Naming doesn’t always lead to shaming. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix.

SUPPORT CRITICAL STATE [[link removed]] THIS HOLIDAY SEASON! [[link removed]]

"Critical State is the best newsletter I sub to, hands down. I'm not a ~security~ oriented person, but CS lets me out-wit my friends with MAs in security studies." — Reader in PA

Reporting is hard, especially this year. But we know it’s a valuable resource. If you value Inkstick Media, Critical State, and Things That Go Boom, please make a donation [[link removed]] of $5 a month today. Our reporting is free for everyone, but it’s not free to produce. We appreciate your support, especially now.

Donate [[link removed]]

If you read just one thing …

... read about how naming doesn't always lead to shaming.

A preferred approach by human rights advocates tracking state violence against civilians is to make as much fuss as possible about state crimes. In theory, the bad publicity should deter governments from continuing their bad behavior. However, as a new article by political scientist Lora DiBlasi shows [[link removed]], states that get called out by human rights groups often conclude that their mistake isn’t killing civilians, but getting caught. DiBlasi finds that states that have been called out by Amnesty International and the UN Commission on Human Rights are more likely to outsource their repressive violence to pro-government militias that have no formal relationship to the state. Militias give governments (semi)plausible deniability, allowing them to avoid the consequences of being named and shamed.

suffering for fashion

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the inhumanity of contingent employment around the world, particularly when people are forced to work to keep the systems that allow others to ride out the pandemic in relative comfort running smoothly. Garment workers in Pakistan work on an ad hoc system driven nearly entirely by the ebb and flow of overseas orders. When that exploitative system came into contact with the worker protections against COVID-19 put in place by the Pakistani government, the system won. [[link removed]]

Pakistani law prevents employers from firing workers during the pandemic, but on multiple occasions, factory managers have been filmed laying off workers and then shooting at workers who try to protest. Often, police look on, taking the managers’ side.

Labor organizers point to H&M and other fast-fashion brands as the main drivers of the industry’s refusal to take worker well-being seriously. H&M, in turn, disclaims any responsibility for the actions of the factory managers, who are subcontractors and therefore are only contracted to H&M, rather than working directly for the company.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] The methodology wars

This Twitter thread [[link removed]] summarizing how Saudi Arabia has gone about trying to undermine an embarrassing UN Women report about gender equality in the country is a trip down the rabbit hole. Rather than contest the UN Women report, the Saudi government just made its own report, using a methodology of its own design. By the Saudi metrics, wouldn’t you know, Saudi Arabia was a worldwide leader in women’s rights.

The Saudi government argued that UN Women’s methodologies were flawed, relying on “unknown survey collection methods” and riddled with “data- collection error.” In contrast, the Saudi report drew its data from local experts (who were also under the watchful eye of the Saudi government).

UN Women never published the Saudi report, but King Saud University eventually did, and Saudi media covered it widely.

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

Last week on Deep Dive, we looked at how the distance between national governments and the people who actually implement their repressive policies both enables and limits the violence states can do to their own people. In the Philippines, the deadliness of President Rodrigo Duterte’s ultra-violent drug war varies based on the political networks of the various mayors charged with carrying it out. This week, we’ll look at a case where the distance has served an opposite function, making it very difficult for the national government to get its violence implementers to stop repressing people.

In Mexico, police torture civilians accused of crimes at an astonishing rate. In a survey of prisoners in Mexico, nearly 60% reported being beaten by police before being put in custody of a public prosecutor, and nearly 40% reported being beaten while in public prosecutor custody. Over 35% report being victims of simulated drowning before being turned over to public prosecutors and 25% were subjected to waterboarding or similar techniques by public prosecutors. Electric shocks, being crushed with heavy objects, and burns are also frequently inflicted on people unfortunate enough to come in contact with the Mexican criminal justice system.

All this is true, despite the fact that Mexico instituted a sweeping criminal justice reform law in 2008 that, among other things, aimed to end torture as a major component of Mexican policing and prosecution. The national government, in other words, told its on-the-ground violence implementers to chill. Twelve years on, that hasn’t really happened. In a new article [[link removed]] in the American Political Science Review, Beatriz Magaloni and Luis Rodriguez investigate why torture is so embedded at the implementation level of Mexican justice.

Torture’s outsized role in Mexico stems from the country’s colonial past. Mexico inherited an inquisitional justice system from Spain, in which confessions are a crucial part of securing convictions. Since inquisitional systems (as the name suggests) are agnostic about whether those confessions are coerced or not, torture to produce coerced confessions became an institutionalized aspect of how the justice system functioned. The 2008 reforms ended inquisitional justice by changing evidentiary standards to make coerced confessions functionally inadmissible. Magaloni and Rodriguez used data from the survey of Mexican prisoners to test the law’s effectiveness. After the reforms, they found, there was a drop in torture, but the reforms were only responsible for between 4 and 8 percentage points of the drop — hardly at the levels that might have been expected given the content of the new laws.

Part of the reason for the laws’ limited effect came from the durability of the inquisitional institutions even in the face of democratic intervention. Police forces and prosecutors had a way of doing things, and the state’s actual ability to change those practices on the fly was extremely limited. Over time, as judicial oversight threw out more and more coerced confessions, the reforms did move the needle on torture, but police and prosecutors had to institute the reforms on themselves.

Another issue Magaloni and Rodriguez identified was the increasingly militarized nature of Mexican policing, driven in part by Mexico’s approach to its drug war. In Mexico, local police and military forces sometimes engage in joint operations against drug cartels, blurring the line between law enforcement and punitive raids. These joint operations, the researchers found, increased police torture in the area by between 5 to 10%, even controlling for areas where high levels of drug cartel violence might make the war on drugs more war-like than usual.

Mexican justice had a hard enough time implementing reforms from the national level, but the militarization of the drug war created a set of mixed signals that, in some communities, wiped away the positive effects of the reform entirely. A national government working at cross purposes to itself will have a particularly hard time curbing its footsoldiers’ violent tendencies.

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

Lydia Emmanouilidou looked back [[link removed]] on the role of social media in the Arab uprisings of 2011 and 2012 as part of The World’s retrospective on the so-called Arab Spring. Social media was initially a huge asset for pro-democracy protesters, giving them a platform for mass organization that helped them gain worldwide attention. However, the openness of social media platforms means that anti-democratic forces can also make use of it, both to push their own propaganda and to hunt down their activist foes. Nearly all of the Arab uprisings ended with violent repression by dictators, and many pro-democracy veterans of those uprisings now object to social media companies — which helped the dictators as much as they helped the protesters — being given credit for the protests.

Shirin Jaafari spoke [[link removed]] to Leila Bouazizi, the sister of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit seller whose dramatic self-immolation set off the first round of protests in the Arab uprisings. Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest mismanagement in his town of Sidi Bouzid. Video of his protest taken by bystanders circulated quickly and became a major symbol for protesters in Tunisia, and around the Arab world. Though the Tunisian revolution was the most successful of the Arab revolts, Leila Bouazizi now lives in Canada, and says that her family has been both supported and targeted as a result of her brother’s galvanizing act.

Daren Caughron urged [[link removed]] the incoming Biden administration to make preserving peace in Colombia a top priority. Violence and public unrest are on the rise in Colombia. The number of civilian massacres has tripled since 2019, and protests against the killings and the government’s COVID-19 response have rocked the capital. The Colombian government has been slow to implement sections of the peace deal between itself and FARC rebels, in part due to the pandemic. However, Caughron points out, if that peace deal breaks down it will affect the 1.8 million Venezuelans who have fled to Colombia to escape instability in their own country, in addition to the millions of Colombians who hoped to put the country’s horrible civil war behind them.

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

Space Force began its life as viral marketing for a Netflix sitcom of the same name, but now that the show has cratered [[link removed]], the Pentagon has its sights set on bigger IP. Members of Space Force are to be known henceforth as “ guardians [[link removed]],” a pop culture callout lost on absolutely no one.

The US Army, meanwhile, made a real technological breakthrough [[link removed]] last week. Kudos [[link removed]] to all involved.

A late entrant [[link removed]] for headline of the year.

Never let it be said that the internet never did anything positive for local news [[link removed]].

TFW the hurly-burly is about to start [[link removed]].

Critical State is taking a vacation next week, but we’ll be back in your inboxes in 2021. Until then, be sure to observe the Critical State tradition of reading Santa Clausewitz [[link removed]]. Enjoy your holidays, stay safe, and hopefully, next year will be less of a disaster.

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 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.

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