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 the coins slipping through GardaWorld’s fingers.

The US is facing a coin shortage, but corporate America is stepping up to the plate. Private security giant GardaWorld has, according [[link removed]]to an investigation by the Tampa Bay Times, put over $9 million worth of coins into circulation since 2014 by losing them from bank vaults it was meant to be guarding. The company handles vault security for 8,000 clients, including half of the top 10 US banks. It has been hiding the losses by misreporting the total cash in its vaults to its customers, and then moving cash between vaults to make up losses when auditors come calling. Former employees blame GardaWorld’s lax security practices, born of the company’s strategy of rapid expansion with few quality controls, for creating an environment where stealing from the vaults became laughably simple.

The balance of criminal power in Rio

Rio de Janeiro’s drug gangs have an international reputation for the control they exert over many of the city’s neighborhoods. A new study [[link removed]] by researchers at Universidade Federal Fluminense, however, finds that drug traffickers are no longer the most prominent armed actors in the city. Right wing, police-associated militias have now far surpassed the gangs they were established to combat in Rio’s underground power structure.

The study estimates that drug traffickers control [[link removed]]15.4% of the city, while the police paramilitary groups control an astonishing 57.5%.

The police paramilitaries grew out of death squads that were formed during Brazil’s military dictatorship, but have grown into major organized crime groups that include some current police officers among their ranks.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Looting to survive

Antiquities looting is on the rise [[link removed]] again in Iraq as a result of economic stress brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. The country’s extensive archaeological sites have been under increased threat since the US invasion in 2003, as security forces have been too thinly stretched to protect the sites.

Sites like the ancient city of Tell Jokha have become a magnet for looters searching for an income during the economic downturn. Last month, authorities managed to stop two looting parties and recover 438 artifacts, but many other looters escaped notice.

COVID-19 is still on the rise in Iraq, with roughly 4,000 new cases per day and 500 deaths per week from the virus as of the end of September.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE No John, it really is the institution: Part I

* Mike Duncan voice [[link removed]]* Hello, and welcome to “Revolutions.” The concept of overthrowing old orders and replacing them with, well, literally anything else is looking better by the day, but the process of doing so is murky and fraught with dangers. This week and next on Deep Dive, we’ll look at new research on how revolutions actually function, and what separates them from run-of-the-mill armed uprisings.

In a new article [[link removed]], forthcoming in the journal Comparative Political Science, Megan Stewart and Karin Kitchens try to get at one of the fundamental questions about revolutions: how do they actually institutionalize radical social reform? Put another way, once you decide that things have to change, how can you actually make that change stick?

To find answers, Stewart and Kitchens look at arguably the most revolutionary period in American history: Reconstruction. After the Civil War, the federal government undertook an extended effort in some areas of the south to transfer resources from the slaveholding class to formerly-enslaved Black people. Thaddeus Stevens, one of the leading lawmakers behind Reconstruction policies, called it a “radical revolution” that would make American institutions less racially biased and more egalitarian. The federal government deployed 60,000 troops in the south in 1866, and sent another 25,000 later, to enforce Reconstruction policies and protect the officials, federal and local, who were charged with implementing them.

The soldiers mostly succeeded where they were deployed, but they were deployed inconsistently. Some areas received substantial, ongoing military support, while in other areas, Reconstruction officials were left undefended. The variation in enforcement allows Stewart and Kitchens to test just how effective the deployments were in institutionalizing a redistribution of power and resources to formerly enslaved people, and how long the new distribution remained in place.

In areas where any federal troops were deployed, Stewart and Kitchens found that Black literacy increased between 1% and 1.5% between 1900 and 1920 — even well after Reconstruction. That may not seem like a huge increase but, as the authors note, that means between 46,000 and 74,000 Black people who would not have acquired literacy had troops not been deployed were able to do so, even long after the soldiers left. Furthermore, each 10% increase in the size of the troop deployment in a given county yielded a further 1% increase in Black literacy and a 1% reduction in the difference between Black and white literacy rates by 1920. In other words, the deployments allowed for institutionalized change in a way that lived on after Reconstruction was cut short.

Of course, while the troop deployments provided the security for institutionalization, it was not the soldiers who were creating the schools, laws and political networks necessary to make those literacy gains. Instead, it was Black southerners themselves who built these institutions and stockpiled the resources necessary to perpetuate them after military support was withdrawn. Black churches, political leaders and community groups used the assets they had organized during Reconstruction to maintain schools, Black-owned businesses, and other structures that allowed them to continue pursuing equitable resource distribution into the 20th century.

However, as Stewart and Kitchens found, the process that made space for Black institutions also generated another institution: organized counter revolutionary violence. Lynching was rare before the Civil War, but afterward, it became the emblematic form of white supremacist violence. As the gap in power and resources between white and Black southerners shrunk, white resentment grew, and after Reconstruction, the number of white-on-Black lynchings in the south exploded. Looking at county-level data, Stewart and Kitchens find that networks of white violence are also highly correlated to areas where federal troops were deployed. Federal deployments are linked with an increase in white-on-Black lynchings of between 20% and 75%. The lynching numbers also increase depending on the success of Black educational institutionalization in those counties — lynchings in the 1920s were 30% lower in counties with the lowest gains in Black literacy than in the counties with the highest gains.

Stewart and Kitchens are hardly the first to point out that social change can be fostered or scuttled depending on how violence related to the change is managed. But their paper does convincingly demonstrate a case in which security provision allowed the seeds of both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary institutions to germinate. As the Reconstruction era gave way to the Jim Crow era, most of the egalitarian successes of Reconstruction were violently rolled back. Yet, where Black institutions had amassed the resources to be able to survive the backlash, they nurtured communities that would score major successes against Jim Crow just a few generations later.

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

Shirin Jaafari reported [[link removed]]on renewed violence in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, as Taliban and government forces try to give their respective sides an edge in ongoing peace talks. According to local estimates, up to 35,000 people have been displaced and 200 killed or wounded by the fighting, which began on Oct. 11. The fighting began with an attempt by the Taliban to take over the city of Lashkar Gah, which then prompted a counterattack by government troops. The fighting has prevented civilians from accessing Lashkar Gah, which is a center for medical and humanitarian resources in the province.

Anna Schumann compared [[link removed]]the current state of American nuclear arms control policy to arms control’s portrayal in an important historical document: Aaron Sorkin’s “The West Wing.” About 20 years ago, the show dramatized the debate over ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), a measure which remains unratified in the US today. While much has changed since then — concerns voiced by CTBT opponents on the show about the need to test and the ability of countries to cheat the treaty have been at least partially allayed by technology — the treaty is as popular today as it was in Sorkin’s imagined 1990s. Nearly 90% of Americans support ratifying the CTBT, yet Congress still refuses to do so.

Rebecca Kanthor spoke [[link removed]] to people in the Chinese city of Qingdao, where the government tested all 9 million residents last week after 12 COVID-19 cases were discovered in a local hospital. Between Sunday evening and Tuesday morning, public health officials administered 3 million tests, with results available within 24 hours. Testing centers are numerous, but lines can get long at peak times. One school teacher reported waiting 90 minutes for a test.

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

The looks [[link removed]] on these Nigerien officers’ faces tells you all you need to know about how successful the US military’s “give our partners second-hand copies of mind-numbing management books from 40 years ago” strategy is going.

Sure, Dakotans are hugely overrepresented in the Senate on a per-person basis, but have you considered that they might be underrepresented on a per-nuclear-warhead basis [[link removed]]?

In a touching gesture, graduates of an Egyptian police academy chipped in and got Carol Cohn a group gift [[link removed]].

Claws-ez faire capitalism. [[link removed]]

“Nasty, brutish, and short, you say?” — This [[link removed]] leviathan.

An underreported cybersecurity threat [[link removed]].

In which a pearl-clutching virtual meeting hosting company refused [[link removed]]to let members of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology say “bone,” lest the concept of sex enter anyone’s mind. The company also capped attendance at 68, just to be safe.

Live footage [[link removed]] of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference.

A lede [[link removed]] for the ages.

All contractions are botched in this [[link removed]] perplexing patch.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Follow The World: DONATE TO THE WORLD [[link removed]] Follow Inkstick: DONATE TO INKSTICK [[link removed]]

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.

Preferences [link removed] | Web Version [link removed] Unsubscribe [link removed]