The state and its ravenous power. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

… read about when states would rather just not.

Conceptually, the state is ravenous for power. Within its borders, it justifies its existence by aggressively pursuing a monopoly on the use of violence and by exercising exclusive taxation rights. In reality, however, sometimes when the state gets offered another course of power it pushes back from the table and says “I’m good.” In a new article [[link removed]], political scientists Richard Alexander and Joan Ricart-Huguet show that small-scale challenges to state rule can sometimes cause the state to just cede the field. During French colonial rule in West Africa, some local African leaders engaged in civil disobedience to protest various aspects of French rule. French colonial governors reduced public investment in the protesting districts, as we might expect if the state wished to punish anyone who challenged its power. Yet the French government, which lacked the resources to really press its claim to rule, also lowered taxes in the protesting districts. Rather than stand up to the local leaders, the colonial government just withdrew from the situation, effectively ceding some of the state’s conceptual power along with its de facto power.

Child trafficking in India

In a harrowing first-hand account, [[link removed]] men who were trafficked to Jaipur, India, as boys and forced to work manufacturing bangles tell of their rescue and of the conditions they were forced to work under.

Nearly 2.5 million children work in Rajasthan, the Indian state of which Jaipur is the capital, and many are trafficked from elsewhere in India. In Jaipur, they do much of the intricate work that propels the city’s jewelry industry.

The work takes children away from school and exposes them to a range of medical issues, from respiratory problems caused by breathing in glass dust to spinal problems due to working hunched over for hours on end.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] The value of an excuse

Nuclear nonproliferation advocates spend a lot of time bemoaning the problems caused by dual-use materials — that is, things that can be used for both nuclear weapons programs and other, less terrifying things. A nuclear aspirant might buy up all kinds of dual-use things useful to making a nuclear weapon and play it off like they’re only interested in that second, benign use. A new article [[link removed]] by political scientist Reid Pauly, however, points out that dual-use materials are also a boon to nonproliferation efforts because they make for a convenient lie.

Nuclear weapons programs tend to start out secret. If a counterproliferation organization catches a country starting a nuclear program, that country has a huge incentive to keep their failure secret. The virtue of dual-use technologies is counter-proliferators can use them as a carrot in negotiations: If you abandon your nuclear program, we’ll publicly agree with your lie that this stuff was for something else.

After speaking with officials in both counterproliferation organizations and from the South African government that bucked counterproliferation efforts before eventually reversing course, Pauly found that the value of a face-saving excuse is quite high in the nuclear world.

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

Last week, we began our look at the study of wartime sexual violence through the lens of a review article [[link removed]] in the Annual Review of Political Science by field leaders Ragnhild Nordås and Dara Kay Cohen. We read new research on how organizational ideology drives when, where, and why armed groups choose to engage in sexual violence. This week, we’ll take a step back and look at new thinking on the ethics of studying wartime sexual violence and new methods for studying political violence generally.

In the big-data age, there has been a shift in social science toward studying large numbers of small events — individual incidents of sexual violence, for example — in hopes of learning more about how those events are affected by other variables. A recent article [[link removed]] in the Journal of Global Security Studies by Cohen and political scientist Amelia Hoover Green examines how those data collections are actually gathered and the ethical considerations that accompany them.

One of the most appealing things about quantitative studies of large data sets of individual events is how seemingly ethically uncomplicated it is. Compared to traveling to a conflict zone, directly interviewing traumatized survivors, or designing experiments with vulnerable subjects, quantitative desk research seems to be an ethical lay up. Yet, as Hoover Green and Cohen point out, quantitative research doesn’t end research ethics concerns, it just conceals them.

Data sets come from somewhere. Often, the data are gathered by aggregating media reports, or through large-scale fieldwork done by nongovernmental organizations. By the time data is aggregated into a set and researchers are working with it, there are few opportunities left to influence its accuracy or methods used to gather the inputs. This creates (at least) two types of problems when studying topics as narrow but consequential as wartime sexual violence.

The first is a question of accuracy. In large data sets — say, ones that cover all instances and forms of political violence — the underlying assumption is that the size of the set basically wipes away concerns about random errors in individual datums. Once researchers begin to disaggregate those sets to look at only some categories of violence, such as wartime sexual violence, those errors become magnified. Hoover Green and Cohen report an example in which a typo in a State Department report almost led to a dataset reporting that the Israeli military raped minors in their custody, a charge for which there is no evidence (the typo, however, is hardly exculpatory — the report was supposed to read that Israeli Defense Force troops employed “threats of rape” against minors in their custody). When dealing with acts that shock the conscience like sexual violence, accuracy is crucial.

The second, thornier problem is the methods of data collection. Hoover Green and Cohen cite multiple cases in which journalists acted unethically to produce stories about sexual violence. A Pakistani 17-year-old who was gang raped was, in the words of a contemporary commentator, “hounded by journalists” for details of the attack. Another study, by Midnight Oil alumna Sherizaan Minwalla and Johanna Foster, found that many journalists who wrote about ISIS abuses against Yazidis acted atrociously toward victims of wartime sexual violence. Yazidi women said that eager reporters made empty promises of financial rewards for telling their stories, and some even threatened to identify the women without their consent if they did not grant interviews. When the reports gathered this way are aggregated into data sets, researchers can become implicated in these methods without their knowledge.

Hoover Green and Cohen urge researchers to both learn about the informed consent procedures used by the organizations that gather the data they use and to disclose those procedures to readers. In order to better understand those procedures, interviews with the data gatherers could become a standard part of desk research, which would be an important step toward offering readers and researchers alike a qualitative sense of how quantitative studies get made.

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

Rebecca Rosman chronicled [[link removed]] the debate in France over civilians filming police operations. Communities of color in France have long complained about police violence and racism in the country, and in recent years have begun to document it using cell phone cameras. French police view the concept of civilian oversight as an attack, complaining that officers can be identified in viral videos and face social repercussions. Last year, the French government proposed a bill requiring anyone posting videos of police to blur out officers’ faces, but the bill was ruled unconstitutional in early May.

Kallie Mitchell explained [[link removed]] the limits facing international humanitarian aid efforts in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. What began last November as fighting in the region between Ethiopian government troops and members of the nationalist Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front quickly devolved into ethnic cleansing by the Ethiopian state. International humanitarian groups have been denied access to Tigray, which has aggravated the threats civilians face. As Mitchell pointed out, women are in Tigray are disproportionately vulnerable, both as a result of widespread sexual violence against women in the conflict and because women make up a majority of the people who have been forced into ad hoc displacement centers as a result of the violence.

Rupa Shenoy traced [[link removed]] the effect that protests against George Floyd’s murder in the US had on discussions of policing in New Zealand. Before Floyd was killed by police officer Derek Chauvin, New Zealand was on the path to arming its police officers, despite protests from Māori groups who argued that armed policing would endanger their communities. Thousands of New Zealanders protested in solidarity with the uprising in the US that followed Floyd’s murder, and one effect of those protests was to shelve the plan to arm police. Since then, racial inequalities in policing have only become more central to the discourse in New Zealand, as police profiling of Māori communities remains a serious concern.

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

To be allowed to mind the US nuclear arsenal, you need to be an expert. Your knowledge of highly classified information and procedures needs to be sharp and up to date. There are exercises and exams, and if you fail you might get demoted to minding just world-harming, rather than world-ending, weapons. Luckily, there are flashcard programs online that can help you keep up-to-date. All you need to do is enter the relevant, classified information into the flashcards and… oh no [[link removed]].

Representative Dan Crenshaw has created a system where people can leave anonymous tips about their experiences with the insidious influence of “wokeness” in the US military. He’s getting some [[link removed]] responses [[link removed]].

Editors, please [[link removed]], we’re begging you.

Animation [[link removed]] is fun!

The perils [[link removed]] of dual-use technology.

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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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