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 real challenge in climate diplomacy.

Generations of social scientists have worked under the assumption that the major barrier to international cooperation on environmental issues — and climate change, in particular, — is the threat of free-riding. Solving climate change is costly for countries that pitch in to stabilize global temperatures, yet all countries reap the benefits. So, the theory goes, countries have an incentive to refrain from contributions, hoping they'll get the benefits for free. A lot of time and effort goes into crafting policies that will beat the free-rider problem. A new article [[link removed]] in the journal Global Environmental Politics, however, suggests that this energy is misplaced. Michaël Aklin and Matto Mildenberger find no empirical evidence that either national governments or publics are deterred from climate action by the idea that other countries might be free-riding off their actions. Instead, they find that the economic impacts of climate reforms are much more relevant to how the reforms are received and implemented than any concerns about free-riding.

Epstein in Peaceland

Terje Rod-Larsen, the now-former president of the UN-associated International Peace Institute, was forced out last week after it became public [[link removed]] that he had a close financial relationship with infamous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Rod-Larsen took a $130,000 personal loan from Epstein in 2013, five years after Epstein was convicted for procuring an underage girl for prostitution.

The case of Rod-Larsen underscores how embedded Epstein was in the world of international diplomacy. Rod-Larsen, who socialized with Epstein frequently, authorized the Institute to pass $100,000 onto Epstein, that the Mongolian government had paid the institute to fund an advisory board, though the money was never delivered.

Even Kevin Rudd, the former Australian prime minister and the chair of the Institute’s board who forced Rod-Larsen’s resignation and expressed disgust with Rod-Larsen’s association with Epstein, admitted that he was on a teleconference with Epstein in 2014.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Student journalism wins again

High school students in Kentucky published [[link removed]] a presentation used in the Kentucky State Police academy as recently as 2013, which approvingly quoted Adolf Hitler and encouraged officers to develop a “warrior mentality.”

When asked why training material for state police needed three Adolf Hitler quotes to make its point, Kentucky State Police spokesperson Joshua Lawson told the reporters that “the quotes are used for their content and relevance to the topic addressed in the presentation” and that “the presentation touches on several aspects of service, selflessness and moral guidance.” The slideshow, which encourages trainees to become “ruthless killers,” is included in full in the story, so you can judge for yourself what kind of moral guidance Hitler was being used to offer.

The slideshow came to light as part of discovery in a lawsuit related to a 2018 killing by Kentucky State Police troopers.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Getting at the vote: Part I

If you’re reading this on your phone while waiting in a long line to vote in today’s US national elections, here is some cold comfort: voter suppression happens in other democracies too, so you’re not alone. Regulating the vote is a key part of state repertoires of control, and states are coming up with novel ways to shape electorates all the time. This week and next, we’ll look at new research on how governments try to control election outcomes.

In a new article [[link removed]] in the American Political Science Review, Elizabeth Iams Wellman tackles how governments in Africa treat the ultimate absentee ballots: votes from diasporas. The number of international migrants in the world increased by 78% between 1990 and 2019, creating a growing demand for emigrant participation in home country elections. In sub-Saharan Africa, that demand drove a massive change in voting regulations. In 1990, no countries in the region allowed external voting by diaspora populations. Today, 32 out of 48 countries do. That’s a major increase in enfranchisement, but, Wellman found, some countries made it easier for emigrants to vote than others. Wellman set out to find why some African countries encouraged diaspora voting, others tolerated it and others banned it.

The main constraint on implementing diaspora voting is the cost. Setting up polling places, delivering ballots, and ensuring accurate vote counts is hard enough inside a country’s territory, but doing it around the world drives up the cost significantly. Even after a country has legalized diaspora voting, it has to set up a whole infrastructure abroad if it wants to give emigrants actual access to the polls.

On the other hand, governments might well have reasons other than cost to avoid providing actual ballot access abroad. Diaspora votes are just that — votes — and they can swing elections. In Cape Verde, emigrant votes swung presidential elections in 2001 and 2006, ensuring the election of Pedro Pires despite Pires losing the domestic vote each time. For governments that don’t enjoy majority support from their country’s diasporas, there is a strong incentive against enabling diaspora voting, no matter what the de jure law says.

Those considerations are reflected in the de facto reality of diaspora voting. Of the 141 national elections that have been held in sub-Saharan Africa in which diaspora voting has been legalized, only 85 had any infrastructure to actually enable members of the diaspora to cast their ballots. Even among those 85 elections where diaspora voting was possible, actual ballot access varied considerably. In some elections, emigrants had to travel to their home country embassies and present multiple forms of identification in order to participate, while in other elections polling stations were set up in areas where emigrants lived and voter ID requirements were more flexible.

Wellman found that, even after accounting for state capacity to implement diaspora voting, diaspora support for the incumbent party was a major predictor of whether countries invested in diaspora voting infrastructure in a given election. Or, to put it another way, even when they had the ability to give ballot access to voters who were legally entitled to it, incumbent parties were less likely to do so if they knew those voters wouldn’t support them.

Wellman illustrated the point with the case of South Africa, which made diaspora voting legal in 1994, with the advent of majority rule, then outlawed it in 1998, and then reinstated it in a limited form in 2009. In 1994, with South Africa newly liberated from apartheid, the goal was to create as inclusive a process as possible. The apartheid government had forced tens of thousands of South Africans into exile, and without diaspora voting, they might not be able to participate in an election that many had sacrificed heavily to bring about. By 1998, however, many of those exiled had returned to the country, while others who had benefited from apartheid but opposed the elected African National Congress (ANC) government had left. Using the parliamentary majority it secured in the 1994 election, the ANC pushed through a ban on diaspora voting ahead of the 1999 general elections.

In 2009, a South African Supreme Court case forced the government to allow South African citizens abroad the ability to vote, bringing back de jure diaspora voting. The de facto ballot access, however, was very limited. In the United Kingdom, for example, South Africans had to wait in long lines at the only polling station in the entire country in order to cast their vote. In some countries, the consulate where the voting was held closed while voters were still in line. In the 2014 elections, only 18,000 South Africans cast votes from abroad, over 80% less than did so in 1994. Only 8% of those who did get to vote supported the ANC.

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

Andrew Connelly reported [[link removed]] on the civilian mobilization in Armenia as the country’s conflict with Azerbaijan drags on. Armenian civilians in the capital city Yerevan are organizing events to make camouflage netting and other military accessories for Armenian soldiers to use at the front. Yerevan has also become a destination for Armenians displaced by Azerbaijani bombings of towns and villages in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Despite the displacement crisis, the conflict seems likely to continue into the winter.

A. Trevor Thrall and Jordan Cohen warned [[link removed]] that the US is becoming less discriminating in choosing the countries to which it sells weapons. In the last 18 years, the US has sold $640 billion in weapons to 167 countries, but, according to Thrall and Cohen’s research, in recent years more of those sales have gone to countries that are likely to lose control of the weapons or use them in human rights abuses. Indeed, as a result of the Trump administration’s policy change making domestic economic benefits the deciding factor in determining where to sell arms, US arms sales are now riskier than they have been at any point in the 21st century.

Mary Kay Magistad explained [[link removed]] the debate over Chinese telecom Huawei and its pursuit of contracts to build 5G infrastructure around the world. 5G technology will allow for much more rapid wireless data transmission, and Huawei offers cheap, reliable equipment to build 5G networks. The US, however, has been aggressive in warning countries and companies not to partner with Huawei. US officials warn that Huawei technology likely contains backdoors that would allow the Chinese government to access private data, much as some technology exported by US companies contains backdoors for use by the US intelligence community.

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

Thomas Friedman got improbably rich by, among other things, peddling the idea that countries that have McDonald’s franchises don’t go to war with one another because McDonald's customers prefer paying for burgers to paying for bullets. The so-called “golden arches theory” has already been disproved multiple times, but the ongoing war between Armenia and Azerbaijan offers a final nail in the coffin. Not only are countries with McDonald’s franchises fighting each other, the franchises themselves are doing their own version of bellicose nationalism [[link removed]].

Francis Fukuyama to market capitalism: “You’ve won! No other economic system can compete with you, and I’ll be singing your praises for the foreseeable future.”

Market capitalism to Francis Fukuyama: “Who are you?” [[link removed]]

Nuclear history memes are still good. [[link removed]]

There are other good tweets, but you have to go vote! Send pics of your “I Voted” stickers to @samratner on Twitter, [[link removed]] and I’ll send you a good tweet in response.

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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 GBH.

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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