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Last June, Brazil’s supreme court issued an order suspending all police raids in Rio de Janeiro while the COVID-19 pandemic was raging — part of an attempt to force police to focus on public health provision. The jury is still out on the effect of the ban on pandemic response, but it has taken a major bite out of Rio’s other massive public health problem: police violence. According to a new working paper [[link removed]] by political science PhD candidate Jessie Bullock, not only did police killings drop an astonishing 66% as a result of the ban, but overall civilian homicides in the city fell as well, by 19%. What’s more, the removal of police patrols from the streets doesn’t seem to have increased other forms of crime. Property crime rates were basically unaffected by the ban. Instead, it seems as though the ceasefire in the long-running shooting war between police and organized crime in Rio has been a welcome relief for the civilians caught in the crossfire.

What is ‘great power competition’ good for anyway?

One theory for US politicians’ bipartisan embrace of the idea that the US is in a “great power competition” with China is that such rhetoric serves to unite Americans against a common enemy. That theory, however, is dangerously flawed. As political scientist Rachel Myrick writes in a new article [[link removed]], there is little to suggest that bellicose rhetoric drives a reduction in US political polarization.

Myrick hypothesizes two ways that making foreign countries seem threatening might bring US partisans closer together. The first is the idea that, as voters learn more about a perceived threat, they will come to a bipartisan agreement on how to confront it. Yet, as Myrick’s research shows, that’s not what happens. Instead, people often take in new information about the threat through their partisan lenses, maintaining or even increasing polarization.

Nor is there evidence that making China seem more threatening drives people in the US to put aside their differences and embrace their shared Americanness. In fact, Myrick shows, decreased polarization as a result of appeals to identity in the face of a foreign threat are short-lived — if they happen at all.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Desertion debriefs

Why do committed rebels sometimes end up deserting the organizations to which they’ve devoted their lives? To answer that question, researchers Enzo Nussio and Juan Ugarriza analyzed [[link removed]] over 19,000 records of deserters from Colombia’s FARC insurgency, and then read Colombian military reports of interviews with the deserters.

Nussio and Ugarriza found that desertion was less a product of any change in the deserters and more a result of a decline in the organization they escaped. Even when deserters still shared the FARC’s ideology, their interest in deserting increased as they became less convinced that the organization could deliver change based on that ideology.

Organizational decline also lowers the costs of desertion. A highly functioning insurgency has the capability to credibly threaten sharp punishment against fighters who try to leave the group. Once the credibility of that threat begins to wane, people who are having second thoughts about their participation have less reason to look over their shoulders as they split town.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE The stuff of life and death: Part I

Political violence research doesn’t analyze the physical artifacts of insecurity too much anymore. Instead, researchers’ time is mostly taken up with important intangibles — game theory, incentive structures, public opinion, and the like. But the physicality of things is crucial to understanding how insecurity manifests. This week and next on Deep Dive, we’ll look at new research on the objects that make up the world of political violence.

In a new article [[link removed]] in the European Journal of International Relations, political scientists Kate Cronin-Furman and Roxani Krystalli examine mementos of suffering that victims of human rights abuses keep close at hand. These small artifacts of harm — copies of testimony about a dead relative, photographs of a disappeared friend, newspaper clippings chronicling a kidnapping — take on outsized importance in the lives of people who have suffered abuses, especially at the hands of state forces. Because accountability for such abuses is so rare, the items are often the only concrete evidence available that the abuses actually took place.

Cronin-Furman and Krystalli spoke to dozens of victims and their families across two very different post-conflict contexts: Colombia, where a robust transitional justice program is underway that provides hope for some form of accountability for wartime abuses, and Sri Lanka, where transitional justice initiatives have been effectively defunct. In both countries, they asked how people went about documenting abuses and what that documentation, once gathered, means to the people who keep it.

Colombia’s Observatory of Memory and Conflict reports that 82,998 people were disappeared in the country between 1958 and 2017, when a peace agreement ending the long-running war between the government and FARC rebels was implemented. Since 2011, the country has had a Victims Unit — a government office dedicated to identifying people who have suffered human rights violations during the conflict. The violence was so widespread that almost 1 in 6 Colombians have been named as official victims by the unit. Recognition as a victim allows people to receive certain benefits and considerations from the government.

As a result, documentation of abuses in Colombia tends to be quite bureaucratic. One woman whose husband was disappeared in 2010, showed Krystalli five different official documents she kept that confirm various steps of her acceptance on the victims registry. The documents have state seals and signatures from key officials, and the woman keeps them as both legal proof of her eligibility for reparations and as a testament to the time and effort she spent navigating state bureaucracy to secure them. Indeed, for some other Colombians Krystalli spoke to, the bureaucratization of victimhood has given the transitional justice process the veneer of legitimacy while avoiding major issues. A human rights defender told her that government officials “just want the victims running around filling out forms until we die,” and a woman whose son was disappeared said, “I do not want another letter from the government. I just want to know what happened to my son.”

In Sri Lanka, however, where an estimated 146,000 Tamils went missing near the end of a long civil war between Tamil rebels and the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lankan state, there is no bureaucratic equivalent to the Victims Unit. The conflict ended in 2009, but an official Office of Missing Persons wasn’t set up until 2018, and it has accomplished little. Instead, families of the disappeared who want assistance from the government are forced to apply for death certificates for their relatives. As many family members told Cronin-Furman, government pressure to say that their relatives are dead feels like an implicit threat: Absolve us of the responsibility of acknowledging what happened to your relatives or we will force you to remain living in poverty.

Rather than give into that pressure, many Tamil families keep their records of lost loved ones from the state and use them in rituals of mourning and remembrance. Though the Tamil holiday recognizing fallen independence fighters is officially banned, many families still bring photographs and other mementos to burial sites on the day to honor the dead and disappeared. Many also hold on to evidence of the disappeared in the hopes that one day, the international community will put enough pressure on the Sri Lankan state that it will make real efforts to pursue transitional justice and investigate cases of disappearance.

In cases where there are powerful political incentives to deny that human rights abuses took place, the evidence of abuses that victims keep is a vital connection to the truth. That evidence can be the foundation of bureaucratic state structures of transition and reparation, and it can be a deeply personal xxxxxx against those who would say that the abuses didn’t happen or don’t matter. Often, it is both.

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

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

Young Hyun Lily Joo made the case [[link removed]] against COVID-19 vaccine hoarding by the US. Currently, the US has enough vaccine doses to vaccinate 750 million people, despite the fact that there are only about 330 million people in the US. At the same time, vaccination rates are lagging around the world as countries struggle to secure the doses necessary to protect their citizens. Vaccine hoarding — which is also taking place in other rich countries in addition to the US — is preventing poorer countries from acting to stop the spread of new, deadly variants of the virus. As Joo pointed out, the hoarding is pointless greed that impedes public health efforts around the world.

The World spoke [[link removed]] to Vladimir Milov, an adviser to Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, about Navalny’s declining health in Russian custody and the state of Russian politics. Navalny has been imprisoned since his return to Russia in January, and was conducting a hunger strike to protest the prison’s ban on him seeing his doctors. Milov told The World that Navalny was in “grave danger” due to the hunger strike, and that his team had only been able to access “fragments of information” about his health. (Navalny has since ended the three-week hunger strike.) Milov also discussed the dangers of opposing Russian president Vladimir Putin, pointing out that Navalny is just one of the many Putin opponents who have been poisoned or otherwise targeted over the years.

Sammy Luffy and Samhita Rao examined [[link removed]] the relationship between climate change and the politics of sexual and reproductive health. Politically and economically disadvantaged people are the most likely to bear the brunt of climate disasters, and they are also the least likely to be able to secure their sexual and reproductive health rights. When climate disasters occur, securing those rights becomes even more difficult. For instance, in Honduras, after Hurricane Eta hit in 2020, displacement from the storm prevented over 400,000 women there from accessing essential sexual and reproductive health care. Protecting sexual and reproductive health rights for all, Luffy and Rao argued, is a crucial goal for climate justice efforts.

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

When they came up with the “bumbling detective” literary trope, it’s not clear that this [[link removed]] is what they had in mind.

One way to understand the difference between nationalist groups like the Taliban and internationalist groups like ISIS is that the Taliban only wants one Windows wallpaper [[link removed]], while ISIS is after the whole rotation of Bing backgrounds.

When fossil fuel companies talk [[link removed]] about how great it is that they’re instituting carbon capture programs, it’s helpful to remember the actual amount [[link removed]] of carbon they capture: basically none.

Ned Price is apparently the first State Department spokesperson to have never been a nerd [[link removed]].

An international organization [[link removed]] that claims it promotes fairness but actually permanently enshrines the interests of the members that were richest when the organization was founded? That sounds strangely familiar [[link removed]].

Well, would you look at that [[link removed]]?!

The most useful local news graphic [[link removed]] in a long time.

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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 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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