What are the problems of private surveillance for public ends? Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

… read about the problems of private surveillance for public ends.

Cities across the US have paid millions of dollars to ShotSpotter, a private company that uses an array of hidden microphones to tell police departments when and where gunshots are fired in their jurisdictions. Yet when defense lawyers in Chicago, one of the company’s largest client cities, tried to challenge ShotSpotter evidence in court, the city retracted it rather than risk litigating whether the company can deliver on its promises. An investigation [[link removed]] by Vice revealed a potential reason for the prosecutorial unease. In a number of instances Vice was able to find, ShotSpotter analysts changed their conclusions about shots fired after police asked for evidence that more closely reflected their version of events. The company is not subject to public scrutiny, so it is impossible to know for sure how accurate its data is. One independent study, however, showed that 89% of the company’s alerts in Chicago led to no evidence of a gun crime.

THE PERILS OF PEACEKEEPING PLUS

Military leaders often warn against “mission creep,” the phenomenon in which a military operation starts off with limited goals and then, over time, develops new, more expansive goals to justify its continued existence. Increasingly, however, United Nations peacekeeping missions are starting out life pre-crept, with expansive mandates that are difficult to fulfill. A new article [[link removed]] by political scientists Robert Blair, Jessica Di Salvatore, and Hannah Smidt tracks how expanded mandates have posed a problem for UN peacekeeping operations.

It’s not just that mandates have grown broader in recent years, they’ve also grown more fragmented. Peacekeeping missions now are often tasked with a range of objectives that, at least in execution, have little relation to one another, from improving education to increasing agricultural output in host countries.

The researchers find that the more fragmented the mandate, the less successful missions are at fulfilling all of these disparate peacebuilding tasks. The expanded mandates, however, do not seem to affect achieving the missions’ core security goals.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] The Birth of a White Nationalism

Historians generally agree that "The Birth of a Nation," DW Griffith’s 1915 racist blockbuster, played a major role in setting the agenda for anti-Black political organizing in the US. Leave it to economists, however, to ask, “Sure, but how much of a role?” Economists Elena Esposito, Tiziano Rotesi, Alessandro Saia, and Mathias Thoenig went back and figured out when and where Birth of a Nation was screened in the US and then used that data in a working paper [[link removed]] to measure the film’s effect on discourse and policy.

The film, which valorizes both the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan, was a huge hit. The researchers show that screenings of the film were followed by substantial changes in the way local newspapers and other outlets talked about the Civil War and racial issues — emphasizing the unity of a single, white United States and de-emphasizing slavery and Confederate racism.

Screenings also increased overall patriotism, even increasing enlistment in the US military at a time — the middle of World War I — when enlistment was a particularly risky proposition.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE The limits of non-violence: Part I

In the last decade, interest in non-violent resistance as a way for people to secure major reforms has increased among activists and policymakers alike. Research [[link removed]] showing that civil resistance efforts are more effective at achieving political aims than violent movements sparked efforts from both grassroots organizers and state-sponsored democracy promoters to capture the apparent non-violent advantage. Today, however, after the disappointment of the Arab Spring and other non-violent democratization movements, there has been some re-evaluation of just how much of an advantage non-violence provides. This week and next on Deep Dive, we’ll look at recent research on how — and for whom — civil resistance actually works.

In a forthcoming article [[link removed]] in the American Political Science Review, political scientists Devorah Manekin and Tamar Mitts add a variable to the debate about the effectiveness of civil resistance: the ethnic identity of the people doing the resisting. Manekin and Mitts begin their analysis by re-evaluating the leading data set on civil resistance by coding whether the resisting groups were made up primarily of members of their country’s dominant ethnic group or of an ethnic minority. After re-running the regressions with this added variable, the salience of ethnicity to success in civil resistance becomes clear. Among movements drawing from dominant ethnic groups, non-violent movements are roughly 20% more likely to succeed than violent movements. When ethnic minorities are doing the resisting, however, the non-violent advantage completely disappears. For ethnic minorities, violent and non-violent resistance are equally unlikely to produce major political change.

That’s a fascinating result, but it doesn’t tell us much about what’s actually going on inside protest movements. Why does non-violence work for some people and not others? According to the civil resistance literature, non-violence draws its power from the way protesters are perceived — a non-violent sit-in and a bomb are both ways to temporarily disable a bridge, for example, but the sit-in is likely to be seen as inherently more legitimate by people who might be on the fence about joining the resistance movement. Non-violent action that can effectively coerce the state without sacrificing legitimacy can attract many fence-sitters to the cause.

With this mechanism in mind, Manekin and Mitts hypothesized that ethnic minorities do not benefit from the perceived legitimacy of non-violence in the way that dominant ethnicity protesters do. Specifically, drawing on the extensive literature on ethnic stereotyping, they theorized that non-violent protest by ethnic minorities might be perceived as violent, regardless of the protesters’ actual actions. If fence-sitters see your sit-in as something more like a bomb, whatever legitimacy gains you make by remaining non-violent go up in smoke.

To test their theory, Manekin and Mitts conducted survey experiments in the US and Israel. They presented respondents with news coverage of protest incidents and asked them to rate how violent the protest was and whether police action was required to quell the protest. The ethnicity of the protesters was randomized for each respondent — either white Americans or Black Americans in the US and either white Jews, Ethiopian Jews, or Israeli Arabs in Israel. Among US respondents, non-violent street marches were rated 8.5% more violent if the marchers were depicted as Black, and respondents were 75% more likely to recall Black marchers engaging in violent behaviors when asked about the details of the march.

In Israel, it was the same story. Non-violent marches by Ethiopian and Arab protesters were seen as 11% and 16% more violent respectively than marches by white Jews. Ethiopian marchers were 93% more likely to be remembered committing violence, and Arabs were 52% more likely.

Interestingly, when the protests the survey asked about actually were violent — destroying police cars for example — there was essentially no difference in how white and Black violence was perceived. In fact, Israeli respondents saw Ethiopians destroying police cars as being less violent than white Jews doing so.

In a second set of surveys, which added a condition in which respondents were told if the protesters expressed a commitment to non-violence or not, the results were essentially the same. Neither enacting non-violence nor publicly pledging to do so could make respondents perceive ethnic minority protesters as actually being non-violent. The non-violent advantage disappeared under the weight of ethnic prejudice. That finding is a depressing one for civil resistance advocates, but a clarifying one for activists. Clearly, the act of protest does not wipe away the prejudices that so often necessitate the protest in the first place.

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

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

Sarah Burns detailed [[link removed]]a new chapter in the long-running struggle between Congress and the US president over control of military deployment decisions. A new bill has been introduced in Congress that would close loopholes in the 1973 War Powers Resolution that allow the president to order military operations for 90 days before having to seek congressional approval. Instead, the new bill would create clear standards and schedules for Congress to approve military operations, and force the president to offer clear objectives and cost estimates for operations at their outset. It is unclear if the bill will pass, but if enacted it would be a major shift in how decisions of war and peace are made in the US.

Daniel Ofman reported [[link removed]]on the arrest of Russian journalist Roman Dobrokhotov, editor of the independent publication The Insider, on libel charges. Russian police raided Dobrokhotov’s home last week, ahead of international travel he had planned. Dobrokhotov spoke to The World, telling Marco Werman that police have seized his passport and that he expects harassment of journalists in Russia to continue. The Insider, however, can continue functioning due to its geographically distributed operations — in addition to staff in Russia, the publication employs staff across Europe that are less subject to Russian repression.

Sarhang Hamasaeed outlined [[link removed]] opportunities and challenges in US-Iraq relations in the wake of an announcement that the US will have no combat troops in the country by the end of 2021. Iraqi prime minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi was in Washington last week, finalizing the decision on combat troops and making sure that Iraq will continue to receive military training and humanitarian support from the US after combat troops depart. Hamasaeed urged both the US and Iraqi governments to pursue cooperation beyond security issues, arguing that the US can assist Iraq in accomplishing needed economic reforms, anti-corruption efforts, and clean energy goals.

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

Toyota probably isn’t too happy that various insurgent groups have turned their products [[link removed]] into improvised weapons, but at least Toyota isn’t a presenting sponsor of ISIS [[link removed]].

United States Strategic Command, which manages the US arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles, is very mad [[link removed]] that China is managing its own arsenal [[link removed]] of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The final paragraph of this [[link removed]] excellent heist article is worth reprinting in full: “After the heist, potential witnesses at a nearby cafe told Le Parisien they saw and heard nothing. Many were reportedly distracted by the presence of one-time screen hard man and martial arts specialist Jean-Claude Van Damme at the nearby opticians.”

Congratulations to the United States Department of Justice on being the only distributor to make money [[link removed]] on hip hop album sales in 2021.

A compelling proposal [[link removed]], although the smaller-statured Nicolas Sarkozy would likely never have been seen again under the floral onslaught (an outcome some might have preferred).

The only good joke [[link removed]]to follow the dreadful discourse [[link removed]] about what does and does not constitute a HIPAA violation.

“How great is freedom of expression” indeed [[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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