racism on which the worldview of Reinsch, Giddings, and their ilk rested. Henderson argues that their work went beyond effective criticism and constituted its own theory of international relations. Du Bois’ analysis of World War I as having its origin in competition among European powers to achieve racially-driven goals of dominating Africa and Asia in order to tamp down class conflict among whites at home, for example, both upends traditional realist explanations of the war and explains the crucial role of racism in subsequent imperial policy. As Henderson writes, “it is not only IR theory, it is accurate IR theory.”

Locke, for his part, contributed to international relations theory with his work demonstrating that race is socially, rather than biologically, produced. To the extent that racial identities hold across international borders, therefore, it is not the result of some kind of inimitable civilizational identity each person inherits at birth but instead comes from social relations that transcend state boundaries. Locke’s work, Henderson argues, opened the door for studies of diasporic politics that are not bound by racial essentialism.

The history of international relations theory may seem like an arcane thing to study, but international relations theories are the frames we use to analyze the news every day. If those frames are old, dusty and racist — it’s worth investigating some alternatives.

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

Mathew Di Salvo recounted [[link removed]] the murder of Karina García, a young mayoral candidate in Colombia who was killed while campaigning in Cauca, an area disputed by the FARC and the Colombian government during the country’s civil war. García’s assassins are unknown, but her death comes at a time of increasing tensions as local and regional elections approach. FARC dissidents announced a return to violence last month, and civil society figures are being killed at a rate of nearly three per week.

Critical State’s own Laicie Heeley interviewed [[link removed]]American labor activists Tiffany Flowers and Yasemin Zahra about their trip to South Korea to meet counterparts in the Korean labor and peace movements. Flowers and Zahra spoke about how the trip impacted their work, and inspired them to think about the labor movement globally.

Martha Bayne traveled [[link removed]] to Puerto Rico to chronicle the latest round of mass protests on the island, this time against a plan to open large areas of previously protected land to outside developers. The level of public outrage about a zoning issue, Bayne wrote, is indicative of the increased level of political participation among Puerto Ricans since Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017.

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

The National Archives unveiled [[link removed]] a new option in their online search function: the ability to search within text. Using optical character recognition, the Archives have scanned many of their documents and extracted the text from them, allowing for much more specific searches than were previously possible. If you’re someone who enjoys digging through archives but doesn’t live near Washington, DC, this is your lucky day.

When you need to convey [[link removed]] enthusiasm and all you have are Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles.

Anyway, here’s (Soviet soldiers dancing to) “Wonderwall.” [[link removed]]

The Massachusetts justice system is having a normal one. When the Boston “Straight Pride Parade” took place a couple weeks ago, counterprotesters arrived in droves to tell off the world’s lamest party. Police arrested a number of counter protesters, mostly on non-violent charges like disorderly conduct. Suffolk County DA Rachael Rollins last week declined to prosecute the nonviolent offenders, or at least she tried to. Boston Municipal Court judge Richard Sinnott denied Rollins’ request, rejecting [[link removed]] her assertion of prosecutorial discretion. Rollins hit back [[link removed]] against Sinnott, and this is where the story gets truly wild. It turns out that, back in 1980, when Sinnott was an investigator at the DA’s office, he shot [[link removed]] a 22-year old Coast Guardsman on City Hall Plaza and his bosses had the case dismissed through prosecutorial discretion. The DA’s office said he acted in self-defense, but contemporaneous accounts suggest that Sinnott started the incident by ordering a group of Coast Guardsmen to stop kicking the tires of an F-15 fighter jet on display in the plaza and, when they ignored him, attacking the young men with Mace. When the Mace prompted a brawl, Sinnott brandished a revolver and pulled the trigger. His assailants were charged with assault and battery.

Makes perfect sense. [[link removed]]

Weekly Brexit update. [[link removed]]

Iran’s state news service is trying to make a point with this [[link removed]] picture, but truly who can say what it is?

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Critical State is written by Sam Ratner and is a collaboration between PRI’s The World and Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRI/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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