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...dig into the richest survey dataset on Africa.

Afrobarometer [[link removed]], the leading source of survey data from Africa, released [[link removed]] its most recent data on corruption last week. Results vary widely from country to country — for example, 80% of respondents in the Democratic Republic of Congo reported paying a bribe for a public service in the last year, while only 5% of respondents in Mauritius said the same — but the topline results are not encouraging. Overall, a quarter of respondents reported paying a bribe in the past year, and over half of respondents believe that corruption is getting worse in their country. Yet, a majority of those surveyed still believe that ordinary people can make a difference in the fight for honest governance.

Super secret squirrel forever

Today, officers and contractors who work abroad have their identities protected by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, but that protection runs out five years after they leave the intelligence community. Congress is now considering a set of bills, backed [[link removed]] by the CIA, that would make domestically-based officers and contractors “covert agents” under the law — and would indefinitely make identifying them a crime.

The bills’ proponents argue that in a world where espionage takes place as much online as in seedy bars, security is as important for an intelligence contractor based in Vienna, Virginia as one based in Vienna, Austria.

Civil liberties activists point out that the bills would make it much harder to demand accountability for malfeasance in the intelligence community. They point to the CIA’s torture program, for which no one has been tried but resulted in a conviction for former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who divulged to a reporter the name of a contractor who helped design torture techniques for the program. If protections for those involved last forever, they argue, it will be very difficult to get public answers about what happened.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] African organizations set the peace agenda

A group involved in philanthropic funding for peace research has begun targeting one of the major challenges in producing valuable data on issues of war and peace: bias toward the needs of Euro-American institutions that dominate peace research. Aaron Stanley, Grant Masterson, and Arsene Brice Bado reported [[link removed]] some exciting early returns from their organizations’ joint effort to have African organizations set priorities for data gathering in peace research.

The Carnegie Corporation of New York has funded partnerships for peace research between African and American institutions with African partners as the main program developers — a rare arrangement for projects from an American funder.

So far, these projects have produced new data on conflict-prone election processes and studies on more effective ways of gathering data on election violence, but they also operate as a model for new ways of producing knowledge about security issues that better serves the communities being studied.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] MIDNIGHT OIL

Our Midnight Oil guest this week is Faine Greenwood, who works as a contractor on unmanned aerial vehicle issues for the Massachusetts Department of Transportation. Before she joined MassDOT, Faine was a researcher at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative's Signal Program on Human Security and Technology. She's an expert on the use of drones in humanitarian contexts and she writes about drones and other emerging technology issues at Slate [[link removed]].

WHAT IS THE HARDEST PROBLEM YOU WORK ON?

I spend my time thinking about how organizations, and especially the humanitarian community, can integrate new technologies into existing systems. That obviously involves a whole range of challenges, but the hardest one is probably getting people to think about why it is that they want to add new technologies to their systems in the first place. There is a lot of pressure out there — from donors, inventors, and innovators within the humanitarian community — to try out cool-seeming new tech in humanitarian operations, but "because it's cool" isn't actually a very good reason to do something in a crisis situation. The humanitarian world has built a set of standard operating procedures over a long period of time that largely work pretty well, so when people get the urge to start fiddling with those procedures by adding new tech, they should be able to make a good case about how that new tech will actually be an improvement over existing ways of operating.

When people don't ask those questions, technological interventions that are well-intentioned and seem helpful can have some real negative consequences. After the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, for example, a lot of people showed up with drones to assist in search and rescue and recovery efforts. The problem was that there were no real procedures in place for integrating drones into the humanitarian response system, and the drone operators largely didn't understand enough about how disaster response operates to build those procedures on the fly. The resulting confusion engendered a lot of distrust from the Nepalese government, which put in place some harsh anti-drone regulations that will set domestic drone use in Nepal back years. It also served to undercut international faith in drones as a disaster response tool, which was a shame because they can be really helpful if integrated correctly.

HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT TRYING TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM?

The path to getting people to ask the right questions about emerging technology is really two-fold. First, we need to do research that will give innovators a better sense of the stakes involved in testing new technologies. When it comes to unmanned aerial vehicles, for example, there has been basically no research done on public attitudes toward drones outside of North America. That's a problem because it's people outside North America (and in the Global South broadly) who tend to bear the brunt of humanitarian tech experimentation. If we had good, granular data on how people around the world feel about drones and why, it would be much easier to make the case to drone operators that they should take local concerns seriously.

Second, we need to get in the habit of performing realistic cost-benefit analyses. People tend to assume that, for any given task a drone can do, it is cheaper and/or more effective than doing that task another way. Often that assumption is true, but rarely is it ever tested. If people internalize that a new technology has to meaningfully improve on existing methods in order to justify building new procedures around it and shouldn't be allowed to skate by on its cool factor, it would go a long way toward ending harmful tech experimentation in the humanitarian sector.

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

Matthew Bell tracked [[link removed]] evolving attitudes in Israel toward the Iran nuclear deal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been an implacable foe of the deal, but large segments of Israel’s security establishment supported it. Now that the deal seems to be coming apart, Netanyahu faces the problem of the dog who finally caught a car: figuring out what to do next. Israel had organized much of its defense planning on the assumption that the deal would hold and now must adapt on the fly.

Jamie Withorne wrote [[link removed]] a courageous essay about mental health and national security. Drawing on her own experience as a security professional struggling to talk about mental illness, she laid out the ways that the security clearance process incentivizes ambitious defense wonks to avoid mental health treatment. The culture of denial around mental illness, she argued, makes life worse for everyone in the security community.

Cindy Pom checked in [[link removed]] on France’s efforts to prevent violent extremism in the country, nearly four years after the Bataclan attack carried out by ISIS in Paris. The French government has funded various deradicalization programs directed at Muslims sympathetic to ISIS, but the common thread between the programs is a focus on strict secularism. Participants in one program were expected to stop eating halal food and in another, a man shaving his beard was seen as a major sign of progress. It is hard to say how effective this approach is, but at least one expert called the idea of targeting religion as the source of violent extremism “counterproductive.”

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

The news was bleak this week, but at least some people still found time for networking.

Noted ex-White House staffer [[link removed]], car parker [[link removed]], and Nazi collaborator medal-wearer [[link removed]], Seb Gorka, is mad that the US Women’s National Team won the World Cup. So mad that data visualization expert Kieran Healey decided to demonstrate [[link removed]] the source of Gorka’s ire by adapting a diagram [[link removed]] from Gorka’s own doctoral dissertation [[link removed]].

Iran nuclear deal detractors explored new frontiers of galaxy brain [[link removed]] last week, arguing that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei should “follow [North Korean leader Kim Jong- Un’s] approach” and meet with President Donald Trump — neglecting the small detail that, before meeting Trump, Kim took the important prerequisite step of building and testing multiple nuclear weapons.

Every part of this [[link removed]] Bernie Sanders tweet about Ross Perot is so deliciously weird that we can’t figure out where the emphasis should go. Perot gave Bernie Sanders a sword? Perot gave Sanders a sword? A sword was given, by Perot, to socialist Senator Bernie Sanders? Bernie Sanders has a sword because recently-deceased, billionaire iconoclast Ross Perot gave him one?

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 PRI’s The World and Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRI/PRX, BBC, and WGBH.

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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