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... read about how democratization might not be so bad after all.

A subdivision of the long-running debate about whether democracy leads to long-term peace is the discussion of whether democratization contributes to peace in the initial democratic period. One popular theory posits that leaders in new democracies actually prefer to go to war as a way to unify their constituents around a national struggle. Yet, a new article [[link removed]] by Midnight Oil alumnus Ben Denison and Krista Wiegand suggests the opposite. Looking at new democratic governments that inherited territorial disputes with neighbors, Denison and Wiegand measured those governments’ propensity to go to war based on the decisions their authoritarian predecessors made about how to manage the disputes. In countries where the past authoritarian regime had both kept the peace and kept the country’s claim on the disputed land, incoming elected leaders were quite likely to maintain the same peaceful policy. It is not, in other words, that democratization is inherently destabilizing. It’s just that new democratic leaders are forced to reckon, for better and worse, with their country’s pre-democratic history.

Gendered peace failures

In the years since the United Nations took up Women, Peace, and Security as a distinct issue area, many countries that work with the UN have attempted to incorporate the latest thinking on gender and conflict into security policies. An article [[link removed]] by Elizabeth Pearson and Chitra Nagarajan shows many of the stumbling blocks with these efforts in countries like Nigeria face significant internal security concerns.

Nigeria has been running National Action Plans to address gender in its conflict with Islamist insurgents Boko Haram since 2013, but, as Pearson and Nagarajan point out, that period has hardly seen the gendered effects of state security interventions lessen. Gender-based violence and sexual exploitation remains high in areas where Nigerian soldiers interact with civilians and little has been done to address the problem.

The policies that have been implemented harm men as well as women because they use gender as shorthand for “perpetrator” and “victim” respectively. Under these policies, civilian men are automatically under suspicion whenever they interact with government forces, while even women who have perpetrated attacks against civilians are considered innocent and denied access to reintegration programs that might give them a path to a more peaceful life.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Colonial history of refugee law

The 1951 Refugee Convention set important benchmarks for the legal consideration of refugees that have shaped the international legal regime around forced migration ever since. An article [[link removed]] by Ulrike Krause tells the story of how the Convention, which notionally set out to develop regulations for the entire world, ended up creating different rules for colonizers and the colonized.

With remarkably little debate, the Convention authors adopted a clause that allowed colonizing countries to choose for themselves whether the Convention’s rules about what states owe refugees would apply in their colonies.

Since 1951, as more and more former colonies gained their independence, those countries tended to create their own agreements on the treatment of refugees, implicitly challenging the pro-colonial 1951 Convention. That divide remains, calling into question the supposed universality of refugee protections under UN auspices.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Civilian labor in reconstruction: Part II

Last week on Deep Dive, we looked at research on the unseen labor that civilians do to rebuild society after armed conflict. The costs for that work are high, and are rarely acknowledged by the governments that benefit from it. This week, we’ll look at new research on what happens when governments do acknowledge that work — at least long enough to exploit it.

In an article [[link removed]] in the journal International Peacekeeping, Margaux Pinaud describes a situation in which the government explicitly turned to civil society organizations to monitor a ceasefire between government and rebel forces. In 2006, the government of Nepal and the Maoist rebel group that had been fighting it for the previous decade reached a ceasefire agreement. It was the fourth agreement reached during the conflict — the previous three had all broken down, leading to recriminations on both sides. By the time of the 2006 ceasefire, both sides were interested in new approaches to strengthening the agreement.

They ultimately established a National Monitoring Committee for the Ceasefire Code of Conduct (NMCC), which would be charged with evaluating and reporting on both sides’ adherence to the agreement. To staff the NMCC, the warring parties recruited 24 Nepalese civil society groups and individuals — a mix of trade unions, professional associations, human rights activists and others. By relying on civilian labor to keep the peace in a conflict where civilians bore the brunt of the war, the thinking went, the peace might become more durable.

That bet worked, Pinaud argues. The ceasefire held from when it was established, in May 2006, to the signing of a long-term peace deal between the belligerents six months later. Pinaud interviewed 31 people involved in the ceasefire, and found that the NMCC was quite effective in the work it set out to do. In six months, it investigated 1,425 complaints of violations and highlighted the ones it found credible both directly to the parties and through the media. The openness of its fact-finding missions allowed the parties to better communicate about intentional violations versus unfortunate accidents, reducing distrust during peace negotiations. The NMCC also played an active role in the peace negotiations themselves, serving as fact-finders for the talks and advocating for a wide range of civilian voices to be included in the discussions.

There was, however, a cost to these efforts, which was borne disproportionately by the civilians who participated in the NMCC. There was a widespread belief that NMCC members favored the Maoist rebels, which undercut both the work of the commission and the reputation of commission members in their day jobs when they had to interact with pro-government figures. The NMCC itself was also under-resourced, requiring participants and their organizations to find outside funding and make do with their own uncompensated labor when funding was unavailable.

The country's reliance on civil society groups also contributed to a lack of diversity among those monitoring the ceasefire. Civil society tends to be richer, more male and more associated with dominant ethnic groups than the countries they try to represent, and the NMCC was no different. Of the 24 members, only two were women, and the overall membership was overwhelmingly drawn from what Pinaud called the “English-speaking, Kathmandu elite.” Perhaps as a result, their reports made little mention of the problems faced by women and disadvantaged ethnic groups.

In all, Pinaud concludes that civil society can play a successful role in shepherding warring parties from the battlefield to the negotiating table. In order to do so, however, civil society groups must be willing to pay the reputational and logistical costs that come with such an effort, because governments are not going to cover either.

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

Shirin Jaafari gathered [[link removed]] opinions from around the world about the occupation of the US Capitol by President Donald Trump’s supporters last week. European leaders expressed sorrow at the scenes, but the overwhelming response from around the world was horror. As Midnight Oil alumnus Zachariah Mampilly told Jaafari, the responses potentially indicate “the death of American exceptionalism.” It is hard to square the idea of the US as a uniquely democratic country with the images of people violently attempting to invalidate an election result, Mampilly noted. Others from Syria, India, and the United Kingdom all highlighted the difference in the light touch police took with pro-Trump rioters and the heavy force used against mostly peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020.

Jonah Blank decried [[link removed]] President Trump’s recent pardon of four Blackwater contractors who massacred 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2017. The men, who had been serving sentences ranging from 30 years to life in prison, are just the latest in a string of people convicted of serious wrongdoing against civilians in post-9/11 wars that Trump has set free during his presidency. The policy of impunity for those who murder civilians in US wars, Blank argued, undermines both the US justice system and the country’s credibility abroad. More importantly, however, absolving unrepentant men who killed children as young as nine is simply immoral.

Ariel Oseran highlighted [[link removed]] the stark inequalities in Israel’s rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. For Israelis, vaccination is proceeding at 150,000 vaccinations per day — a world-leading 1.5% of the country getting shots each day. In the occupied Palestinian West Bank, however, vaccination is haltingly slow, due in large part to restrictions imposed by Israel’s ongoing occupation. The Israeli government has made no move to assist the Palestinian National Authority in aquiring or distributing vaccines.

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

A ready-made [[link removed]] “how it started / how it’s going” meme for understanding the state of information technology in the US military.

In fairness to John Bercow [[link removed]], you can see how he might be interested in a dictatorship run by someone who doesn’t talk [[link removed]].

Weird to find out that Marshall Billingslea [[link removed]] has the power of time travel but only uses it to go back and do man on the street interviews as 1954 midwesterner Harold Thorsgard [[link removed]].

It’s an uneasy feeling to watch the tools that defined the failed US security policy after 9/11 being trotted out as the obvious policy response for dealing with the Capitol invaders. Spare a thought, however, for the pure schadenfreude [[link removed]] of Muslims, who, after decades of being the targets of those tools, finally get to see the shoe on the other foot.

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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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