Who owns aid data? Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

… read about who owns aid data.

Most foreign policy and development research (including much of what gets featured in Critical State) involves researchers from the “Global North” generating data about countries and people in the “Global South.” One ongoing ethical question about that research is who ends up owning that data. A new article [[link removed]] by Mahad Wasuge, Ahmen Musa, and Tobias Hagmann examines how Somalia has approached that question and what Somalis might do about it in the future. As they describe the situation, years of political instability in Somalia have “led to a situation in which international actors have de facto privatized much of the knowledge and data production” in the country. As a result of that privatization, Somalis too often lack a say in both the policies that their data is used to justify and the security of the data itself. With aid agencies increasingly relying on biometric data to do their work, data regulation has become a security issue for Somalis in its own right.

Showing up still works

One of the main lessons of the COVID-19 era has been that most of the office meetings that took place before the pandemic could have been emails. Some meetings, however, still get the goods. According to a new article [[link removed]] in the American Political Science Review, personal visits by world leaders to foreign countries have a measurable effect on how the leader’s country is viewed where they visit.

The researchers measured the effects of world leader travel by looking at trips that happened in the middle of Gallup polling in the destination country. The people surveyed just after the trips tended to view the visiting leader’s country more favorably than the people surveyed just before.

The effects stuck around for over two weeks, a crucial buffer for approving whatever negotiation the foreign leader was in town to undertake. Also, it works regardless of how militarily powerful the visiting country is — visits are nice, not just opportunities for intimidation.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Religious governance in conflict

When state structures break down, other forms of governance step in to provide services and order in their place. In many cases, those forms rely on religious structures. A new report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace examines how Islamic religious structures influenced local governance as Syria broke apart into smaller zones governed by various armed actors over the course of the civil war.

The Assad government worked assiduously to prevent Muslim clerics from accruing political power in Syria. In areas where other groups pushed out Assad’s forces, clerics stepped into a range of governing roles depending on the identity of the new rulers.

In areas controlled by former al-Qaeda affiliates Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, Muslim leaders slotted into an overall governing structure rooted in Islamist authoritarianism. In areas controlled by the Turkish army, however, clerics worked with local democratic organizations to provide both religious and civil services in response to local demand.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Checking in on democratic peace: Part I

“Democratic peace” is a concept that was once a shibboleth in international security policy and has since become the opposite: A shibomore. International democracy promotion efforts grew in the 1990s and 2000s under the axiom that countries with democratic institutions simply would not fight wars with one another. Subsequent research, as well as some light engagement with the actual historical record, has shown that countries with democratic institutions have actually fought wars with each other plenty [[link removed]] of times. Yet, the idea that democratic accountability can encourage peaceful dispute resolution remains a powerful one, and there are instances where it happens. This week and next in Deep Dive, we’ll look at the current state of the literature on democratic peace and the conflicts democracy might help prevent.

One area where traditional democratic peace theory gets tripped up is in dealing with civil wars. If democratic institutions allow for improved dispute resolution between states, then logically they should be even better at resolving disputes within states. Yet, in reality, countries with democratic institutions face civil wars with some regularity. Researchers have long debated whether democracy has any clear effect on the likelihood of civil war onset and, if so, how democratic a country has to be to get any benefit in preventing civil wars.

Some political scientists — most notably Christian Davenport [[link removed]] — suggested that the answer might lie in disaggregating democratic institutions. His argument was that the democratic features that allow regular people to communicate policy preferences to leaders do more to prevent civil war onset than democratic features that only empower elites. In a new article [[link removed]]in International Studies Quarterly, political scientists Hanne Fjelde, Carl Henrik Knutsen, and Håvard Mokleiv Nygård take Davenport’s argument as a jumping off point. Accepting that different types of democratic institutions have different effects on civil war onset, Fjelde et al. propose a different approach to categorizing institutions. Rather than splitting democratic institutions between mass and elite focuses, Fjelde et al. split them between institutions that increase the majority’s power in the country and institutions that protect minority interests from majority power.

Fjelde et al. call institutions that increase majority power — like competitive elections in which most if not all citizens can vote — “vertical constraints” on elite power, because they reach up from the masses to those who ostensibly control government. Institutions that limit attacks on elite minority interests, like property rights and an independent judiciary, are in turn “horizontal constraints” because they largely protect the elite from one another, preventing retribution against one party when another takes power. They created indices for both vertical and horizontal constraints, and rated roughly 7,000 country-years covering 167 countries on the quality of each country’s constraints in each year.

Using those ratings, the researchers were able to evaluate the effects of the constraints on civil war onset. Unsurprisingly, both types of constraints help. Perhaps more surprisingly, horizontal constraints seem to matter more than vertical restraints in preventing civil wars. Horizontal constraints, which allow elites who are out of power to trust that they won’t be killed, immiserated, or otherwise deprived of their status before they get a chance to resume power, appear to keep those disempowered elites from getting any big ideas.

More interesting, however, is the interaction between horizontal and vertical constraints. Generally, the two are mutually reinforcing — the more of one, the more effective the other is in reducing the likelihood of civil war onset. At the margins, however, things get weird. Specifically, when a country lacks horizontal constraints, improving its vertical constraints doesn’t reduce the risk of civil war. All the elections in the world, it seems, will not improve a country’s dispute-resolution mechanisms if the people who lose those elections have no protection from the people who win them. Democratic peace only functions on the domestic level when the rule of law is present to intervene on its behalf.

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

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Rebecca Kanthor reported [[link removed]] on the underwhelming reaction in China to the government’s decision to lift the legal cap on children from two- to three- per family. From the government’s perspective, China’s population is aging, its workforce is declining, and its birthrate is alarmingly low, so encouraging people to have more children is a priority. For China’s urbanized population, however, having more children would cause more economic and mental strain than it would provide benefit. Wage workers struggling with the rising cost of living in Chinese cities do not seem particularly eager to expand their families.

Leah Garden highlighted [[link removed]] the threat climate change poses to coffee production. Nearly 70% of the world’s coffee crop is grown by small producers who are particularly vulnerable to climate shocks, as coffee plants cannot survive when temperatures grow too high. Garden advocates for international support to help small producers implement regenerative agroforestry, which involves planting native trees and other plants within coffee fields. The trees provide shade and protection from the heat for the coffee plants, while also capturing carbon in their own right. Shifting to regenerative agroforestry could preserve small farmers’ livelihoods while preventing shocks to overall production levels.

Manuel Rueda chronicled [[link removed]] the Colombian state’s violent response to recent protests in the country. Since the end of April, when protests against corruption and a proposed tax hike began, police have killed at least 42 people in their attempts to break up the demonstrations. Videos of police violence against protesters have been shared widely, which has driven further outrage and larger protests. Human rights groups say that the violence is partly the result of the militarization of Colombia’s police services during the country’s long civil war and the militarized approach to drug enforcement encouraged by US policy.

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

My “Not understanding the work of George Orwell” shirt has the FBI asking [[link removed]] a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.

The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement to end Israel’s occupation of Palestine has yet to move the needle very much on Israel’s export economy. It has reclaimed some acreage, however, taking up space rent-free [[link removed]] in the minds of conservatives the world over.

Presumably this clip [[link removed]] will replace the Balrog commercial [[link removed]] in Marine Corps recruiting materials.

The Army, meanwhile, has shifted its recruiting efforts to narrowcasting [[link removed]] each of its military occupation specialties to one twelfth of the population.

1,000 centrist pedants: “The US isn’t an empire! We’re the first anti-colonial world power! We’re the good guys!”

Actual Space Force: “ Congratulations [[link removed]] to our newest guardian on her promotion to Grand Moff.”

During a training exercise, US soldiers accidentally took over [[link removed]] a Bulgarian olive oil factory. This brash attempt at seizing foreign oil has reportedly left political scientist Robert Vitalis reeling [[link removed]].

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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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