Africa has the youngest and fastest-growing population of any continent on earth. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

… read about the democratizing potential of young Africans.

Africa has the youngest and fastest-growing population of any continent on earth. That’s a fact that makes some queasy, including those who see the continent’s “youth bulge” and the political and economic demands of all those young people as a potential source of insecurity. Yet, as Midnight Oil alumnus Zachariah Mampilly points out [[link removed]], it’s not the children who are wrong [[link removed]]. As age gaps between authoritarian leaders and the populations they rule increase and youth remain largely locked out of the traditional corridors of power, youth organizing is likely to become the most significant democratizing force on the continent. Some examples have already come to the fore — in Sudan, well-organized youth street protests played a major role in both the fall of longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir and in shaping the subsequent interim government. Research suggests that the bottom-up organizing necessary for those sorts of protests makes democratization efforts more likely to succeed in the long run.

Forms of insurgent taxation

When insurgent groups set up governance structures for the civilians living under their control, whether those structures gather taxes or provide public services, it’s like a high-stakes advertisement for how life would be if the group becomes the long-term authority in the area. In a new blog post [[link removed]], Sahel expert Alex Thurston looks at why the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) chooses to market itself to local constituencies by taxing civilians through a framework of zakat, the Muslim practice of obligatory alms.

Using a zakat system rather than conventional tax structures helps ISWAP emphasize its argument that it offers a uniquely Islamic governance structure, one fundamentally different from a secular state.

Yet it is also a measure of how far ISWAP is from actually creating any sort of state structure, Islamic or otherwise. Some 80% of ISWAP’s zakat is gathered in the form of livestock, which allows the group to collect taxes while staying on the move rather than having to create geographically stable institutions.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Pandemic response by drone

When all you have is a drone, everything looks like a surveillance problem. That’s the upshot of a new article [[link removed]]about the new ways governments used drones to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In fairness, some governments used drones for things beyond surveillance. Spain, for example, turned to agricultural drones, usually used to spray pesticide, to spray disinfectant over large outdoor areas early in the pandemic. Soon, though, scientists discovered that major outdoor spraying wasn’t a worthwhile approach to managing COVID-19.

Once the more marginal use cases were dispensed with, governments set about using drones to keep track of their citizens in a big way. In France, South Africa, and other places, drones were used to broadcast messages reminding people to practice social distancing. In Italy, Malaysia, and the UK, drone footage was used to enforce lockdown orders.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Externalities of intervention: Part II

Last week on Deep Dive, we looked at new evidence that UN peacekeeping missions of the modern era, with their wide-ranging mandates and environmental awareness, can have measurably positive effects on host country water quality. This week, we’ll look at another issue area that has become a focus for peacekeepers as peacebuilding has become a vital part of the peacekeeping portfolio: the economic well-being of civilians.

As we noted last week, in addition to deterring ceasefire breaches and preventing the resumption of conflict through direct engagement with the major parties, peacekeepers since the Cold War have taken a more expansive view of their role in conflict zones. If conflict is a result of structural factors as well as choices by individual actors, the theory goes, then preventing a return to conflict requires addressing structural issues. One of the most fundamental structural issues — and one that is often exacerbated by conflict — is economic deprivation.

In a recent article [[link removed]] in the American Journal of Political Science, Vincenzo Bove, Jessica Di Salvatore, and Leandro Elia try to parse out the effect that peacekeeping missions have on household consumption in economies that have been riven by conflict. They are less interested in UN programs specifically targeted at household consumption than in increased consumption as a positive externality of peacekeeping-driven increases in security. By their theory, the only impetus civilians need to begin returning to pre-war economic activities is a measure of physical safety from the ravages of the war.

To study their theory, Bove et. al. look at survey data from South Sudan during a period when the UN peacekeeping mission there — UNMISS — was specifically charged with conducting civilian protection operations. In the period they studied, some 15,000 blue helmets worked to improve civilian security in South Sudan during a time of both humanitarian and political crisis. It is a useful case for their theory both because of the focus on civilian protection and because the World Bank conducted multiple rounds of a large-scale, detailed economic survey during that time. The granular data generated by the World Bank allowed the researchers to plot how deployments of peacekeepers down to the county level affected the economic conditions civilians in those counties reported experiencing.

The correlations between peacekeeper deployment and consumption are substantial. Bove et. al. found that peacekeepers being deployed in a county predicts an almost 28% increase in the average amount of food civilians in that county consume. Similarly, the likelihood of missing meals falls 10%.

One way to interpret that data would be to say that peacekeepers likely directly inject a fair amount of money into the economy wherever they go, just by buying food and other supplies locally, and that their economic inputs could account for the increased consumption. That would make it less likely that the consumption gains had anything to do with security provision per se, but instead were the result of a kind of roundabout form of humanitarian aid.

Bove et. al., however, tested that interpretation by measuring the effect of peacekeepers on civilian perceptions of security. When peacekeepers were present, civilians reported feeling safer, they didn’t have to travel as far to get to a market, and they were more optimistic about the course of their lives. Once Bove et. al. controlled for all the indicators of increased civilian security, the increased consumption effects basically went away. That is, money from the peacekeepers can’t explain much of the consumption increase without the broader security improvements that the peacekeepers provide. The fact that people eat better when peacekeepers are doing their jobs, then, really does seem to be an externality of reducing conflict.

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

Esti Lamonaca recounted [[link removed]] the experience of being a transgender non-binary soldier during the Trump administration’s attempt to ban trans people from the US military. Following President Trump’s tweets announcing the ban, Lamonaca experienced a surge in transphobic incidents, both from the general public and from their chain of command. They were put under investigation for their gender performance and reprimanded for not maintaining their hair length to the Army’s standard for “female” soldiers. Once the ban went into effect, they were forced to spend two years in the closet. Now, as a veteran and with the ban lifted by the Biden administration, there are still questions about when the Department of Veterans Affairs will provide trans veterans with access to gender-affirming health care.

Rupa Shenoy surveyed [[link removed]] responses to the release of the Biden administration’s first annual Trafficking in Persons report. This year’s report has drawn harsh criticisms for the range of practices it puts under the category of “human trafficking,” from horrific cases of people kidnapped into slavery to rather less terrifying instances of Cuban doctors being sent abroad to work with underserved populations. The report also highlights the decline in human trafficking enforcement brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic — the number of alleged traffickers facing prosecution around the world fell below 10,000 for the first time since at least 2013, and no expert believes it is because trafficking has fallen off.

Trita Parsi drew [[link removed]] the connection between the heavy toll taken by US sanctions against Iran and the outcome of the country’s recent national elections. Iran’s next president will be Ebrahim Raisi, an ultra-conservative much less open to finding common ground with the US than current president Hassan Rouhani. Turnout in the 2021 election was close to half of what it was in the last presidential election, in 2017, when voters went to the polls in droves to reward Rouhani’s efforts to end the most damaging aspects of the sanctions regime through an agreement not to pursue nuclear weapons. Iran kept up its end of the bargain, but the Trump administration reneged, reinstating sanctions that the Obama administration had lifted. In 2021, Parsi argued, reformist Iranian voters lost faith in Rouhani’s ability to produce concessions from the US and stayed home, handing the race to Raisi.

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

He even [[link removed]] warns about the dangers of smoking [[link removed]].

The owl’s power is growing [[link removed]].

The prequel to “Sexy Pinups of the Postwar Era” is presumably somewhere out of frame on the lower shelf [[link removed]].

A fascinating thread [[link removed]](ha) on where Afghan war rug culture has ended up now that US troops are finally leaving the country after two decades.

The end of US deployments in Afghanistan have occasioned a look back at some of the war’s smaller absurdities, from the safety posters [[link removed]] to the letters [[link removed]] from questionably supportive children to the letters [[link removed]] from overly supportive children.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence really showcased [[link removed]] the esteem in which it holds both the concept of workplace diversity and the open source intelligence community last week.

If put into motion, Shirley Graham Du Bois’ plan [[link removed]] to smooth over the Sino-Soviet split would have made for incredible diplomatic theater.

It’s incredibly poor form for the manufacturers to not seal these [[link removed]] bags with yellow ribbon.

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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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