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If you read just one thing…

....read about the danger of US-South Korea military exercises.

Peace activists often protest joint military exercises between the US and South Korea as being an impediment to peace on the Korean peninsula. In an environment where the US and North Korea are still formally at war, they argue, the North Korean government sees the exercises as preparation for an invasion. North Korea hawks, however, say that the Kim government is just crying wolf about the exercises to provide an excuse for its own provocative actions. Who is right? A new article [[link removed]] in the Journal of Conflict Resolution makes a compelling case that it’s the peace activists. Political scientists Jordan Bernhardt and Lauren Sukin tracked how North Korea responded to different kinds of joint military exercises and found that the responses are far from the random collection of provocations that the hawk position would predict. Instead, North Korea responds much more aggressively to exercises that are more easily interpreted as cover for invasion attempts than to smaller exercises with less combat power involved. These patterns, the researchers conclude, indicate that North Korea views the exercises as real threats to its security.

War within the peacekeepers

The United Nations is contending with a novel threat: ethnic cleansing within its peacekeeping ranks. Ethiopia is pulling [[link removed]] ethnic Tigrayan soldiers deployed on UN and African Union peacekeeping missions and flying them back to Addis Ababa, where they may be tortured or killed to prevent them from siding with Tigray People’s Liberation Front in the ongoing conflict in the northern Tigray region.

The issue strikes at the heart of UN peacekeeping operations because, as of the end of October, Ethiopia was the second-largest [[link removed]] contributor of troops to UN peacekeeping missions in the world.

In addition to the removal of Tigrayan soldiers from peacekeeping missions, the Ethiopian government withdrew 3,000 troops involved in a peacekeeping mission in Somalia to fight in Tigray. The Tigrayan soldiers among that contingent had their weapons confiscated.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Surveillance Monday

As Cyber Monday bubbles over into a whole season of online holiday shopping, a new investigative report [[link removed]] is a good reminder of how online shipping behemoth Amazon supports itself. Leaked reports from within the company show that the company maintains a massive surveillance apparatus that it deploys to get dirt on anyone that might threaten revenues, from warehouse workers who have the temerity to unionize, to climate activists who think some things are more important than creating a lot of value for shareholders [[link removed]].

The company contracted the Pinkertons — union-busting muscle of yore who still exist as corporate stooges for hire — to infiltrate warehouses in Poland and gather intelligence on workers there.

Amazon also employs an in-house team of former military intelligence analysts to track union organizers across Europe, keeping tabs on the threat that Amazon workers might demand a union.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Peacekeeping work: Part I

A political science Voltron came together recently. Three of the world’s leading scholars on peacekeeping, Barbara Walter, Lise Morje Howard, and Page Fortna, wrote a major article [[link removed]] in the British Journal of Political Science, taking stock of what we know about the processes and conditions necessary for third-party peacekeeping to be effective. This week and next, Deep Dive will look at recent papers cited as key to helping future policymakers make better choices and bring conflicts to a close.

One thing scholars of peacekeeping actually do agree on is that peacekeepers do reduce violence against civilians. Conflicts that have international interventions from peacekeepers consistently see a drop in violence against civilians — often a quite substantial drop. Some research even shows a close relationship between the number of peacekeepers and civilian safety: the more blue helmets around, the fewer civilian combat deaths.

That’s encouraging news, but there is still a nagging issue. Peacekeeping missions typically take place because peacekeepers are invited in by at least one of the parties to the conflict — usually the government party, in the case of a civil war. Is it possible that parties to the conflict invite international intervention in the first place because they expect levels of violence to drop anyway? Is the dread god Endogeneity skewing our beliefs about whether peacekeeping works?

An article [[link removed]] forthcoming in the journal International Organization says probably not. Political scientists Allison Carnegie and Christopher Mikulaschek dug into the actual mechanisms by which peacekeeping missions are generated and discovered an opportunity for a tidy, natural experiment about peacekeeping effectiveness. The UN Security Council is the most important body in determining when, where, and to what degree UN peacekeepers are deployed. Council membership outside of the five permanent members turns over frequently due to term limits, and the non-permanent seats are allotted to specific regions. Once the Council members are set, the Council presidency rotates each month, in alphabetical order — that is, for the purposes of measuring the Council’s effect on international conflict, basically at random. Because Security Council membership and leadership are related to the size of peacekeeping operations but are unrelated to the state of any particular conflict that might be a target for peacekeeping operations, the Council’s makeup allowed Carnegie and Mikulaschek to use Council membership and leadership as random variables to test peacekeeper effectiveness.

Their results are stark, and speak to both the way peacekeepers are apportioned and who they actually protect. When a state in a certain region holds the Council presidency, Carnegie and Mikulaschek find, the Council sends more peacekeepers to conflicts in that region. For every hundred of those additional peacekeepers, who, regardless of conflict conditions, would not have been there if a regional state wasn’t in the Council presidency, peacekeepers prevented an average of 17 additional civilian casualties each month. Similarly, each hundred additional peacekeepers that arrive due to a country from a certain region being on the Council produce another 12 prevented casualties each month. In other words, states do act to get the international community to increase stability in their neighborhoods and peacekeepers do help deliver that stability.

Carnegie and Mikulaschek also found, however, that those civilian casualty preventions weren’t evenly distributed. The reduction in civilian casualties that peacekeepers bring is only reflected in civilian casualties caused by rebels. Peacekeepers have basically no effect on civilian killings by government forces. This is the flip side of the peacekeeping model — peacekeepers are invited into conflict areas and serve there, to a certain extent, at the pleasure of the host government. The incentive, therefore, is for peacekeepers to exert much more energy cracking down on abuses by rebels, who get no representation on the Security Council, than on abuses by a government that might decide supporting the peacekeeping mission is no longer worth it. The international community, it turns out, is very good at restraining violent behavior, but only if its members aren’t the ones doing the shooting.

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

Mary Kay Magistad explained [[link removed]] the relationship between Chinese investment in Ethiopia, and the current conflict in the country’s Tigray region. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front was a key member of the coalition that ruled Ethiopia for 27 years before political protests carried current Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to power in 2018. During that time, Tigrayan political leaders courted Chinese support for infrastructure projects throughout Ethiopia. Today, however, Abiy’s government and Tigray are locked in a bloody conflict, and Abiy is attempting to reorient Ethiopia’s development policy toward institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Critical State’s own Laicie Heeley examined [[link removed]] the monster that swallowed Washington: “The Blob.” In a special episode of “Things That Go Boom,” Heeley profiled both the US foreign policy establishment — which Ben Rhodes dubbed “The Blob” for its unthinking commitment to US primacy — and a new generation of detractors seeking to challenge the establishment’s hold on the levers of power. The rise of an anti-Blob contingent in Washington has created tensions that are already shaping the discussion about foreign policy in the coming Biden administration.

Katherine Harvey traced [[link removed]] the history of American efforts — mostly in Republican administrations — to “fix” Middle Eastern politics. These undertakings seem rooted in the idea that the region is a blank slate on which the US can paint, or a machine with easily manipulable knobs labeled “democracy,” “oil production,” and “religion.” Of course, efforts to “fix” the Middle East always fail and often backfire on the US, because none of the assumptions underlying these missions are true. Instead, as Harvey pointed out, attempts to impose fixes from the outside often undermine the ability of people actually living in the region to achieve peaceful compromises with one another.

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

The Minions T-shirt [[link removed]] is so on the nose you have to wonder if it’s satire.

Neoliberalism doesn’t exis — oh [[link removed]].

Two is really the ideal [[link removed]] age to learn about the concept of formative conflict.

This [[link removed]] story would make for a great “Death Of Stalin” prequel.

When your defense acquisition program is actually designed [[link removed]] to spin out of control, it might … spin out of control.

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

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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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