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If you read just one thing …

... read about the health effects of xenophobia.

A major genre of social science in the coming decades is going to focus on studies trying to measure the effect of living through the frequent political shocks of the Trump years. A pioneering article [[link removed]] in that genre, tracking birth outcomes among people from countries targeted by President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban who gave birth in the US, is out in the journal Social Science & Medicine. People from those countries living in the US gave birth prematurely at about the same rate as white US citizens in the years of the Obama presidency. After Trump implemented the Muslim ban, however, the chances of a pre-term birth from someone targeted by the ban jumped 6.8%, while the chances for white Americans remained unchanged. It is hard to sort out how much of the effect is due to stress from the ban, stress from the general climate of xenophobia in the US following Trump’s inauguration or other factors. What the article does make clear, however, is that the effects of the Trump years have not been felt equally across the board, and the people who have been harmed during this time have often been harmed in ways we are only beginning to measure.

Reporting during COVID-19

Press freedom in India has become even more constrained [[link removed]] during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the Indian government using the virus as an excuse to crack down on reporter access. Between the government’s actions and the economic and physical toll the pandemic has taken on India’s media landscape, it is getting much more difficult for Indians to access independent local news sources.

So far, at least 55 reporters in India covering COVID-19 have been the target of state intimidation efforts, including arrests and assaults, largely under the pretext of enforcing anti-COVID-19 regulations.

In one instance, police used the threat of COVID-19 as a justification to expel press from a village that had been the site of a horrific alleged murder. Evidence had begun to emerge that police were involved in a coverup to protect the alleged perpetrators, and the expulsion freed local law enforcement officials of outside oversight as they went about their business.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] On Wednesdays, we wear camouflage

Political scientist Sarah Parkinson has a new article [[link removed]] out that features an epigraph from a foundational text of conflict studies: “Mean Girls.” Parkinson’s paper describes how militant groups build their “practical ideology” — the everyday social customs and interactions that shape people’s lived experience of identifying with a certain militant group — and how practical ideology builds organizational cohesion and political awareness within these groups.

During fieldwork among Palestinian communities in Lebanon, Parkinson encountered a wide range of signifiers people used to communicate theirs and others’ places within the complex world of Palestinian politics. Sometimes fashion tells a story — many young people wear depictions of a Palestinian refugee cartoon character to show that they are not associated with any party.

Other times, however, signifiers are more obscure. For example, an older person with a preference for spicy food may have picked up the taste for spice in Tunisia, perhaps as a Fatah official in exile there in the 1980s.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Federalism in violence: Part I

When the state makes up its sovereign mind to do some repressing, it is often not the central nervous system of national government — the national police or secret service — that actually carry out purges or mass arrests. Instead, there are often layers of distance between the decision-makers and the people who implement their decisions, even when the decision is to commit violence against the state’s own citizens. This week and next on Deep Dive, we’ll look at research on how national governments interact with the distributed networks they use to exercise their putative monopoly on violence.

When Rodrigo Duterte won the 2016 presidential election in the Philippines, his signature policy proposal was his war on drugs. Even by the standards of wars on drugs, the one he proposed was particularly brutal. He advocated for the extrajudicial killing of even low-level drug offenders, bragging [[link removed]] that he personally had shot three drug dealers dead during his time as mayor of Davao City. The plan won him the election and remains wildly popular in the Philippines even as the government says it has killed nearly 6,000 Filipinos. Human rights groups estimate [[link removed]] it has killed many more.

As president, Duterte moved from the murdering to the sanctioning role in the practice of state-sanctioned murder. To actually implement his program, he needed local governments throughout the country to step up and do something that doesn’t necessarily come naturally in a democracy like the Philippines: kill their own constituents. Unsurprisingly, there was a mixed response among mayors when it came time to actually put Duterte’s proposals into action.

What is more of a surprise is the pattern of variation in responses. As a forthcoming article [[link removed]] in the Journal of Politics by Nico Ravanilla, Renard Sexton, and Dotan Haim shows, a crucial predictor for the extent to which municipalities complied with Duterte’s plan was the amount of patronage money they had at their disposal when Duterte was elected.

Ravanilla et al. coded each mayor based on their party affiliation in 2016 and how substantial of a patronage network that party affiliation provided them. Based on the mayors’ access to patronage, the researchers then labeled each one as either an outsider or an insider. Insiders had a lot of resources to draw on and could afford to buy the loyalty of the constituencies they needed to stay in power. Outsiders, however, were comparative political loners, with much less cash to distribute.

When they measured reports of police violence in municipalities governed by insider and outsider mayors, the researchers found that municipalities with outsider mayors identified 40% more drug offenses — that is, conducted 40% more drug enforcement — than insider-led municipalities. Which is weird, seeing as they did basically the same amount of enforcement on every other category of crime. More alarming, all that increased drug enforcement also led to increased extrajudicial killings. Police in outsider municipalities were 60% more likely than those in insider municipalities to have killed a drug suspect after Duterte’s election.

Ravanilla et al.’s explanation for these divergences is that the mayors are all acting out of self-preservation. For the outsider mayors, who have little to fall back on if support for their policies wanes, being identified with Duterte’s popular anti-drug crusade is simply good politics. By prosecuting the war on drugs enthusiastically, they run the risk of police scandal but they gain the benefit of association with a widely approved policy.

For insider mayors, however, there is much less incentive to take on the risk of a police scandal. They know that the danger of being the enthusiastic supporter of the “ Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party [[link removed]]” comes when the leopards eat a locally important face and they are implicated. The insider mayors would much rather limit the amount of violence their police forces engage in and then make up any subsequent dip in their support by strategically distributing cash.

As in so many instances, in the Philippines, enacting violence helped turn some of the outsiders into insiders. During the 2019 midterm elections, outsider and insider mayors joined Duterte’s party en masse, hoping to ride his coattails. Yet, when the votes were counted, outsiders who switched, having fought Duterte’s drug war, were nearly 20% more likely to be reelected under Duterte’s banner than the insiders.

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

Daniel DePetris offered [[link removed]] a suggestion for a foreign policy layup in Joe Biden’s first 100 days as president: end US involvement in the war in Yemen. The war, which has killed well over 100,000 people and forced four out of five Yemenis to rely on humanitarian aid to survive, is tremendously unpopular in the US. Congress passed a war powers resolution to prevent US resources from being used by Saudi and Emirati militaries in Yemen with bipartisan support, but President Trump vetoed the resolution. As Biden comes into office, he has the chance to implement the resolution’s measures on his own and prevent US weapons from being used in the deaths of yet more Yemeni civilians.

Andrew Connelly reported [[link removed]] on the challenges faced by people displaced in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Many Armenians who lived in cities and towns now occupied by Azerbaijan cannot return home, and even those who can will have to do so under the supervision of Russian peacekeepers. Towns along the frontlines of the conflict were shelled right up to the night of the ceasefire between the two countries, leaving a great deal of reconstruction for those who survived and are able to find their way home.

Yuko Yokoi challenged [[link removed]] the conventional wisdom that young people are a net risk to national and international security. Many governments view youth as a threat because it is from their ranks that armed groups draw most of their fighters, but a UN study found that the policies that grow out of that view often turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most young people, Yokoi pointed out, are peacemakers in their communities, including in some of the most war-torn parts of the world. A proposal in Congress, the Youth, Peace, and Security Act of 2020, would direct the State Department to engage and encourage youths involved in peace activism.

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

*Realists, wearing black shirts that say " SICKOS [[link removed]]" on the front* " Yes.. ha ha ha YES! [[link removed]]"

It’s the end of another semester, which means it’s time for another collection [[link removed]] of student-made international relations memes. Keep ‘em coming, folks.

A very effective use [[link removed]] of ironic quotation marks.

On the occasion of Space Force joining the ranks of challenge coin creators, a smart essay [[link removed]] on one of the fundamental themes of Critical State: Challenge coins are stupid and shouldn’t exist.

The Flemish and Wallon sides of Belgium are often at odds, but it is the synergies [[link removed]] between the two that make the country work.

Security pundits periodically come up with new buzzwords to suggest that the internet has somehow ushered in some new form of conflict that is neither war nor peace. One that is recently in vogue, “The Gray Zone,” is as meaningless as all the rest, a fact demonstrated by … this graphic [[link removed]] from an article about The Gray Zone.

If you pronounce it correctly, “bananas,” “beaches,” and “bases” should all rhyme [[link removed]].

A fun game to play with your friends: Read this list [[link removed]] of celebrities the Trump administration asked to participate in a public vaccination campaign, and try to figure out what criteria they used to decide which celebrities appealed to the “superspreader” demographic. Please tweet your best guess to @samratner, because we have no clue.

Broke: The biggest danger from nuclear blasts is the accompanying EMP (electromagnetic pulse).

Woke: The biggest danger from nuclear blasts is the accompanying EMP ( exploding mistletoe and pines [[link removed]]).

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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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