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Loitering munitions have been hanging around for a long time. Since the 1980s, these weapons — which get their name from the long period they can remain in the air before finding their target — have acted as a showcase for the latest in autonomous weapons technology. Many, for example, are designed to fly lazily in circles around enemy airspace until an enemy anti-aircraft radar turns on, at which point they automatically detect and attack the radar station. Today, autonomous technology is advancing quickly and loitering munitions are the platforms on which that technology is being first applied. As Kelsey Atherton writes in a new explainer [[link removed]], that fact will mean that debates over how much control algorithms will have over life and death decisions in future wars will take place first over loitering munitions. Read up to learn more, and to get a preview of the next two weeks when Kelsey will take over Critical State while Sam takes a vacation.

A rebellion policy for the 99%

Most social scientists view rebel taxation as a purely instrumental thing — rebellions cost money, people have money, rebels control people, bada bing bada boom. In a new article [[link removed]] in the journal Conflict Management and Peace Science, however, Jori Breslawski and Colin Tucker outline a more interesting motivation behind rebel taxation: ideology.

It turns out, they show, that rebel groups with communist ideologies are more likely to institute taxation of civilians than other groups. For these groups, taxation serves not simply to raise funds but to preview for civilians the kind of state these groups wish to enact — one in which at least some community resources are distributed collectively.

That’s a particularly interesting finding, since many in both the social science and policy communities see rebel taxation as being fundamentally extractive and harmful to civilians. If, instead, taxation is part of the rebel political program to engage with civilians, it may not be deserving of the level of opprobrium it now draws from the international community.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Regulation by persuasion

A popular narrative in Washington holds that one of the reasons for Chinese investment in Africa is to buy African support for Chinese policies in international institutions. Yet in some major issue areas where African countries have supported Chinese proposals there seems to be little evidence of actual quid pro quo. In a new policy brief [[link removed]], Henry Tugendhat and Julia Voo point out that Chinese investment in telecommunications in Africa bears little relationship to African support for policies that favor the Chinese telecom firms.

China announced a “Digital Silk Road” program of international telecommunications investment in 2015. About four years later, it began pushing for reforms at the International Telecommunications Union that would benefit Huawei and other Chinese companies. African countries have been supportive of those efforts, leading some to see the Digital Silk Road as a vote-buying exercise.

Tugendhat and Voo, however, note that Chinese investment in African telecommunications sectors has actually decreased since the Digital Silk Road was announced. Rather than vote buying, the researchers contend that African support comes from actual agreement with the policies proposed.

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

Last week on Deep Dive, we looked at new research on how the putative advantages of nonviolent civil resistance against the state disappear when the people doing the resisting are ethnic minorities within the state. This week, we’ll see how much that lesson applies when people are resisting rebel governance, rather than state governance.

Scholars have taken an increasing interest in the ways civilians living under rebel control in civil wars express their preferences to the rebel groups that seek to govern them. In a recent article [[link removed]] in the Journal of Peace Research, political scientist Sebastian van Baalen expanded on that research agenda by taking on the question of not just how civilians make themselves heard but of how rebels decide when to listen. Drawing on earlier research, van Baalen examines local elites as the key drivers of interaction between rebels and local civilians. Rebels want local elites to help them maintain order and communicate with people, and can use the threat of violence to coerce cooperation from the local elites. Local elites want rebels to treat them well and to respond to local concerns, and can use the threat of civil resistance to coerce cooperation from rebels. When the local elites are more effective, rebel governance becomes more responsive to civilian pressure.

The question, then, is what makes local elites effective in engaging with rebels? Van Baalen hypothesized that the answer lies in local elites’ capacity to mobilize civilians to engage in civil resistance — the more people they can get to a protest, the more seriously rebels will have to take them. Furthermore, van Baalen argues, mobilization capacity is driven substantially by the strength of the elites’ clientist networks. The more people who depend on a local leader for jobs or food or dispute resolution, the more who will respond to that leader’s call to march against rebel malfeasance.

To test these ideas, van Baalen looked at governance under the Forces Nouvelles (FN) rebel group in Côte d’Ivoire in the first decade of the 21st century. By 2003, the FN controlled 60% of Côte d’Ivoire and began to establish a significant administrative capacity in the areas it occupied. By reading extensive local newspaper archives and interviewing 93 people who were directly involved in FN governance and civilian responses to it, van Baalen was able to compare how the FN responded to civilian demands in four towns where the strength of elites’ clientist networks varied significantly.

In some areas, FN governance became remarkably collaborative. In the town of Odienné, for example, rebels assembled a civilian council that had veto power over rebel governance decisions. Taxes were negotiated with local traders, and public schooling expanded under rebel leadership. Yet that was not always the case. Soon after rebels took Odienné a newspaper declared the town “the most troublesome” area under FN control, due to near-constant threats of revolt from the town. FN leaders later admitted to van Baalen that they fired multiple commanders in the area out of concern that the commanders rubbed Odienné civilians the wrong way, which might lead to an uprising.

Both civilians and FN leaders agreed that the source of Odienné’s remarkable capacity for resistance was the fact that the town was led by a small group of land-owning families that had incredible power over the town’s main economic activity — growing cashews. Everyone who worked in the cashew fields or as traders in the broader cashew economy owed their livelihoods to these families. The families, long-established as leaders in the town, could call forth what a local journalist described as a “large segment of the population” to protest the rebels on a day’s notice. Their clientist networks, in other words, drove civil resistance.

Conversely, in the southern neighborhoods of the city of Man, clientist networks during the war were quite weak. Rather than controlling agricultural production, local elites in southern Man maintained power by distributing state funds to members of their networks. Once the FN took control of the city, however, access to those state funds was cut off and local elites were left with little to offer the people who had recently formed their base of support. In southern Man, grievances against FN governance were widespread. In a 2008 survey, nearly 50% more people in southern Man reported experiencing violence under FN governance than their neighbors in the north of the city, where elite clientist networks were stronger.

In addition to these insights about the importance of clientist networks, van Baalen also found that ethnicity matters in civil resistance against rebels much like it does in civil resistance against the state. The FN was ethnically heterogeneous, but it was rooted in the Ivorian north, where the Malinke and Senoufo ethnic groups predominate. Looking at the range of FN governance, van Baalen observes that the group “adopted responsive governance only in studied areas with a significant ethnopolitical constituency.” Clientist networks, therefore, were a necessary but not sufficient precondition for civilians turning civil resistance into improved rebel governance. Ethnic minorities got little from their non-violent efforts to influence rebels.

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Anjali Dayal examined [[link removed]] the current state of United Nations peacekeeping. UN peacekeepers, Dayal argued, are at a crossroads. Increasingly, peacekeeping missions are going beyond their traditional roles as mediators, cease-fire enforcers, and implementers of peace accords and adding offensive counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations to their portfolios. This poses a fundamental challenge to the idea of peacekeeping, as a focus on offensive action against non-state forces undermines the idea that the UN can be a neutral, disinterested broker between warring parties. With UN peacekeepers constituting the largest deployed military force in the world, it is important for UN members to decide what that force will focus on in the long term.

Mac Hamilton highlighted [[link removed]] the tension between the downward pressure Congress is exerting on infrastructure spending and its inclination to increase the Pentagon budget. Republican lawmakers are attempting to add $50 billion in new defense spending to the large infrastructure bill Congress is now considering — a bill that was considerably larger before those same Republicans declared that it spent too much on things like roads and bridges. That $50 billion would be on top of the extra $25 billion for defense already added to the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Bill. Hamilton pointed out that these spending decisions are incongruous, given that US military deployments are declining and infrastructure spending is widely popular.

Jon Letman spoke [[link removed]] to journalist and historian Leslie Blume about her new book on John Hersey, whose coverage of the US use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought American attention to the horrors the US inflicted on Japanese civilians. Prior to Hersey’s work, the US military had told domestic audiences that reports of deaths from radiation were simply Japanese propaganda, and that the bombs were somehow humane. In a 1946 story in the New Yorker, Hersey ended that myth. Blume, however, told Letman that for many in the US, Hersey’s exposé of the cruelty of atomic warfare did nothing to dampen their enthusiasm for it. Racist animus toward Japanese people was so high at the end of World War II that many in the US told pollsters that they wished more nuclear weapons had been used on Japan.

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

The motto [[link removed]]of that noble house was “unsoiled by fear.”

When it’s time for the repatriation [[link removed]] of every “v” stolen under British colonialism.

It’s nearly impossible to overstate how bleak the cultural messaging was in the US in the wake of 9/11 to people who didn’t live through it, but if you’re too young to remember the “go shopping for patriotism” era, enjoy this [[link removed]] trip into recent history.

A great addition [[link removed]] to the ever-growing category of news story where it seems like a random word generator was used to create the headline.

The United Nations stands opposed to all forms of intolerance, including lactose intolerance [[link removed]].

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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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